Comcast continue to prove that they are evil, scum-sucking bastards

[jducoeur]

This morning, with no warning or notice, they starting blocking inbound port 80 to my house. Given that I am trying to get some work done here, that's more than a little rude, especially since the inbound traffic is essentially trivial -- it's just for test purposes, not a real public website, so we're talking something on the order of tens of K. No idea whether it was an across-the-board change, or specifically targeted at me.

Fortunately, it's easy enough to work around (the nice thing about developing a Facebook app is that the layer of indirection means that I can redirect the port at the FB layer without any change at the user level), but it continues to increase my desire to quit this annoying company. Do I understand correctly from recent conversations that RCN (for a small surcharge) allows inbound port 80? That alone might get me to sign up for them for Internet, given how incompetent Comcast has been lately. (Have I mentioned that outbound email through Comcast has been consistently failing for us for the past two days?)

For now, I seem to be back up and running. I'm tentatively assuming that they simply noticed my inbound port 80 traffic and chose to shut it down. (Although, in that case, I have no idea why they were allowing it previously.) If I find that my new port gets blocked as well, it means that they're sniffing my traffic and looking for HTTP, in which case I'm simply out of here -- we're paying them a small fortune per month, and if they want our money to go elsewhere that much, we can probably oblige them...

Comments

[dsrtao]

RCN will be at our house Friday. Here's what we're getting for $130/month:

Static IP, no filtering.
20Mb/s down, 2Mb/s up.
All the TV channels they have.
A cable box and a CableCard.
Unlimited local and long distance telephone.

Price guaranteed for two years.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

One cable box?
Does that include premium channels e.g. HBO, Cinemax?

[dsrtao]

Eliz said all of the channels. I presume they will charge extra for pay-for-view, and I bet we're not getting some special Spanish or Arabic channels. Probably not the subscription to NFL RipOff 2008, either. But yes, Showtime, Skinemax, HBO, Starz.

You can get more cable boxes and/or cable cards, of course.

[elizabear.livejournal.com]

They said every channel, including all of the premium movie channels.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

It seems to be a national growing trend.

We have a static IP with unblocked ports on RCN. And the customer service is, well, actual customer service.

And we are paying less than I did with Comcast - because even though the Static IP puts me in their business class, with their copious discounting it was still cheaper than Comcast rack rate.

[cellio]

It seems to be a trend with the big players. The smaller players (at least locally) seem much more reasonable, so as long as they can avoid getting swallowed up by the big players, there's hope.

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

It seems that Comcast is making things more uniform. They've had what amounts to neighborhood-by-neighborhood policies for quite a while, depending upon which cable company you were with when they got eaten. I'm seeing lots of reports all of a sudden; when they do something like this on such a broad scale it rarely seems to benefit the consumers.

RCN supposedly will grant you a static IP with no port blocking (in or out). When I last talked to them, this was $20/month; that may have changed. Our base package (which seems very similar to dsrtao's, is based at $122 (without static IP). I should ask them again what the current rate is.

[elizabear.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's $19.99 for the static IP option.

Our new service is ~$132/mo, and includes phone/net/cable with 1 digital box, 1 cable card (for the TiVo), 20/mbs up & 2/mbs down, static IP, unlimited local/LD/regional phone (includes Canada & PR), and every channel they have, including every premium movie channel. They offer 1 or 2 year contracts.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Do not attribute to malice what can be as easily be explained by incompetence .

So, they aren't evil, scum-sucking bastards. They are merely stupid, scum-sucking bastards :)

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"Any sufficiently powerful stupidity is indistinguishable from evil"?

Once you have enough power, negligent misuse of it becomes a serious issue.

[dsrtao]

As I once said to a Microsoftie: it's not that your company is special. Any company with that much monopoly advantage would be just as evil. That doesn't excuse you, though.

[serakit.livejournal.com]

What is the significance of inbound port 80?

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Running a local webserver on the comcast-hosted machine that people from the outside world can get to.

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

If you area has DSL service as an option, you might want to check out Speakeasy (http://www.speakeasy.net/) for your internet service. I have a package with 2 static IP addresses, and no port blocking, plus the usual assortment of email addresses, web hosting space, and so forth. I can't quote you numbers on the speed. I think there's a faster service available than the one I have, but I haven't run into any serious performance issues, even with two intense Everquest junkies in the household, so I haven't paid much attention to the traffic speeds.

I originally went with Speakeasy about 5 years ago when I was expecting to stay in the system administration game, and wanted access to things like the fixed IP addresses which weren't offered by a lot of providers. I don't really need them at this point, and could probably save a few bucks a month, but inertia is a strong force. I'm paying about $75 a month for my service. I've only needed customer service a couple of times, but when I've needed it it's been good and competent. I'm not sure I'd recommend them to a real novice, because the initial setup was mildly technical. Nothing you'd have any trouble with, but I wouldn't want to try to walk my grandmother through it. I've vaguely noted that there are higher end, more business oriented offerings, all the way up to T1, but haven't paid attention to the details.

You'd need to go elsewhere for your cable TV fix though.

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

We go through Speakeasy too, and have suffered minimal problems (other than the typical long setup times when changing addresses -- they're still dependent on Verizon at the core). Intelligent technical staff, sane usage policies, etc.

We've got a 1.5 down, 384 up plan for $55 a month, I think. They also explicitly allow a lot of things that most others don't -- sharing your wireless, talking directly to smtp so you can run a mail host from your local server, etc. And they'll even set up reverse DNS for you, which I kind of like (though I didn't bother to set up 'commune.crschmidt.net' again after we moved and our IP changed).

In general, I'd highly recommend speakeasy for anyone vaguely technical -- but you may pay a price. In addition to our $55 or whatever for speakeasy, we pay $65 for the lowest package of Cable TV that isn't just public access, so we're paying $100+ total -- I don't know how much you're paying now, but it feels like a lot to me.

[jducoeur]

Actually, that's not all that much. Admittedly, we use a pretty serious cable package, but we're paying $150+ to Comcast...

[jducoeur]

I'm dubious about DSL: I'm going to be running CommYou from the house for the time being, so I'm occasionally going to need serious bandwidth. While I'm going to be using a Real ISP for the Real Site, I'll need to be able to do things like download the current database to home for dissection occasionally, and stuff like that.

It's not a trivial question, since DSL's bandwidth isn't shared the way cable's is. But I *do* make considerable use of the high cable bandwidth sometimes, and do like it: being able to download software packages in seconds, for example, has been really very convenient lately...

[laurion]

Have you considered hosting with a third party hosting service, where it's their _job_ to support high traffic unfettered access? I'm not sure if you have business concerns, but for $8 a month you can get bandwidth measured in TB/month.

[jducoeur]

To the house? I certainly know ISPs that can run that kind of bandwidth to my site itself (indeed, I'm choosing between them -- SoftLayer is currently leading the pack), but I don't know anything that cheap that runs to my curb...

[laurion]

No, not to your curb. That's why I said third party hosting. I guess my question is really if you need to get bandwidth to your curb, or can you move what needs bandwidth to where it can get it. (Mohammad, Mountain)

SoftLayer looks pretty good if you need your own dedicated hardware, and the computing power that implies. If what you need is storage space and bandwidth though, is dedicated hardware worth the extra cost? In my case I'm running several dynamic websites, with databases, e-mail, a handful of cron and backup scripts, and a podcast with gigs of data transfer each month. I'm not doing any massive number crunching, video editing, etc. that requires dedicated hardware, so Dreamhost covers all my needs for a fraction of the cost of a dedicated system.

[jducoeur]

No, the issue is very much the to-the-curb side. I plan on doing my development at home (at least to start), so I need solid bandwidth to here, even though the actual *site* will run elsewhere. (I don't enjoy trying to do major development remotely -- done it enough times to think it introduces unfun pokiness.) I've already got ISPs; the question is how I connect to them.

And Dreamhost isn't an option. This isn't an ordinary website: this is going to be a fairly high-power AJAX/Java application. That in and of itself lets Dreamhost out, since they explicitly *don't* support servlets. (Unless you are doing dedicated hardware, which pretty much misses the point of Dreamhost.)

Keep in mind, this isn't a personal project. I'm building something that is *intended* to have a million daily users in a year's time. (No, I'm not necessarily expecting that fast a growth curve -- but it's plausible, and I want to be able to handle it if it happens.) So rapid scalability is absolutely key here, from the architecture on up. Heck, one of the reasons I'm planning on Hibernate for the middle of the DB layer is so that I can switch from MySQL to Oracle reasonably quickly, should that prove necessary...

[laurion]

Oh, I don't mistake this for a personal project at all. I didn't think Dreamhost was going to be a solution, I was just illustrating that there's no way I could do what I want to do with a bandwidth to the house solution, especially with my even greater financial restraints, and that moving off the curb got me what I wanted.

Clearly one of your defining needs at the moment is the flexibility and accessibility of keeping your development very close at hand. So, you're right -- high speed to the house is what you need now, and something dedicated elsewhere when you've got something a little more stable and releasable, and the concern is scaling the resources to match.

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

We've been very happy with Verizon FiOS — it's worked just the way a utility should: very fast, always works, and you never need to think about it. I've never needed static-IP, so haven't looked into the pricing, but I know they offer it.

[jducoeur]

I'm thinking about it. I would need their business-Internet package, and it isn't clear that you can combine that with home-TV easily. But it's certainly pretty by the numbers, and Consumer Reports' glowing review is very intriguing.

The major downside is that msmemory is not happy about the notion that they insist on ripping all the copper out of your house when you sign up (as many reports have said they do). So we'll see: RCN is also clearly in the running.

But between the two, I think Comcast loses. The only reason we've stayed with them as long as we have is the inconvenience of changing email addresses, but they have added so many other inconveniences that I think that is now outweighed...

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

I can confirm that they do indeed insist on ripping out your copper pair. When the power goes out, the battery back-up kicks in: it's rated to run for eight hours, by running for seven and then saving the last hour of juice until you push a "give me my last hour now" button. But the battery won't power your ringer, so unless you happen to pick up at the lucky moment, you can't get incoming calls.

This was what kept us from switching over earlier than we did. I finally gave in only now that we have cell phones as an alternate pathway.

[be-well-lowell.livejournal.com]

That's why I left Comcast when we moved out of Burlington. Not that they were blocking inbound traffic, but that the Terms of Service said that I wouldn't have inbound traffic. I didn't do that in Burlington, because the TOS had allowed it when I originally signed up (for the late-lamented MediaOne), but I wasn't going to sign a new contract agreeing from the start not to do something I was planning to do. So I went with Speakeasy, for less bandwidth at a few extra bucks.

[jducoeur]

Ah, yes -- MediaOne. The one company in cable/internet that had a clue. I really, really miss them...