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The key is to avoid the big-name assfaces whenever possible; much like the major cell carriers, they don't give a shill if they lose any particular customer, as long as their bottom line isn't affected. Regional places like Sonic.net or DSL Extreme are MUCH better for any geek to go with, for example -- neither uses caps/throttling or minds home servers, and while both block port 25, DSL Extreme's TOS states they will open it if asked.

The thing is, regional ISPs are rarely well known even in their area, so a lot of people have no clue that there's any options beyond the cable/phone companies. Even if you've never heard of any independent ISPs existing in your area, spend some time searching the web for a local one (they can be very hard to find) and ask at BroadbandReports & Craigslist's Forum area before signing up with a national ISP. It takes some extra time, but it's worth it.

But TOS is a civil matter. Share your connection and they're entitled to cut you off.

My provider, Speakeasy.net, explicitly allows me to do this.

I know not everyone is in my situation, but I live in a densely-populated US metropolitan area where there are more than enough competing options for broadband. If my provider ever changed those terms of service on me (because of their recent takeover, or a change in management, or whatever) I'd be the first one to cut them off from my money and I'd go elsewhere. I'm the customer. I don't need the aggravation.

And again, I'm not saying everyone has the same options as I do (thought, it's probably worth checking out this site to really make sure you know all your options). I'm just saying that where I live, I actually have ISPs that try extra hard to serve customers like me.

My congratulations to Australians for having an ISP that stands up for the interests of its customers. I wonder if we could ever get something like that in the United States? Haha, I'm just kidding... I know we can't.

There are ISPs like that in the United States like that one. It just depends on where you live, and if you took the time to do your research.

I assume it's the same in Australia. Since Australia is huge too, I'll bet that most aussies couldn't get iinet even if they wanted to.

I wouldn't do anything fancy.

The ISPs are very happy to offer service individually to residents. Rather then having some building wide system, let residents work it out for themselves.

I wish I could mod this post a thousand points. Getting this service as a group exposes your organization to all kinds of management nightmares and liability. Do not get into the business of becoming an ISP. It's not worth the trouble. Plus, it's not going to be worth the trouble personally when people start calling you every time their internet is down (or when they think someone else is taking all their bandwidth).

Do not trust what the sales people say. Sales people lie. Let the members of your condo make their own decisions, and if the company they picked is particularly awful, or becomes awful only later, then at least they'll be able to switch out of it.

I know people that actually do this kind of network support for a living at their workplace, who have had all kinds of difficulties trying do the same for their tenants (granted, condo owners are not the same as tenants, condo owners should be easier, but still).

Incorrect. The answer six years ago was http://www.dslreports.com/ now it is http://www.broadbandreports.com/

Ok this is unfortunately a fantasy and not something you should do in this bullshit legalistic world we live in today. Hypothetical, don't do it, do not try at home etc.
,br> But having said that. Never underestimate the power of beating the living crap out of a few company executives and making sure they know why, and informing them that it will continue until they honor their promises. It would happen a time or two and then they'd get the message and after that no one would be beaten and no one would be cheated.

In the old days they dealt with assholes by running them out on a rail or by tarring and feathering them. Assholes, liars, and cheats were harder to find back then.

Incorrect.
The answer six years ago was http://www.dslreports.com/
now it is http://www.broadbandreports.com/

Well, some ISPs are. Just depends on how they structure things legally. Should it be easier for ISPs to stand up and refuse to censor and snoop on their customers? IMO, yes. However, AFAIK, AT&T still retains common carrier status despite their well documented spying efforts, so...

This puts the lie to any claim that the primary problem with people who tether is their bandwidth usage. If Verizon was so burdened by the top bandwidth hogs then why would they roll out this service, thus making more people hogs? It should be obvious to anyone that the real reason is greed. They want to charge for every possible use of their (ours if you consider the publicly owned airwaves that they were leased ) spectrum. Verizon has already eclipsed AT&T as the carrier I hate most. And to think that I was almost enticed to Verizon for their fast LTE network.

Even with natural monopolies, you'd at least have competitions in some areas between providers.

Instead, due to government regulation, I'm stuck with Broadstripe Cable because Comcast's coverage area ends 1/2 mile away.

And trust me, if you thought Comcast was bad, you have seen anything yet.

