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Free market capitalism implies competition. From Comcast's own announcement regarding their merger with TWC (http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/comcast-and-time-warner-cable-file-applications-and-public-interest-statement-with-fcc):

"Comcast and TWC do not compete against each other in any area"

We suffer from a cartel among service providers who keep their prices high and their service lousy by foregoing competition, and regulation is necessary to prevent this.

Nonsense. Curved TV's ensure you see a square picture if you are sitting exactly dead centre. That is a tangible difference.

I've never actually seen anyone watch anything in 3d in their home.

Why would I want a square picture of what is broadcast in a decidedly un-square format? You've substituted your so-called square view for glare from many angles. And you've further reduced the acceptable viewing angle.

As for not having seen anyone watching 3D in their home, I suspect you aren't
invited into those homes that have a 3D telly. That hardly is a standard by which to judge.

My neighbor down the street does, and he subscribes to Comcast 3D service.
It does work. Its nice. Not all that much of an improvement, if you ask me, just a novelty.

Is it a fad? Sure.

But just because your small outlook on the world doesn't include something, its no in indication that something doesn't exits, or that it doesn't work.

I thought it wasnt a secret anymore and there was a 250gb cap in place. I could be wrong but i vaguely remember hearing this a couple years ago.

http://customer.comcast.com/he...

Now - will mobile data allow a way to skip over the cable-internet providers and offer real competition?

Not until mobile drastically increases its capacity. Currently Xfinity (home Internet and TV service by Comcast) has a cap on the order of 300 GB per month, compared to about 10 GB per month for comparably priced satellite or cellular data plans.

Comcast also has a motive here -- to get their customers to use Streampix instead of Netflix or get Netflix to pay extra to get to their customers.

Tit for Tat and all of that.

If you'll recall, it was discussed right here on /., complete with the evidence. See this..

Unfortunately, they are Canada only. Given that Comcast is the largest ISP in the US, they are a relevant source for me to point to. Business Class service is the only way to get a static IP address with Comcast and that starts at USD 69.95 per month plus another USD 14.95 per month for the static IP address.

Unfortunately, they are Canada only. Given that Comcast is the largest ISP in the US, they are a relevant source for me to point to. Business Class service is the only way to get a static IP address with Comcast and that starts at USD 69.95 per month plus another USD 14.95 per month for the static IP address.

For "fJUDalism" to contiue in the Jew-Nited States of Amerika http://corporate.comcast.com/n...

http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/the-facts-about-xfinity-tv-and-xbox-360-comcast-is-not-prioritizing

According to the article Apple wants something much like what Microsoft got except that, as Apple did with phones, they want to do it without Comcast providing the apps.

Forcing you to use their router? Is this a Comcast-wide policy, or something local to your area?

Yeah, definitely not Comcast-wide.

http://customer.comcast.com/he...

Hmm, there used to be a way bigger list. Maybe that's still available somewhere else. I definitely bought my own router, which paid for itself after a few months, instead of paying to rent one forever.

Cable and DSL require a remote.

Bullshit.

There's plenty of cable boxes with an up-down channel button on them. You know, for example nearly every Scientific Atlanta, Cisco, Pace, Samsung and Motorola used by pretty much everyone.

http://ww2.cox.com/residential...
http://customer.comcast.com/he...
http://www.timewarnercable.com...

If I had an option of changing channels on the TV like in the old days I would not worry about a remote either.

It's your lucky day!

Not true. If you're willing to reduce your usage from a few hundred gigs a month to just 5 gigs a month, you can save $5 in some markets.

http://customer.comcast.com/he...

If you go over that pathetic amount, you end up paying $1 a gig. /snark

I wonder if anyone actually thinks this is a good deal.

The only problem with your argument is the fine print. All of the ISPs offer the caveat of "up to" in their stated rates. Comcast will give you "up to" 8 meg.

Read the column headers, 4th column over.

http://www.comcast.com/interne...

You don't need any in-depth analysis to figure out what's going to change.

Look at Time Warner's internet service prices:
http://www.timewarnercable.com...

$15/mo for 2Mbps.

Then look at Comcast's internet service prices:
http://www.comcast.com/interne...

$40/mo for 3Mbps.

MORE THAN DOUBLE THE MONTHLY PRICE, FOR JUST ENTRY-LEVEL INTERNET SERVICE.

The competition between cable and DSL has kept prices down for years. But now, with Verizon switching to FIOS with even more astronomical entry-level internet prices, you will have NO CHOICE in the matter, but to pay much more than you do now, for slower service. How many people are going to just go without internet, when they only occasionally browse the web, and their cheapest option is $40+? Comcast is trying to rape my mother...

I suggest you look, Comcast bought AT&T Cable TV business back in 2001

http://corporate.comcast.com/news-information/news-feed/att-broadband-to-merge-with-comcast-corporation-in-72-billion-transaction

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/ "CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher" so expect to see a lot of new, cheap, "always on" networked devices ready for the US market :)

While we might joke, consider the Xfinity home security system. Cameras and controls, and sensors. http://www.comcast.com/home-security/equipment.html

Put a camera in every room, and what do you get? Bibbity Bobbity, Boo. No spying through dishwashers needed.

Comcast stop capping their customers a while ago.

Well, yes and no. Comcast still contacts people, but in most, but not all markets, the cap was removed. They still throttle and use shaping technologies, which is why my QoS is setup the way it does; On paper, I have almost twice as much bandwidth as I can reliably get without triggering a transient bandwidth clamp-down on my service. Weeks of careful experimentation has revealed that Comcast only provides unmetered access at about 75% of your rated line speed. Go above that, and at certain times of the day, it'll start buffering your downloads, becoming bursty, etc. -- by placing you in a lower priority queue. For people who use VoIP or Netflix, this can ruin your internet experience.

But yeah, in the strictest sense... there aren't any caps. YMMV.

Comcast just updated their usage limits and they seem pretty reasonable.

XFINITY Internet Package New Data Usage Allowance
Economy 300 GB
Economy Plus 300 GB
Internet Essentials 300 GB
Performance Starter 300 GB
Performance 300 GB
Blast! 350 GB
Extreme 50 450 GB
Extreme 105 600 GB

If you go over, they charge you $10 per 50GB. I've got the 50/10 Mb plan and I'd have to be running at 50Mb for 16 hours. This is assuming that I'm downloading from a site/torrent that can provide 50Mbps of bandwidth. Over the past three months the most I've used is 150GB. ..but what if you watch lots of netflix...?

They've got a meter with details. Their highest quality tier is still pretty small: Best quality (uses up to 1 GB per hour, up to 2.8 GB per hour if watching HD, or up to 4.7 GB per hour if watching 3D)

At 2.8GB per hour with a 350GB cap you could watch 125HD movies. There's about 720 hours in a month, so do you really want to spend about 1/3 of your time (including sleeping time) watching movies?

Like others have said, how much really do you need? These caps are so high, I can't imagine surpassing them. If you need more usage, call up Comcast, Verizon, ATT or any other SP and ask for a business line. Heck, if you really need bandwidth, most will be more than happy to sell you a 40Gb synchronous circuit.

Found it!

Under "Technical Restrictions," they list

use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network
content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises
LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited
equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy
services and servers

However, I don't think they go to the trouble of enforcing this very often.

They will, if enough people start running their own mail servers.

use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers

However, I don't think they go to the trouble of enforcing this very often.

Here, I even do your homework for you.

Read technical restrictions section about Comcast residential service :
http://www.comcast.com/Corporate/Customers/Policies/HighSpeedInternetAUP.html

What invisible cap? They tell you exactly what it is here

Anyone that's stuck with only one option.

No, I mean, who has to pay ONLY $65 for 35Mbs. If I want 27/7Mbps from Comcast I have to pay over $100! As I said I pay a bit more now for 10/5 service from Comcast (residential rates)

Check out Comcast pricing here.

I am fully with you on how the duopolies most of us get to chose from are utterly ripping us off. The sad thing is I had both fiber to the curb from a smaller company AND faster DSL options from Sprint a decade ago, but they all folded or were "bought out" (in the Simpsons sense).

The live TV/PVR "functionality" is still dogshit, apparently shoehorned in at the last minute. I've used it with NPVR and MythTV backends and it doesn't do the most basic things like pause or rewind. Other than that it's lovely.

I think you're doing something wrong. I been running frodo in a raspberrypi using mythtv backend, and I can rewind, fast forward, pause and schedule recordings. I even returned the cable boxes to my cable provider, 4 of boxes and now comcast refunds me $3 per month for not renting their cable box. I could not do any recordings if the backend was tvheadend but it works just fine with mythtv and VDR.

Full dual (for now at least), and they are giving out /64

http://blog.comcast.com/2012/04/ipv6-deployment-technology.html

I appreciate your post, but you're either misinformed or woefully out of date. Comcast dropped Sandvine years ago.

Officially, yes. Unofficially, some people have reported problems. I ran the test here, along with others, on an otherwise idle connection; From about 5pm-1am local time during the week, and varying on the weekends, it's easy to trip the throttler -- simply loading a video on netflix, then quitting (as in, no active connections, confirmed with wireshark), waiting a minute, and running a bandwidth test, shows a 30% reduction in available bandwidth repeatedly with Speedtest.net, as well as test files downloaded from numerous FTP and HTTP sites. Total traffic transferred in the previous 30 minutes prior to each test was less than 5MB total, with a 30 minute cooldown after -- tests were run repeatedly and triggered off scripts automatically. All traffic was logged.

I think ipv6 is available across much (maybe most or all) of the Comcast network, but will only be usable with compatible clients with ipv6 DHCP support (and specifically DHCP6-PD for routers.)

More or less. The Comcast blog says "To meet this goal, we launched and enabled IPv6 in over one-third of our broadband network ... we observe roughly 5% of users can take advantage of this. That percentage can increase dramatically if vendors act to enable IPv6 by default in software updates for existing devices and in newly shipping devices."

From what I saw on some Comcast page recently (which I can't find again, sorry), there's no prefix delegation yet, although they claim it's coming.

FWIW, I seem to be in the 1/3rd. Today I switched my Netgear WNDR3800's Advanced/IPv6 setting to "Auto Config" (as opposed to "Auto Detect", which uses 6to4...ugh) and it (somewhat oddly) doesn't show a WAN IP but does show a LAN IP of 2601:9:yadda:yadda:yadda/64. Seems to actually work, and once I disconnected my Mac from the wireless network and reconnected, it had an IPv6 address as well in the same subnet. "ping6 www.google.com" works with round trip times around 20 ms, and Chrome actually uses IPv6 - www.comcast6.net says my IPv6 address at the top of the page where it used to say my IPv4 address.

Really, you didn't see it? It's in the first paragraph, and the whole article is 4 paragraphs

Today, we announced the pilot market launch of the Comcast data usage meter in the Portland, Oregon area. After a short period, we’ll roll it out nationally. It’s designed to be simple and easy to use and will help customers better understand how much data they consume in a month. (Note: the median usage for Comcast’s customers is about 2 to 4 GB per month.)

The meter is accessible by logging in to Customer Central at http://customer.comcast.com/ and clicking on the “Users and Settings” tab. From there, click on “View details” in the “My devices” section (located toward the upper right hand of the screen) and that will go to the meter page. As you can see from the accompanying screen shot the meter will show usage in the current calendar month when it’s first launched. Over time, it will show the most recent three months of use (including the current month). The data is refreshed approximately every three hours.

The meter measures all data usage over a cable modem. So, if a customer is using multiple computers and other devices, such as an online gaming console, “over the net” VoIP applications or devices, or additional wireless devices (such as an iPod Touch), the meter will report data usage for all of those computers and devices combined.

This is a tool we promised to provide, and we are pleased to deliver it today after rigorous employee testing and the completion of an independent analysis conducted by NetForecast, Inc. If you’d like to see NetForecast’s report on the system, click here.

To read some additional FAQs about the meter, please visit http://sitesearch.comcast.com/?q=data+usage+meter&cat=ccentral

Really, you didn't see it? It's in the first paragraph, and the whole article is 4 paragraphs

Today, we announced the pilot market launch of the Comcast data usage meter in the Portland, Oregon area. After a short period, we’ll roll it out nationally. It’s designed to be simple and easy to use and will help customers better understand how much data they consume in a month. (Note: the median usage for Comcast’s customers is about 2 to 4 GB per month.)

