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

[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.