Comcast getting it from the FCC

[kc2orw]

Maybe this is some of the change we can hope for...

Comcast, and I hope some others soon, is getting taken to task about QOS being applied that favors there products/subscription service over alternative services today. I always had hoped form the earliest days that I would just buy bandwidth and use it as I chose. But the TeleCriminals have distorted that notion out of existence and have found newer ways to try and charge more per bit, perhaps this practice can be changed.

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090120/ ... cc_comcast (http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090120/ap_on_hi_te/fcc_comcast)

[W9PDS]

This is no joke..

I had Comcast + Vonage about 3-4 years ago. I successfully used it happily for a long time.

Then shortly after comcast rolled out their home voice product, Vonage started to suck.
Lots of dropouts, skips, missed calls, etc.

Prior to the comcast voice rollout I tracerouted the vonage server I was connected to from my home network. All my traffic stayed in the Chicago area and even terminated in the same building. Comcast handed off the service to Vonage at the same address, the big 350 E. Cermak technology center. Latency was 10-20 ms & everything was hunky-dorey.... most of the hops never even left the same building.


After comcast rolled out their voice product & Vonage started to 'suck' I did lots of investigating to figure out what was going wrong.

To transit to the same Vonage server, I now had to leave Chicago, head to New York, Transit to Virginia, BACK to New York, and then back to Chicago terminating @ 350 E. Cermak.

It was ridiculous and was obviously done maliciously. I could sit at home on the same line & ping google and get a 10ms response back, but pinging vonage all of a sudden became 100-120ms.

I opened trouble ticket after trouble ticket. I had traceroutes from 3 major carriers (I work for an Internet company & have access to different trunks) to show proof that Comcast had changed their routing to Vonage, but they did nothing.

I eventually left them & never looked back.

[kc2orw]

Wait till a few more people decide to go IPTV, outside of the providers normal subscription based service, then the dreaded bandwidth choke might show up everywhere. Of course if it gets addressed now then maybe they won't be feeling brave enough to risk it. I am so tired of the broadband regionalized monopolies, big business is the boon of this country. Does anyone really have to guess why some of us didn't vote GOP this time...

[N1LAF]

Wait till a few more people decide to go IPTV, outside of the providers normal subscription based service, then the dreaded bandwidth choke might show up everywhere. Of course if it gets addressed now then maybe they won't be feeling brave enough to risk it. I am so tired of the broadband regionalized monopolies, big business is the boon of this country. Does anyone really have to guess why some of us didn't vote GOP this time...

Please tell...

[N2NH]

http://i44.tinypic.com/2468hz6.jpg

[KN8K]

I had Comcast several years ago too. When they got phone service I switched to that too. Problem was because I was not a new customer (already had internet and Cable) they would not give me the $99.00 bundle of all three. I switched to Wide-Open-West which was Ok. When Comcast asked me why I switched then they suddenly were authorized to give me the special bundle pricing. I was so pissed I made them wait a year for their final payment. (It was my own little protest).

I now have AT&T phone, high speed internet and Uverse TV which has better digital than WOW did.

[kc2orw]

I had Comcast several years ago too. When they got phone service I switched to that too. Problem was because I was not a new customer (already had internet and Cable) they would not give me the $99.00 bundle of all three. I switched to Wide-Open-West which was Ok. When Comcast asked me why I switched then they suddenly were authorized to give me the special bundle pricing. I was so pissed I made them wait a year for their final payment. (It was my own little protest).

I now have AT&T phone, high speed internet and Uverse TV which has better digital than WOW did.
I went from two services to a three service package with Cablevision and noticed an improvement in QOS too. So much for just buying bandwidth, oh now I have their 800 channels of nothing, woo hoo...

Would anyone care to speculate what would happen to that QOS should I drop two of the Services?
At least one poster here would probably suggest that I continue drink the Koolaide and just accept the bad QOS or pay their price. But I think it is ridiculous to accept that and much prefer to just pick any service and not be subjected to QOS designed to frustrate. Oh well some folks love being sheeple I guess and then there are the others...

