Screw Comcast
20/10/07 12:15 |
Home
That's
actually been the name of my airport network at home
for quite some time now. It's finally become an
action as well.
The last straw in the litany of failure that is my Comcast internet connection is their unilateral attack on network neutrality. Comcast are interfering with the broadcast of packets between users on the network, if either the source or destination is within their domain. Worse, they're doing it in a particularly vile manner - effectively they're using a computer-hacker attack called the 'man-in-the-middle' attack. When they decide you're using too much bandwidth, they (sitting in the middle of the communication link) fake a packet to *both* of the communicating computers, this packet is an 'RST' packet, or 'reset' packet. What this does is tell the computer that receives it that the *other* computer has dropped the connection. So both computers think something is wrong with the other end, and the communication is terminated. This is pure unadulterated evil.
Now I'm not a huge user of P2P (which is where the news broke). I *do* however use iChat to keep in touch with my family across the Atlantic. It's a cool video-conferencing system built into all macs, and since my family all have macs, it works well. Since there's several thousand miles between us, it's one of the few ways we can 'see' each other without major travel.
Until a few months ago, iChat worked great. Now, I get less than a minute of great picture, and then everything breaks up! I was putting it down to transatlantic bandwidth issues, but then I tried it from work, and (lo and behold), there's no problem, looking around the net, it seems I'm not alone. This *did* annoy me. I doubt I use even 1% of the bandwidth I pay Comcast for, and when I do want to use some, they have a specific policy preventing me from doing so. It seems I'm allowed to pay Comcast for their services, just not to actually *use* those services ever.
I currently pay Comcast the princely sum of $185-$200 per month for both TV and internet, I've just ordered Dish Network, and will be cancelling all the Comcast services as soon as Dish and an alternate internet are installed. Dish ($84/month) will be here on Saturday :) The only real problem was which internet service to go for. I currently have a co-located server in Fremont (serving this very web-page). I pay $245/month for a dedicated 10 Mbit/7U service (which is actually a good deal). I never use the 10MBit/s though, I max out at ~1Mbit, and 95% of the time it's down at a few tens of Kbit/s. So, although I'm very happy with the service, that's a waste of money too. So far, we're up to $430/month to reassign...
So, I was looking around, and found Sonic.net's T1-alike. Basically this is 2+ ADSL lines bonded together to provide 1.5MBit/sec dedicated bandwidth in both directions. Together with a managed Cisco router, it costs $299/month. Even if this doesn't pan out, there are plenty (covad.com, garlic.com, core.com, speakeasy.com ...) for around $350/month. Even paying the extra $50, I'm still paying less than the Co-Lo/Comcast Combo, and getting the servers installed in the garage makes maintenance a bit easier than driving down to Fremont...
So, the wheels are in motion. Screw Comcast. You just lost another $200/month...
The last straw in the litany of failure that is my Comcast internet connection is their unilateral attack on network neutrality. Comcast are interfering with the broadcast of packets between users on the network, if either the source or destination is within their domain. Worse, they're doing it in a particularly vile manner - effectively they're using a computer-hacker attack called the 'man-in-the-middle' attack. When they decide you're using too much bandwidth, they (sitting in the middle of the communication link) fake a packet to *both* of the communicating computers, this packet is an 'RST' packet, or 'reset' packet. What this does is tell the computer that receives it that the *other* computer has dropped the connection. So both computers think something is wrong with the other end, and the communication is terminated. This is pure unadulterated evil.
Now I'm not a huge user of P2P (which is where the news broke). I *do* however use iChat to keep in touch with my family across the Atlantic. It's a cool video-conferencing system built into all macs, and since my family all have macs, it works well. Since there's several thousand miles between us, it's one of the few ways we can 'see' each other without major travel.
Until a few months ago, iChat worked great. Now, I get less than a minute of great picture, and then everything breaks up! I was putting it down to transatlantic bandwidth issues, but then I tried it from work, and (lo and behold), there's no problem, looking around the net, it seems I'm not alone. This *did* annoy me. I doubt I use even 1% of the bandwidth I pay Comcast for, and when I do want to use some, they have a specific policy preventing me from doing so. It seems I'm allowed to pay Comcast for their services, just not to actually *use* those services ever.
I currently pay Comcast the princely sum of $185-$200 per month for both TV and internet, I've just ordered Dish Network, and will be cancelling all the Comcast services as soon as Dish and an alternate internet are installed. Dish ($84/month) will be here on Saturday :) The only real problem was which internet service to go for. I currently have a co-located server in Fremont (serving this very web-page). I pay $245/month for a dedicated 10 Mbit/7U service (which is actually a good deal). I never use the 10MBit/s though, I max out at ~1Mbit, and 95% of the time it's down at a few tens of Kbit/s. So, although I'm very happy with the service, that's a waste of money too. So far, we're up to $430/month to reassign...
So, I was looking around, and found Sonic.net's T1-alike. Basically this is 2+ ADSL lines bonded together to provide 1.5MBit/sec dedicated bandwidth in both directions. Together with a managed Cisco router, it costs $299/month. Even if this doesn't pan out, there are plenty (covad.com, garlic.com, core.com, speakeasy.com ...) for around $350/month. Even paying the extra $50, I'm still paying less than the Co-Lo/Comcast Combo, and getting the servers installed in the garage makes maintenance a bit easier than driving down to Fremont...
So, the wheels are in motion. Screw Comcast. You just lost another $200/month...