I'm sitting on the fence with comcast - used them once and they were ok.
But I do like this bit of artwork!

googling "comcast congress" yielded a first hit here
http://consumerist.com/consumer/news- ... on-of-congress-315544.php

You sure have a lot to say on the subject, I hope you write in the same depth about other local JC issues.

my own comcast related quibbles:

-- in other places not far from here comcast offers genuine basic cable tv service which consists of a connection and programming pretty much limited to vhf and uhf broadcast content plus the municipal channel and public access channels for about $15/month. just the thing if all you want is basic tv service and your reception is blocked by tall buildings, hills, etc. i think such service should be available here.

-- i wish broadband service was available a la carte. it would be nice to be able to get a connection and name resolution service inexpensively. why should you have to pay for a broad band providers "value added" services if you don't want to use them?

-- comcast's tech support for high speed internet seems to have gone down hill in the last year or so. (was quite good for a while.)

-- service interruptions on high speed internet became more common in the last year or so, but seem to have trailed off lately, so maybe they're getting a handle on whatever the problem(s) was/were.

-- most high speed internet service interuptions i'm familiar with do not seem to be problems with the connection but rather DNS failures. there are commercial DNS providers they could get backup service from and i wish they would.

-- AFAIK comcast's digital voice service uses proprietary technology and runs on comcasts internal network rather than the public internet, which may have advantages, but also may have drawbacks. at a mimimum, an interface to VOIP (permitting use of third party dedicated VOIP devices) would be nice. (note: i'm a bit out of my depth in this dept.)

-- comcast seems ideally situated to provide commerical public wifi services and with mobile VOIP becoming practical this could become an increasingly attractive option for some folks. a bit annoying that they haven't ventured into this, but on the other hand, they seem to be having trouble chewing all that they've bitten off already, so maybe it's just as well.

hmmm. where to begin?

1. the pejorative tone is uncalled for.

2. i've knocked around the IT world for a couple of decades and dealt with a variety of technical, intellectual property, and contract issues along the way. while P2P has never been a special interest area for me, the asertion that i don't understand much about technology is a bit of a stretch.

3. with issues like this clarity is a rarity. if everything was clear cut to begin with, chances are there wouldn't have been a conflict to begin with.

4. i haven't followed the congressional response to all this. if you have links, please post them.

5. whether or not the folks in question were violating their service agreements might depend partly on with whom they were sharing the files, on what terms, and whether their activities constitute offering "a public service".

6. what is and is not a server can be a subtle question. for example an X-Window server and a VNC client do similar things from the user standpoint. there are technical reasons why one is called a server and the other a client, but they may not be immediately obvious to everyone. however, in this case it's a moot point. ( see next item.)

7. the restriction cited above is not a prohibition against running servers per se. it prohibits using a residential account to make content available from your residence to those outside of your residence in a non-targeted way. (ie, it does not include email or the info sent by web browsers. P2P services can be a bit murky in this respect.) the particular method is incidental.

8. i dislike this provision, but i can live with it.

9. one of the reasons i can live with it is that in practice making personal (or small group) content availabe via a hosting service seems to work out better anyway. so while i may think that i should be allowed to publish a web site from home, i still wouldn't do it or recommend it.

10. i consider the term "any other services" overly broad. while the term "public services" would seem to exclude participation in large distributed computing projects from the ban, it might not, and i see that as a potentially serious limitation. however, as such projects don't ususally consume a lot of network bandwidth i suspect they don't bother comcast much.

11. it would be sort of nice if this provision turned out to be in violation of some higher law and therefore null and void.

12. it would also be nice if the fcc (perhaps with a shove from congress) made some major revisions to the structure of cable tv, broadband, and cell phone contracts. (including but limited to forcing providers to offer the option of buying services a la carte. )

13. while i'd welcome a broad overhaul of how bandwidth is marketed in this country, i'd be a bit wary of congressional action against one contract. contracts are important and the usual place to challenge them is in court.

14. it would also be nice if the government entities that negotiate monopolistic arrangements with service providers were more assertive on behalf of citizens and end users. if users actually read contracts before agreeing to them and either refused to sign them or rasied hell with public officials when they objected to them this might be more polticially feasible.

15. be careful what you wish for. residential contracts seem to be written in anticipation of a particular type of network load. if providers are required to support a broader range of usage patterns other changes may follow, such as surcharges for "excess" bandwidth usage, etc. (which in IMHO would be a more civilized way of dealing with this sort of thing than delaying transfers).