PS: Sorry forgot to add that we have only just been allowed to have an alternative locally Verizon FIOS, not much of an alternative, and people are jumping on that one rather quickly. I suspect they are jumping on it too quickly as it isn't all that different as their requirements seem a bit restricting, maybe we shall see...
I do like to see activity like this so that the mini-monopolies don't think they can do as they please unabated...

[n2ize]

PS: Sorry forgot to add that we have only just been allowed to have an alternative locally Verizon FIOS, not much of an alternative, and people are jumping on that one rather quickly. I suspect they are jumping on it too quickly as it isn't all that different as their requirements seem a bit restricting, maybe we shall see...
I do like to see activity like this so that the mini-monopolies don't think they can do as they please unabated...

They've had FiOS service at my parents home in lower Westchester for several years. All in all the service has been quite good. In well over two years it has only gone down once due to a local problem, service has been consistant, bandwidth excellent, no problems running Vonage or any service requiring high bandwidth. I am speaking strictly of their Internet service, as far as their TV service goes I know not a thing.

[kd6nig]

How much bandwidth does Vonage use anyway? I could have swore it was only around 50k/sec or so, which, unless you're saturating the connection with other stuff (or the ISP doing funny business) should more than suffice.....

[W2IBC]

well where i live we used to have insight until comshit bought it out

insight - good
comcast - crap

[kc2orw]

They've had FiOS service at my parents home in lower Westchester for several years. All in all the service has been quite good. In well over two years it has only gone down once due to a local problem, service has been consistant, bandwidth excellent, no problems running Vonage or any service requiring high bandwidth. I am speaking strictly of their Internet service, as far as their TV service goes I know not a thing.
My main point isn't about who's service is better but who may be manipulating their service to keep the competition out.
A certain amount of deterioration of service can occur but there are some other factors... like the company itself.
I did not properly document the transition because it was also part of a move, the move amounted to 150 feet and three telephone poles down. I feel by examination of the external systems physical routing that it is not much of an influence. I have been on that same system for about ten years, I have gotten them to do repairs due to signal loss and they have upgraded the local system a few years back. I am on the same trunk within the same system and yet my QOS has improved when I shifted to the extended package... hmmm.

Now do you really have to wonder what might happen if I scale back because I decide I don't need their voice and video service and only want data.

[W9PDS]

How much bandwidth does Vonage use anyway? I could have swore it was only around 50k/sec or so, which, unless you're saturating the connection with other stuff (or the ISP doing funny business) should more than suffice.....

Very little. 50Kbits would be the high end.

The problem for me was that comcast re-routed Vonage traffic to go clear across the country in order to create high latency that makes the voice calls sound like crap. They did this in order to give themselves an unfair advantage in the VOIP market.

[kd6nig]

How much bandwidth does Vonage use anyway? I could have swore it was only around 50k/sec or so, which, unless you're saturating the connection with other stuff (or the ISP doing funny business) should more than suffice.....

Very little. 50Kbits would be the high end.

The problem for me was that comcast re-routed Vonage traffic to go clear across the country in order to create high latency that makes the voice calls sound like crap. They did this in order to give themselves an unfair advantage in the VOIP market.

Yeah, when they switch routing thats a pain, indeed.

It will be interesting to see what they find. Probably by the time they do, Vonage might go under though.

[N2RJ]

PS: Sorry forgot to add that we have only just been allowed to have an alternative locally Verizon FIOS, not much of an alternative, and people are jumping on that one rather quickly. I suspect they are jumping on it too quickly as it isn't all that different as their requirements seem a bit restricting, maybe we shall see...
I do like to see activity like this so that the mini-monopolies don't think they can do as they please unabated...

FiOS has no monthly usage caps like Comcrap has. As everyone on teh intarwebz knows, Comcrap now has a 250GB monthly data usage cap.

My ISP (Penteledata) has something similar. 100GB each way.

Verizon also has no plans of instituting monthly usage caps either, although it won't surprise me if they do at one point in the future.

