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.

[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.

[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.

[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 :)

[serakit.livejournal.com]

What is the significance of inbound port 80?

[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.

[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.

[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.