It you want to say TV isn't a failure, then cut off CAFR funding for it. Cut off Obama's giveaway to the networks. Let's have the FCC panel made up of engineers who the public votes in, not the one's the POTUS appoints. Today you have to get your daily dose of propaganda BS along with your local news (which could possibly warn if a tsunami is on the way) what a nasty trade off, listening to how jobs are so good, and the economy is recovering, and OBL shot and dumped at sea, just to try to know if the rain might have nuclear fallout or if some earthquake has a 100' wave headed your way. Let us not forget the switch to DTV which sucks more money people don't have. Plus when it's really windy from the haarp technology mucking with the weather, the DTV packets break up. Where in analog, it was just snow and noise, now it's BSOD (black screen of death)

Ya want to talk about the telcos? Start with NSA fios splitters, move on to wiretaps, spying, and all the rest of the crap. You couldn't GIVE me a mobile phone.

You want to talk about the internet and law? Miserable failure. *.AA , DMCA, streaming stations, copyright/patent trolls, SEO blackhats, the intelligence community spying, Chamber of Commerce, facebook. You can't look me in the eye and tell me that's not a failure for the US Constitution which is now intermittent.

When the monetary system financial terrorism come to fruition and mark to market is realized and the funding sources are added up, and the financial terrorists are prosecuted, these technologies will be a failure. It's just that it isn't measured this way currently because of the corruption and payola.

Watch: sock puppet / trolls will vote this message off the radar they don't like the truth.

Played with it... simple, but not very useful. Use http://broadbandreports.com/

Parent is known troll APK, also known as KingsJester or the HOSTS file troll, which spams several sites trying to show off his supposed programming skillz by writing badly designed VB6 "apps" and loves to spam threads with his rantings on 16MB HOSTS files, which after repeated requests to show how a 16Mb static HOSTS file can scale against a threat of over 1.3 MILLION infected sites with more than 200,000 being added or removed PER DAY has refused to show proof and instead throws insults.

So anyone who listens to APK, Kingsjerker, or whatever he wishes to call himself this week, and thinks a HOSTS file will do anything but stop static ad servers, really needs to do the math. Not to mention on any machine before Vista it will seriously slow down the machine as it is read line by line per access, and frankly isn't much better on Vista/Win 7. About the most inefficient way to block a static site as one can get IMHO, and anyone actually pushing it as an effective solution to the ever revolving malware out there frankly needs their head examined. But then again we know trolls aren't the brightest creatures, now don't we?

For examples of his trolling simply watch this thread or any I post to, as he has been following me for weeks spamming since I pointed out he doesn't have basic math on his side.

Net neutrality is an issue because Internet access has become a near-monopoly service. Few people today buy residential Internet connectivity from someone other than their monopoly telco or monopoly cable provider. For both of those monopolies, Internet access is a tie-in sale - both want to sell customers a "bundle" with telephony, video, and Internet connectivity. In some areas, there's only one provider.

We've already lost one deregulation battle - the right to use any ISP you want over the monopoly telco wires. The FCC changed the rules on that back in 2003. Until then, telcos had to provide raw DSL connections from an ISP to a customer at prices no higher than they charged their own internal ISP. Once the FCC dropped that, the ISP business became a monopoly.

Further back, telcos used to be regulated common carriers. We lost that back in the 1990s.

"Net neutrality" is the last stop before total monopoly control.

Wireless doesn't help. "Deregulation" also allowed wire-line and wireless carriers to merge, which is why AT&T is back in the cellular business. Nor does cable/telco competition. Mergers in that area are coming. In the end, you'll have one connection to the outside world, with a boot ready to step on your tube if you get out of line.

Everyone knows it takes a $100 XBox 360 to bring down Amazon completely.

My initial reaction was similar. I'm not familiar with the syntax, but concluded it functions a bit like some kind of If / Else statement.
The If part applies when at facebook and that other domain, the else applies the Deny everywhere else.

With that entered Firefox often brings up a notification at the top of a page showing data that would be passed to a php plugin at Facebook. So it seems to work fine, I just wish it'd auto-hide the text after a short delay so I didn't have to click a close button or lose some screen space.

I didn't save the URL of where I found the entry a while back, but a post near the end of the thread below has what looks to be a slightly less efficient version of the same thing.

I think it's fairly harmless to experiment since the NoScript feature is for application blocking - it should only disable, not enable.

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/r24132642-Blocking-Facebooks-Open-Graph-API

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/r24474010-Security-E3000-passes-iOS4-IPv6

I installed an E3000 yesterday and this morning tried an IPv6 test at one of many such sites on the web and discovered that my iOS4/3Gs iPhone had an IPv6 address.

It appears that E3000 has an IPv6 capability. Comcast appears to be doing a 6to4 translation along the way.

I don't find any way mention of a IPv6 capability on the E3000 especially anyway to control a firewall on it.

It supports IPv6. You need to fucking google more before you post a reply.. in fact just any comment at all.

I don't know if I trust those test results. The site they used and others differ greatly on a laptop.
(second one uses Flash)

http://m.ba.net/util/ping/nettools.html

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

http://www.broadbandreports.com/speedtest

Your surmise of a back door appears to be correct. This back door remains open even if you disable remote management of the router, and it does not even require knowledge of the admin password you choose. Here's a post detailing how to disable the port 4567 back door using telnet to the router http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/r21990593-modemrouter-Remove-the-actiontec-verizon-backdoor-on-port-456

I guess fiber to the house works differently in your area. Here, the telco equipment finishes at the optical switch, which has 8 cat6 ports. My router/firewall is on one of them feeding the "safe" network, another feeds the "unsafe" network (for work PCs used at home, since the VPN requires some ports which I will not open on our router), and another feeds the IPTV decoder. The telco has access to their optical switch where bandwidth limits can be enforced, but does not have access to my router, which I bought elsewhere.

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/r21990593-modemrouter-Remove-the-actiontec-verizon-backdoor-on-port-456 Haven't tried it, but worth a shot. Took a (very) little bit of googling to find which was still less effort than lambasting the OP.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Residential DSL has asymmetrical downstream speed up to 50Mb/s and cost around $30 per month, while T1 lines run at 1.544Mb/s, yet cost $550 - $1200 per month. Why do you suppose that is?

If you want 24/7 guaranteed 50Mb/s, get yourself a T3 connection. It costs $6000 minimum. If you want cheap useable internet for the home, stick with residential DSL. You're not being sold short, you're just putting too much confidence in the manufacturers spec.

You're behaving like a PHB, which around here should be anathema.

It seems unlikely that AT&T would move GSM to 1900 MHz

Well, they are doing it. And who cares that a 3G phone would solve the problem? They have enough spectrum in 850mhz to run both. There's no compelling reason to degrade the service of the 2G customers.

Switching to WCDMA is advantageous in rural environments. Standard GSM will simply not operate more than 21 mi away from the base station due to timing issues.

That limitation doesn't matter unless you live in Kansas. In the rolling hills of the East or mountains of the West you are never going to get more than 21 miles away from the base station and still maintain a clear enough line of sight to communicate over that distance.

Update your virus defs ... it was a false positive and has been fixed, according to commenters at DSLReports.com. I verified it just a few minutes ago by browsing to the site in Firefox/AdBlock Plus with no problems.

Is claimed to be a work of Steve Friedl et. al. link

Purported to be derived from "DEC Customer Service Memorandum", which appears to be lost.

Keeping in mind that Apple doesn't make the batteries, they have to have some degree of trust in their suppliers. I doubt anyone can picture Apple stupid enough to bait PR nightmares and lawsuits when their image is very important to their business model. Apple's typical reaction is the industry best-case product-problem-coverup-job - do everything reasonable to stick a lollypop in the mouth of anyone that screams, and quietly correct the problem so it doesn't happen again. They're unlikely to admit fault, that would just fan the flames. (pun?)

Batteries lately though do seem to be a serious problem all around for everyone. DSLAM phone boxes blowing up down the street, laptops and ipods catching fire, liio batteries puffing up like balloons. Inadequate testing if you ask me. New technology trying to get rushed into a highly competitive new market, skip the tests it's good enough, just ship it. Then stuff blows up catches fire, or generally misbehaves. But right now rechargeable batteries are making a shambles out of Moore's Law.

This isn't really news any more than the 5 o-clock rush hour. Blame Apple, blame Sony, whatever, it's going to happen. It's not anywhere outside the bell curve yet.

You have to ask for it. I said it wrong. It is "EarthLink Experience" plan. See http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,10338367?hilite=earthlink+experience ... I still have this plan. I got it last summer.

You can read even more about Nemertes here:

http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/The-Exaflood-Myth-Just-Wont-Die-102202

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/suckered-by-astroturf_b_73483.html

Gross.

WTF is wrong with these people? How do these astroturfers live with themselves? Is there nothing more important than the size of your paycheck or your corporate rank?

Everyone's surely seen through this and it goes without saying, but yes, this is pure anti-nn astroturf, and it's being shoveled out now because of TWC's recent actions.

http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/The-Exaflood-Myth-Just-Wont-Die-102202

http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12673221

http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/2007/11/20/suckered-by-astroturf/

Dirtbags. "Research", my ass.

in 2009.. I guess we'll have super 3G!!

No, not everyone has that problem, only ISPs owned by cable providers or media-producing companies have that problem (granted, those couple of players have the largest market share of the broadband market, but if you convince enough of your friends -- it doesn't necessarily have to remain that way for too long).

For me for instance, I still have unlimited DSL, but instead of decreasing my service, or capping it, my ISP has only been increasing my speed as the technology improved (without extra charge each time). And a friend of mine, he's been getting outrageous speeds, faster than cable and faster than DSL, through radio signals (it just cost him more to get the initial equipment, and permission from his landlord to mount it on his roof).

If you stay with your current provider however, expect something like $15 for each 10 GB over your cap (if you live in the US). Comcast has currently been testing that price point in a few select areas. I think they're just trying to find the sweet spot where the new customer attrition rate they'll incur is going to be offset by the much anticipated extra revenue this new (cell phone like) overage model brings in.

I am certain this will work!

Sorry, DirectX -> ActiveX

More info about the ActiveX component here: http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/r20521695-DSL-Activation-Crapinstallation-without-user-permission

Oh wait, replying to myself since I found it finally:
http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,14167743

Now to try walking my mother through that over the phone...

Unless they're using DOCSIS3, which I doubt, then the maximum a cable modem can do is 45MBit downstream.

The 1Mbit up is what kills you. Don't ever pay $80/mo for that garbage.

You are right, it is in fact DOCSIS3. It looks like they will offer 100Mbps in the future.

Canadian cable provider Videotron announced last February that the company would be offering 100Mbps cable broadband service using Cisco's pre-DOCSIS 3.0

source

I would indeed not pay 80$ for the current deal :)

Incorrect. You can still roll your own router with the Actiontec. All you need to do is disable DHCP on the Actiontec and release the WAN's IP.

There's lots of great FIOS/FIOS TV help over at BroadbandReports: http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/vzfiber

I'd strongly recommend that you take some time and read the Broadband Reports forums on the various Canadian ISP's if you plan to make any ISP choices, rather than trust the sales pitches. It will take a little time, but you will very, very glad that you did. Pay special attention terms like throttling, hard caps, soft caps, bandwidth limits and penalties, the use of the phrase "up to" when quoting speeds, quality and location of technical support, cancellation fees, and customer satisfaction ranking. And make sure you look at ISP's like Teksavvy, the highest rated Canadian ISP, who charges about 55% what you quoted for the same real (as opposed to theoretical) speed.

I'd strongly recommend that you take some time and read the Broadband Reports forums on the various Canadian ISP's if you plan to make any ISP choices, rather than trust the sales pitches. It will take a little time, but you will very, very glad that you did. Pay special attention terms like throttling, hard caps, soft caps, bandwidth limits and penalties, the use of the phrase "up to" when quoting speeds, quality and location of technical support, cancellation fees, and customer satisfaction ranking. And make sure you look at ISP's like Teksavvy, the highest rated Canadian ISP, who charges about 55% what you quoted for the same real (as opposed to theoretical) speed.

But the prices aren't any cheaper. I just checked Primus, and for their 3 MB/s connection, it costs $42.95 a month, if you sign up for their long distance also. Bell on the other hand costs $42.95 for their 7 MB/s service, as long as you sign up for at least a basic phone line. Oh, look, they're exactly the same price, and Bell is faster, and doesn't make you sign up for a long distance plan.

But the prices aren't any cheaper. I just checked Primus, and for their 3 MB/s connection, it costs $42.95 a month, if you sign up for their long distance also. Bell on the other hand costs $42.95 for their 7 MB/s service, as long as you sign up for at least a basic phone line. Oh, look, they're exactly the same price, and Bell is faster, and doesn't make you sign up for a long distance plan.

