[ale] All you Comcast fanboys...

Sun Jan 4 20:29:18 EST 2015

When I moved from Boston to Midtown Atlanta I used my wife's Comcast
residential service.  When we moved from Midtown to Sandy Springs I
installed Comcast Biz Class with 5 static IPs.

For the first 3-6 months or so I was seeing periodic network failures
within the comcast network.  I worked with some colleagues high up in the
Comcast food chain to determine there was a misconfiguration on one of
their Atlanta ibone routers that was causing it to fail to properly
failover when the primary link failed.  (How many fails can I put into a
single sentence??)  So basically anytime the primary link went down,
either due to a fault or do to maintenance, the network failed to switch
to the backup.   OOPS!!   Once they finally figured that out the routing
has been rock solid.

My other comcast issue has been that they had a failed battery on my fiber
node.   Even though I have 2+ hours of UPS life on my CPE, whenever there
was a neighborhood power outage I'd lose network.  Unfortunately it's hard
to "test" a neighborhood power outage, so it took several of them (over
the course of a year or more) before there was an outage long enough for
them to see the problem, debug it, and eventually fix it.  Finally, the
last time my power went out my network didn't!

So here I am, three years into their service and now it seems to work
fairly well.  But I'm knocking on wood, just in case.

I really hope Google Fiber comes to town, even if they have no immediate
plans for static IPs.

-derek

On Sun, January 4, 2015 8:06 pm, Edward Holcroft wrote:
> As much as I detest them and their ways, I use their business product
> extensively in our regional offices. When I switched from Qwest, I
> increased the office bandwidth 10x for less than half the cost we were
> paying for a single T1 at the time. That's hard to argue against. I saved
> my company $150k per annum in one fell swoop. And believe me, Qwest (now
> Century Link) were no angels either, they f!@#ed us over to the tune of
> $60k through bad billing over a period of several months that slipped
> through the cracks ... I will NEVER touch them again. We were never able
> to
> recover the money and my company was unwilling to play hardball out of
> fear
> of getting 18 offices disconnected.
>
> I guess that makes me a bit of a sell-out to the Comcast bad-boys :-( But
> ... it could always be be worse ...
>
> ed
>
> On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 1:19 PM, Michael H. Warfield <mhw at wittsend.com>
> wrote:
>
>> [Disclaimer]
>>
>> I gave up on Comcast years ago.  Even if they offered me twice the
>> bandwidth they do now at half the price they do now, I would refuse.  I
>> got tired of all the lies they told me (multiple documented occasions)
>> years ago.  I can tolerate incompetence or ignorance but malice
>> aforethought will not stand.  I have plenty of bitching points with ATT
>> Uverse but, at least, willful lies are not one of them...
>>
>> That all being said...
>>
>> [/Disclaimer]
>>
>> The saga of Comcast using your premises and your electricity to promote
>> THEIR wifi services is well documented.  I saw this first hand just this
>> last month where the clutter of Xfiniti public access points (on all
>> possible channels) were drowning out (beaconing) the legitimate services
>> in a residential neighborhood, making non-xfiniti services unreliable
>> even within a single home where we were staying.
>>
>> The horror stories of their so called "customer support" is also well
>> documented...  Safe advice is now to ALWAYS record any support call with
>> Comcast...  Latest in that saga...
>>
>>
>> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141231/01553029553/yet-another-horrible-comcast-customer-service-experience-goes-viral.shtml
>>
>> Now, they are increasing your "rental fees" by 25% for the privilege of
>> providing their "service" to their customers using your facilities.  The
>> rental fee on "their" cable modem is going up...
>>
>> http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/31/on-comcast-buy-your-own-modem/
>>
>> I still have a couple of my old DOCSIS 2 modems from the last time I was
>> wasting my time with Comicalcast.  But now, at $120 a year to rent their
>> "we advertise our own open service from your property" modems, why is
>> anyone still renting their modems?  Morotola DOCSIS 3 cable modems are
>> starting around $70 on Amazon?  That's what?  7 MONTHS return on
>> investment?!?!  And you are not providing them with free electricity and
>> facilities for their network or cluttering the air with their access
>> point beacons.  How do they continue to get away with this???
>>
>> Mike
>> --
>> Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 978-7061 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
>>    /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |
>> http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
>>    NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best
>> of
>> all
>>  PGP Key: 0x674627FF        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of
>> it!
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Edward Holcroft | Madsen Kneppers & Associates Inc.
> 11695 Johns Creek Parkway, Suite 250 | Johns Creek, GA 30097
> O (770) 446-9606 | M (770) 630-0949
>
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-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant