The Comcast Virus

Chris Pirillo »The Comcast VirusPosted 5 hours ago

AMEN BROTHER!

I remember back when it was AT&T here, when I was using IRC. I had a network issue (unrelated) and brought up tcpview to see what was going on. I had connected to two different servers, one using the standard port, and the other using a different port. The standard port was getting proxied through AT&T’s server. That might still be true today. I don’t have any IRC program on this machine to check it.

Yes, there is a growing list of dis-satisfied comcast phone users…

http://joshmaher.wordpress.com/2007/01/11/comcast-sells-your-new-phone-number/

I don’t hate comcast….i “sort of” like them, but only becasue i have the triple play and it is reletively cheap for all three of them with only a year contract and I can stop it after the year if I don’t want to keep it.

That’s Comcastic!

I love Comcast, never had a single problem with Comcast. I have two choices, I live in an apartment, its either Comcast High Speed Internet or Dialup. DSL is not available, cant have Sat Internet.

I noticed I couldn’t get connected to any peers with utorrent when I was trying to get a Linux Distro. Found out it was Comcasts fault. I am in the same boat as you are Chris, stuck with them. I can get AT&T DSL but its 1MB and crappy, or I can get Knology 1Mb and it sucks plus the cable sucks.
So no choice really.

i hate comcast the cable keep fizzing up and the wireless is terrible i can be connected to my network but no internet i perfer at&t

Their cable service leaves much to be desired as well. I have a comcast labeled DVR which caused me to miss 4 minutes of the Seahawks game on sunday. Sometimes when you fast forward and then hit play, it doesn’t stop fast forwarding. So that nice little 20 minute commercial skipping buffer went screaming by.

I hear that we returned a kickoff 90 something yards for a touchdown… that would’ve been awesome to watch.

I been watching Comcast closely for over 22 years, and haven’t seen them
do one smart thing yet. Well, maybe the Comcast on Demand thing they
cobbled up a few months ago.

The best part of that company is some pretty good installation/repair guys. Other than that, nothing surprises, most especially the cruel and
underhanded stuff Comcast does. The company appears to actively recruit AOL castoffs, especially those who worked in the think tank.

I don’t see where anyone should be complaining about BitTorrent and other P2P traffic being blocked. There’s very little legitimate use for either protocol, unless software and music piracy is somehow considered legitimate by you, the vast majority of traffic caried via those avenues. If your favorite piracy channel is still working and you aren’t getting caught, you should be feeling lucky and stay hidden. If it quits working and you still haven’t gotten caught, you should feel damned lucky and quit whining.

Where in the world the public expressions of pride in being a thief, or the public outcries concerning loss of the ability to commit theft are coming from is way beyond my ability to justify. In the world I grew up in, thieves were the absolute dregs of society, scum-sucking low-lives (which they still are, despite their newfound popular “legitimacy”) whose diseased brains couldn’t grasp the concepts of self-worth and self-sufficiency. This was also the same world where one would rather die than become a welfare recipient sponging off of the honest hard work of others, in contrast to today’s world where masses of people publish how-to works on how to beat “the system”, and millions of able-bodied and able-minded people live off of “government money” and think it’s completely normal. Obviously they either failed elementary Civics or were high-school drop-outs, because they fail to realize that there is no “government money”, it’s all sweat and blood being taken from the worthwhile working members of society in the form of ever increasing taxes, and being redistributed to the spongers living merrily on the slippery slope leading down to Marxism.

All ISPs should be blocking the piracy channels, as well as performing stateful packet inspection and blocking to prevent the spread of malware. They’re being utterly irresponsible otherwise, and at worse, performing as the middlemen in intellectual property theft and malware distribution. By not doing these, they are accessories to the rising organized malware and spyware crime syndicates, and leaving themselves wide open for liability suits by the owners of the software and artwork whose theft they are enabling.

It’s really simple. Every ISP I’ve ever signed-up with has you sign for acceptance of an acceptable use policy, which among other things says they can disconnect a subscriber if they perform illegal acts using their bandwidth and network infrastructure. If they DON”T disconnect such abusers, they are condoning illegal activity. Let the ISPs beware and the prosecutions begin.

As the IT director for a very large public library I can say that Comcast has been very difficult to deal with regarding email traffic. We have thousands of customers with Comcast email addresses and Comcast is one of the few ISPs (and the only large one) that routinely blocks email to their customers but does not bounce it back to the sender.