Comcast has been doing this for a while now.

Since they already ARE interfering with VPN connections, they already ARE doing this.

I don't see what the fuss is all about. The radio spectrum is a public good; if deploying BPL means that hundred of millions of people can be connected to the internet via high-speed connection, I think it makes sense that the FCC should seek to either relocate amateur radio to other frequencies, or even eliminate the allocation altogether.

BPL signals interfere with amateur, ham, or shortwave radio signals. And in the case of emergencies shortwave radio may be the only way to communicate, see here: Oregon emergency officials praise ham radio heroes.

That argument is based on the ostrich strategy: keep your head in the sand and you can't possible be blamed for anything. It's just not smart to rely on that. Who knows, a judge may find that you were criminally negligent by providing an open AP that was used in some crime. There's no good reason to take that risk. Setting aside the legal responsibilities for a moment, why would you even want to take the chance of being caught up in an investigation involving your unsecured AP? That's just asking for trouble. You wouldn't leave a loaded gun lying around for anyone to use or a running car unattended for anyone to drive off with, so why would you leave an access point unprotected?

Spammers and phishers aren't what I would be concerned about. I would be more concerned with someone connecting to my network and downloading/hosting child porn, which could get me (1) in serious trouble with the law and (2) an (unjustified) label as a child porn kingpin. It's just irresponsible and foolish to leave an AP open.

Some good points for both sides were brought up here, but in the end I don't see why people wouldn't want to err on the side of caution. Also, I don't know why in the world you are using WEP when WPA is so common and easy to use. And yes, "securing" (not really) your AP with WEP is just not smart and truly is the worst of both worlds. WPA would still keep your bandwidth available while using a short passphrase. In fact, it's easier than WEP. Why aren't you using it?

Is there a website where we can post these results? Broadband Reports comes to mind, but maybe the EFF has a place set up?

I guess it was last year, which is actually a lot longer ago than I thought. I thought it had happened over the summer. Maybe Comcast owned the cable here before, but my roommates and everyone I know has had Insight for at least 4 years.

I have both Comcast cable and AT&T DSL. I'm really hesitant to use the Comcast cable for much of anything, because of this cap. It is great for games and Web browsing, because it is indeed very fast and responsive. However, for bulk downloads, I would steer clear of it, and BitTorrent is right out.

DSL is slower, but I've never heard of a monthly bandwidth limit. I believe that the slower throughput speed of DSL is self-policing. DSL is also individually wired to each customer, unlike cable, as cable's bandwidth is shared throughout entire neighborhoods. So, the only one you hurt by maxing out the bandwidth of DSL is yourself, and with a packet shaper, this becomes less of a problem.

It varies from area to area, but it appears the "secret" Comcast limit has been determined to be roughly 100 gigabytes per month. I believe this is a cumulative total of both upload and download.

This has been going on for some time, and the good people at broadbandreports.com have much to say about it....

I use Silcon. I pay about $60/mo for 3M down, 768K up. I use 100% of my bandwidth 100% of the time. Nothing gets slowed down. I've been doing this well over a year. I have multiple static IP addresses and don't have to deal with per-computer PPPOE bullshit like with Earthlink (worst ISP EVER, except for SpeakEasy who are total fucking liars). So anyway, go with a mom-and-pop. They work. Check their availability with http://www.broadbandreports.com.

Well, what I was getting at is the fact that there is ONE big fiber pipeline here in Vancouver that gives us our connection to the net. If the building that operates that key hub is destroyed, all of western Canada will probably lose net connectivity (unless there are other tier 1 connections I don't know about). To me, that is completely unreasonable. Not to mention that in Canada, only two main companies provide broadband. Telus and Shaw. Even if you go with a reseller, you're still on either on Telus infrastructure or Shaw (Rogers) infrastructure. Here's a great example of why this is bad: Shaw blocks all outgoing connections on port 25 for all residential customers. Oh, want to use mail.yourownwebsite.com for your mail? Too bad... either use Shaw's outgoing mail servers, or upgrade to a business-grade connection from Shaw. Hmm OK, that sure sucks. I guess I'll switch to Telus. Oh nevermind, they also block port 25, among others.

San Antonio has had it for some time, and a few other places. ATT last month said it was spending another $2 Billion (1000 million) to calm fears that it was trashing it (IPTV is MS's, and everybody is scared for some reason).

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/uverse