16. frankly, delaying transfers is a crappy way of dealing with a possible violation of TOS. investigating the site, or simply contacting the user and asking "hey! what are you doing?" (and the pitching a more expensive contract if that's what's called for) would be more polite and better business.

i'm not saying it's a great thing for comcast to do. i don't have my shorts in a twist over it mainly because there are bigger fish to fry... and strictly speaking, comcast may be in the clear on this until the law changes.

17. some folks are trying to possition this as net neutrality issue, and while it can be spun that way, it's not clearly a great fit. (i don't know enough of the details to form an opinion, but from what little i've learned so far it seems shakey.)

18. i've written far more than i intended to . if you've read this far, thanx for hanging in there. gotto go.

Eric, you don't seem to understand much about technology. Comcast has nothing to stand on and congress is currently telling them to fix this.

A p2p client is not a server. If you think that, then a web client can be considered a server because it sends data every time you click a link, why not block web traffic?

Comcast just doesn't want to pay for people that use their connections for more than web browsing however their marketing department will never admit this.

Comcast think that people who use their service as marketed to them are stealing. It is utter BS.

the problem with the recent kerfuffle over file transfer delays is that the folks complaining may have been in violation of their service agreements.

from comcast's terms of service agreement for residential internet service:

"Prohibited uses include, but are not limited to, using the Service, Customer Equipment, or the Comcast Equipment to:

...xvi. run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited services and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;"

as part of the agreement comcast reeserves the right to pull the plug on subscribers who violate the agreement, implementing network behavior that inhibbits abuse rather than just pulling the plug might be viewed as a moderate response.

whether that restriciton should be there or not is a debateable question, but for now it is there and anyone using the service has agreed to live with it.

i do have some bones to pick with comcast that i'll post about separately. this just doesn't happen to be one of them.

(btw: i'd be intersted in feedback on their phone service, though this might deserve it's own thread.)

In response to BrightMoment's comment:

"Errh...that "hilarious article" was posted in this thread a few posts above your own!

Quote:
Re: Who here really, really hates Comcast? #3
Woman Fined for Hammer Fit at Comcast
The Associated Press
Friday, October 19, 2007; 4:18 PM


More proof that some never read a topic thread before posting from the hip. "

BrightMoment,

I may need to read an entire thread before posting but you take posts way too serious and should instead consider starting a social life for yourself, out side of a computer screen....

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I suppose it is possible. I have Directv and had to wait 6 weeks to get my HD DVR. At one point Directv had a 3-month waiting list in some areas.

Is there really a shortage of HD boxes? I assume these are the DVR / HD boxes? Has anyone else experienced this?

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If it isn't too much to ask, could you please poop directly on my cable box just before I return it?

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Please let me know when you do this.

I DESPISE Comcast. It is a penny piching horror of a company who thinks not one whit of its customers.
THey get away with MURDER because in this era of "Corporations can do no wrong" they are allowed to use borderline fraudulent techniques to extract more and more dollars from a trapped public.

Cable companies are MANDATED to give a decent level of minimum service. Well Concast gets around this by "accidentally" broadcasting a signal that results in an unwatchable picture on local channnels unless you rent THEIR BOX. THEN they exclude 5 channels that are iincluded with EVERY OTHER cable bompanies Basic Level...they call this the "VALUE PACK"...so actual BASIC service winds up costing nearly $70. And those DEALS where you get decent service at a decent price for 3 months, 6 months or a year and then they count on your forgetting to cancel when the price doubles or triples. Their nickel and diming and bait and switch techniques should earn them a Congressional investigation.

May they rot in the deepest pit of Hell. I would no longer switch my Verizon DSL or Verizon phone for another Comcast service than I would hang 12 pound weights from my nipples.
I pray daily for the Verizon FIOS system to get to JC so I can go to Comcast's Kennedy BOulevard Comcast office and take a good fat $hit on their lobby floor!

I'm with the Slowskies...Comcast is evil incarnate.

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By "fairly secure" I did not mean to imply that it was special; only that it comes with a built in firewall and is still supported by its manufacturer. Or more to the point, I was saying what it was not, which is not a cheap, non-branded router, with older encryption or without a firewall of any kind, or without support to update known vulnerabilities.

You're right that user configuration can still reduce the security of the Airport, and most other modern routers, and even with a high level of security it can still be hacked into.

But, a wireless router with any type of password access is likely to be a fairly difficult obstacle for most people looking to take advantage, especially when there are so many open access points with no protection at all.

