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

[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.