I totally disagree. I love comcast and have nothing but an awesome connection. I get huge download and upload speeds. I dont pay anything extra. I download files at around 1.5 meg a second…this is “true” download…thats pretty damn sweet…i get around a 400k upload…this is all standard…all times of the day…

Not sure why comcast gets such a bad name…sure…its a cable company that does normal cable company things…but i’ve had cable and internet for years through them and they are always upgrading internet without me asking and adding HD channels to their cable…ALL OF THE TIME..

stop the hating! :)

Rick:
Sooo..those people wanting to download Linux without overwhelming tens of mirrors by using BitTorrent are low-lives? Have you looked at HOW BitTorrent and P2P are being used now? There is at least one YouTube-esque site using some BT technology for downloading and using legitimate media.
There are plenty of other schemes using P2P for legitimate purposes, including one of the new services by the Azureus folk.
Sure, illegal activity happens, but the same illegal activity can happen on the phone line, arranging a burglary of a bank over a company’s wires. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for the safe harbor rules in use by ISPs and phone companies alike: they’d get sued to oblivion for stuff they can’t (and often aren’t allowed to) catch [such as recording telephone conversations without warrant].

Agree with Nick. We customers should not have to support bandwidth hogs.

You want to do lots of downloading? Pay for a faster connection!

these days. Certainly not mine. And they sure don’t seem to mind the fact. Recent news about Comcast’s packet forging, cutting off BitTorrent users, Lotus Notes users, and others have drawn all sorts of howls.Chris Pirillojoined the rant. The Consumerist is so full of Comcast customer service rants, that the folks behind that blog ought to consider changing its name. But what are you really going to do about it? Maybe go to the ramparts (or at least the local office)

Rick’s comments are remarkable. Comcast is a service provider, not a nanny. They should not filter or shape traffic except to protect the network from abuse. P2P or FTP or other traffic is point-to-point and is not multi-cast why should they care? DOS attacks, etc should be filtered, the majority of customer traffic should be respected.

Paul’s comment regarding ‘bandwidth hogs’ is interesting. Comcast has adopted a flat rate model but does apparently target bandwidth ‘abusers’ with sanctions should they exceed some unknown boundary. Those customers might agree to pay for bandwidth, but are not offered that option. The difference between a dedicated T1 line and shared cable service is substantial. Such a dilemma might be resolved by charging a bandwidth surcharge - exceeding 3G/per month will cost x$/GB; but that option isn’t offered. Further, those ‘abusers’ affect others on a largely area basis. Should that be a factor? Gross usage for a provider like Comcast is a difficult factor with those authorities that regulate service rates.

I know of folk that process TIF photos at ~ 15M each. The downloads go OK from companies with 512k lines. His processed images at the same resolution are still ~ 15M but are uploaded at ~ 40kb/s because of Comcast caps (independent of Mark’s experience). He is now considering DSL because of the faster upload speeds.

I find it rather remarkable that when folk actually use the bandwidth they have available they can be penalized or filtered for using more than their unknown share. I find it equally remarkable that as we approach TV on-demand on a wider basis, Comcast would like to shut down so-called bandwidth abusers. Perhaps there is a connection?

first off, you are a complete moron. you did not sign a contract with comcast the price they gave you is good for a year, you can cancel it at anytime without penalty (im a comcast employee). yes, they do manage traffic over their network, if they did not the 3% of users that use 95% of the bandwith would **** it up for everyone. you will not find an isp that does not do this. as for the rest of it, 9 out of 10 issues are due to operator error, so ya, we ask you to check simple stupid **** cause thats usually the problem. if you dont like the prices, dont buy the product. cable television is a luxury, not a nessesity. you can get free ****** tv over the air if you dont want to pay for it. yes free tv sucks thats why it is free. you people amaze me. get lives.

s business service with something like a UStream.tv successfully. Why? Because the provided “speed” that Comcast is providing is relative. So in his case, he had to look for a separate option for running his video. Well that and he wasgrowing tiredof Comcast overall. No, I genuinely understand that with a cable network, there are peak periods when my download speed might not be optimum. That is life. But to wave this 50Mbps hogwash in my face and expect me to do anything short of snorting out

Been comcast customer for long long time and now DSL customer for last two years. I can without any shadow of a doubt testify to the HUGE increase in stability and QOS from AT&T that I have. I know its different for everyone but thats my experience. It has also been nice to simply read about all the Torrent problems from ComCrap while my torrents are working just fine!