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I'm curious as to this assertion... Does Apple's Airport use non-standard encryption protocols that have been found to be more secure than the ones used in other routers? I honestly don't know, but really, to stop people from being able to use your router for internet access, you'd be doing all of the below:
1. Change your default password on your router
2. Change your router's DHCP settings to only give IP addresses to certain MAC addresses (only makes it ever-so-slightly more secure, as this is relatively easy to bypass)
3. Change your router's encryption settings to one of the WPA settings, and using a strong passkey. (WEP is trivially easy to crack.)

Even following the above three steps, it is still possible to crack a WPA key, although it's more difficult than cracking a WEP key. For the paranoid/people running mission critical operations, it is usually best to just forgo the convenience of wireless for the security, dependability, and speed of wired networking.

If the Airport uses the standard encryption protocols, anybody could gain internet access from somebody else's Airport router just the same as they would for any other router... Really, it doesn't depend on the manufacturer as much as it does on the owner of the device.

If anybody's curious on how people gain access to a 'protected' access point, it basically involves watching the data going back and forth between the owner's laptop and the owner's router, and using software to deduce the encryption key. Following that, any other protection the owner has is usually very trivial.

let's bring up the fact that when Clinton passed the cable deregulation act years ago and said it would "help everyone" my cable service got terrible and the price tripled!

by the way, a nice read about how comcast is shooting themselves in the foot

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ ... xplanations.html?from=rss

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Yes, Apple OS is more immune to spyware / bloatware / junkware ect., but the Airport Router is a cross platform, and the computer could be a Windows machine connected to the Airport, in which case it would be vulnerable. Apple's router is fairly secure, so I think its less likely someone would have taken the time to hack into the wifi connection.

As far as many users slowing down the cable network, this is not only possible, its likely. Basically everyone on the network is dumped into the same "tube," the cable running down your street, the servers at comcast, ect.. The more users sending and receiving data, the more interference there is, the less room there is for data to travel, the more packets are lost and need to be resent. This comes to the point of Comcast throttling some users-- like P2P software. P2P software uses alot of bandwidth-- people searching networked computers, transferring data back and fourth, ect. So instead of expanding their network-- e.i. expanding the "tube," Comcast just slows down users using that software.

Most of the time, only at high peak demand hours will users see a difference in performance, and then usually only on high bandwidth applications like downloading files such as pictures, software, movies, music. Something like nytimes.com is largely text-- text is small amounts of data, and so quickly downloads. Meanwhile a site like JClist, which is also mostly text being fed from a database, is likely slowed by the capacity of the JCList servers, not the comcast connection. But something like youtube, which is transferring large amounts of data--sound and flash video-- will appear to be slower when there are a lot of local users from a single service provider. For example, if the connection is downloading at 1000kilobytes a second, a text file that is 10kb will appear almost instantaneously. If the speed is cut in half because of volume, to say 500kbps, the 10kb file still appears instantaneously. But if you are downloading a video file that is 5,000kb, it will take 5 seconds at 1000KPS. Cut that in half, and its 10 seconds. Start adding zeros, and seconds turns to minutes, then hours.

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If someone's mac is slow because of bandwith consuming software it is because they chose to install it. I am unaware of any reports of a mac that has become infected.

I have heard that it's possible for cable based internet to slow simply because of the amount of people who are uploading/downloading when they share the same connection.

Check this link here which unfortunately doesn't really offer a solution, just describes what is probably happening to you when your connection slows down.

http://compnetworking.about.com/od/ds ... emodem/a/speedcompare.htm

Quote:

JCbiscuit,
There are a lot of things that could affect this. A microwave oven in use can severely affect this. Other people's wireless routers can affect it. Cordless phones (of the 2.4ghz variety) can affect it. And it's possible that other people have gained access into your wireless router. These are all things on your end that have nothing to do with Comcast... there are definitely things that Comcast can be doing that negatively affects your performance as well.

Possible solutions:
1. Change your airport's password. It's pretty easy for determined people to get access to the wireless connection. The FBI showed that they could get into somebody's wireless router within 5 minutes with tools anybody can get off of the internet.
2. Try changing your airport's 'channel'. What happens sometimes is that when too many wireless devices share the same channel, this causes them to potentially interfere with each other.
3. If the airport comes with an ethernet port or two for wired connections, try running off of that and see if the slowdowns are still occurring. If so, then it's most likely something that you'll have to bring up with Comcast.