So FiOS is definitely a much better alternative. It has Comcast scrambling to change out amps and nodes to 1GHz, roll out DOCSIS3 for internet and SDV for the TV service to add more HD channels. They also took a wrong move with 3:1 compression from the CMC, because it has actually resulted in MORE defections to FiOS and DirecTV.

With Obama's new FCC chief wanting an open internet, it should get VERY interesting. I personally would like to see the usage caps disappear completely, upload increased, and none of this traffic shaping and port blocking nonsense that ISPs have now. That way I can use netflix to stream HD movies without worrying about hitting my usage limit.

Let them take some of the bailout money and fee increases that they have foisted on customers and build a proper network which can handle the traffic.

The biggest problem with FiOS I see is that some big shareholders in VZ don't like it. At current it is pretty expensive to roll out (I heard it was in the region of $8000 per subscriber) so the rollout may take some time. Also, Verizon is given a long time to roll it out completely, in many cases as much as 10 years! Of course they're going to start with the more densely populated, more profitable areas first.

[kc2orw]

Okay Ryan that's nice but the topic once again isn't about one service provider versus the other.
It is about QOS being applied to ones subscription service designed to keep users from using alternatives.
I want to buy bandwidth and not be bothered with either parties, in my case cablevison and verizon, other, mostly, IP based services.
That being said I would love to consider Verizon but my previous decades of exposure to them leave me a bit unwilling to consider them.

PS: Should be clearer about this NYNEX became Bellatlantic became Verizon or something like that. So I roll it up and simply refer to it, now, as Verizon and that is why I say decades of dealing with them.
They have laid new cable and installed a service box across the street so maybe they will be here next year :lol: But if $8000 per customer number is even close to accurate I suspect it won't be quick, though I have heard someone about three miles away has their service now :mrgreen:

[N2RJ]

Okay Ryan that's nice but the topic once again isn't about one service provider versus the other.

It will all boil down to that type of discussion eventually anyway, because the cable/telco ISPs basically do what the market will bear.

FiOS is a nice alternative not just because of the higher speeds, but because of the lack of caps, and Verizon's sometimes outright refusal to cooperate with the RIAA/MPAA et al.

Many people seem to think that the usage caps are a means to protect the "walled content garden" where you are forced to buy pay per view or on demand from Time Warner/Comcast/cablevision etc instead of getting it from the provider of choice, or having to get comcast digital voice instead of being able to use vonage.

In fact the caps were a result of the FCC ordering Comcast to be more forthcoming with their network management policies. Prior to the 250GB cap, people were being capped at random. They complained to the FCC and the FCC sent a nasty letter. They then put these 250GB caps in place to say "this is where we will charge overages and/or suspend service."

The thing is this isn't enough because for there to be a truly open internet the caps have to go. Otherwise, using legal HD services such as Netflix or Hulu is always going to be more limited than cable provided on demand or PPV.




It is about QOS being applied to ones subscription service designed to keep users from using alternatives.
I want to buy bandwidth and not be bothered with either parties, in my case cablevison and verizon, other, mostly, IP based services.
That being said I would love to consider Verizon but my previous decades of exposure to them leave me a bit unwilling to consider them.

PS: Should be clearer about this NYNEX became Bellatlantic became Verizon or something like that. So I roll it up and simply refer to it, now, as Verizon and that is why I say decades of dealing with them.
They have laid new cable and installed a service box across the street so maybe they will be here next year :lol: But if $8000 per customer number is even close to accurate I suspect it won't be quick, though I have heard someone about three miles away has their service now :mrgreen:

The service is excellent but the bad part I heard is the billing. That is the only bad point about the service.

[kc2orw]

The service is excellent but the bad part I heard is the billing. That is the only bad point about the service.
truly my issue was never about the service but billing and other, previous, tactics bother me. I find I have little interest in TV service I actually only care about data and voice. I have been experimenting with the idea of using IPTV instead and maybe cellphone instead. I am pretty sure that my needs, where TV and News are concerned, can be satisfied by IPTV and Internet News (text and Video)
so I really only care that they, the providers in general, not interfere with me and just supply me reliable, as it can be, non QOS bandwidth.