Quote:

When you say Airport, you mean Apple's Airport router series?

Its unlikely your router has been hacked into. But there are lots of reasons for slowing internet connection, including the weather.

On your end, your computer might be infected with software that is consuming bandwidth by sending data; other electronic devices' magnetic fields could be interfering with your signal.

On their end, everything from temperature to humidity affect signal strength running through copper wires; bandwidth shortages at peak times can cause the internet to be slow; the sites and services you are connecting could also be slowing you down.

here's a related question:

I connect to the internet (Comcast's internet) via an airport wireless port, which is password-protected.

sometimes my connection is painfully slow, the kind of slow you get when a dozen people are using the same hub. is this because of Comcast, or has someone hacked in to my wireless access?

Sounds like Comcast is going to get it where the sun doesn't shine over the internet throttling. According to slashdot, several lawyers have contacted the Electronic frontier foundation looking to sue.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/23/1314222

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Comcast only blocks/delays the uploads not the downloads:

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And yes I have much hate for Comcast. They suggested that I unplug the cable box to fix an "on demand" problem. If I did that I wouldn't have access to on demand (or the program) guide for 3 or 4 hours. The problem was clearly on their end and the next day was working fine again without any action on my part.

Hmmm... I moved in and the cable was still on. (The 99 channels with no box that is.) They said they would have to come out and climb the pole to disconnect the digital phone so they could hook me up with internet and cable. I called 5 times and made 3 appointments. That was March. Cable is still coming in like a champ. Digital phone still not disconnected.

So being that I have free cable (I guess for life), I've managed to put up with the slow Verizon wireless broadband internet I'm now using.

It is what it is I guess.

Comcast can be extremely annoying. Their 9-3 scheduling is an absolute nightmare. Additioanally they aren't to understanding, I live 10 min from work and have told them just call me when your on your way and I'll meet you there well they never seem to get that right. However people that think that Verizon will solve all the problems are nuts. They can't even tell you if your able to get DSL, if you can it can take weeks to turn it on.

As for blocking file sharing, it is their perogative as it is their network. And while a true network neutral establishment would be awesome, eventually someone will sue them and try to win money.

Lastly to the person using IM to transfer songs, it very well could be the program slowing it down or the setup of the IM network. I use bit torrent all the time on comcast and get very quick downloads.

i agree landon, as for HD channels... it seems like we get a few... and even then, dont seem as awesome as they should... even though we have the right cables.. and the tv set right... they stink.

i also love how they say "we'll be there between 9 and 3" so you take a full day off, then they dont show up and act like it's no big deal.


kill 'em all!

I really, really hate Comcast!!!

wanna read a few interesting things that comcast has been up to?

http://bsalert.com/news/853/Comcast_C ... ng_Political_E-Mails.html

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/For_one ... _wiretaps_carry_1016.html

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ ... are-clients-affected.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376597/

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/8993/Com ... re+than+4+Movies+a+Day%3F

http://consumerist.com/consumer/fake- ... ig-ten-channel-292271.php

Personally, i called them recently because I was transferring a few songs I wrote to another friend online using instant messenger. Our transfer rate started out pretty quick, and then got slower and slower and slower, to the point where it had stopped. I asked why, and they said they don't support illegal file sharing. I explained how I wrote this material, and that there was nothing illegal about it. They turned the tables on me and said that if I wanted faster download speeds, I should get the new internet powerboost that they're currently offering. WTF? Nice attempt at answering my question.

Seriously? Aren't I already paying for "high-speed internet"? I am DYING to switch to Verizon FIOS when it comes to Jersey City. For those of you who are interested, you can sign up to get a message at the FIOS website when it becomes available in your area.

Lastly, how many HD channels does Comcast offer right now in JC? I think there are about 8-10 depending on what time of day you check. That is pathetic compared to what I hear DirecTV offers. Anyone have any experience with them?

i dont mind the ad during the scrolling guide... i do mind the fact that about every day i get a new "message" about some ulitmate fighting nonsense....

1. I love the slowsky's - I sometimes rewind my DVR to see their ads - yes i know, quite lame but for some reason i find them hilarious...

2. I hate the fact that at the bottom of the Comcast programming guide there is advertising that i'm guessing about 3 people out of however many million subscribers they have, have EVER clicked on - and 2 of those clicks were probably accidental.

Comcast Internet is great for me. Never has gone down for more than a few hours in the last 3 years. The TV service could be faster though.