The meter is accessible by logging in to Customer Central at http://customer.comcast.com/ and clicking on the “Users and Settings” tab. From there, click on “View details” in the “My devices” section (located toward the upper right hand of the screen) and that will go to the meter page. As you can see from the accompanying screen shot the meter will show usage in the current calendar month when it’s first launched. Over time, it will show the most recent three months of use (including the current month). The data is refreshed approximately every three hours.

The meter measures all data usage over a cable modem. So, if a customer is using multiple computers and other devices, such as an online gaming console, “over the net” VoIP applications or devices, or additional wireless devices (such as an iPod Touch), the meter will report data usage for all of those computers and devices combined.

This is a tool we promised to provide, and we are pleased to deliver it today after rigorous employee testing and the completion of an independent analysis conducted by NetForecast, Inc. If you’d like to see NetForecast’s report on the system, click here.

To read some additional FAQs about the meter, please visit http://sitesearch.comcast.com/?q=data+usage+meter&cat=ccentral

You are not the average user, by far.

Yes, he's not average, by far. He uses up to 35x the amount of the average comcast user

http://blog.comcast.com/2009/12/comcast-data-usage-meter-launches.html

(Note: the median usage for Comcast’s customers is about 2 to 4 GB per month.)

I live in a place that has wifi where you log in with password. It is encrypted, but after logged in you can still sniff everyone else on the network. It still doesn't make it right to do so.

Likewise, your internet traffic goes unencrypted when it leaves your house. It doesn't make it right for me to plug in to that in between your house and ISP and capture that data.

HTTPS and SSH cannot be sniffed on your wifi, nor does either one "go unencrypted" when it leaves your house. Broadband providers using DOCSIS protocols also are not sniffable by your neighbors.

However, I recommend you should worry more about "is it possible" and "is it likely" rather than "is it right". Our government and the big corporations (that's redundant, I know) clearly aren't at all concerned about your ideas of right and wrong.

When they transitioned to DNSSEC validating resolvers for all customers, they dropped the "Domain Helper" service as they viewed it as fundamentally incompatible with DNSSEC validation.

If you are still seeing such behaviors, check which DNS resolver you are actually using, its likely to be OpenDNS or another third party service.

Part of the deal to purchase NBC Universal required that Comcast offer equal access to NBC content over other networks. But making it free bandwidth for your customers, but not for other customers, seems to violate the intent of that requirement while perhaps adhering to the letter of it.

*This* is why you cannot have one company as the service provider and the content provider.

Prior to the merger, the justice department released a Competitive Impact Statement which is concerned with Comcast not allowing access to NBC (and others) content. But it did not consider the possibility of Comcast offering special benefits to the content for their subscribers. Now that I think about it, nothing stops Comcast from offering content cheaper, faster, better quality, in 3D, etc.

Comcast's web site has the regulatory approval document which explains their limitations. It doesn't seem to specifically say they can't do this, but it looks like other people figured they couldn't do this. This blog entry from Mediapost says that the ruling:

Does not disadvantage rival online video distribution through its broadband Internet access services and/or set-top boxes. Does not enter into agreements to unreasonably restrict online distribution of its own video programming or programming of other providers.

So I think most people believed that this was illegal.

They have inconsistent acceptable use policies with data transfers or different definitions of public and local network bandwidth? I don't know, I am more confused now.

This is from http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/common-questions-excessive-use/#excessive22 stating that the cap indeed still applies for XfinityTV.com which I would assume is on the Comcast local network just like the Xbox service. It was last updated Updated 3/9/2012.

Does the Comcast Usage Meter measure data that I consume from XfinityTV.com?

Yes. XfinityTV.com is an Internet web service from Comcast that you receive using your XFINITY Internet service. Comcast treats its affiliated services the same as it treats any unaffiliated services that you use your XFINITY Internet service to access. All data that travels over the public Internet on our high-speed Internet service (and all data that XFINITY Internet users send to one another using the service) is counted toward the monthly Data Usage Threshold, regardless of the source.

[Caps imposed by the ISP] apply to streaming too

But not to DVDs by mail. Major studios' films at least 12 months old are available in this format with very few exceptions, but Let's Plays tend not to be.

I sometimes forget that other ISPs are worse.

Yeah, like single digit GB per month on satellite if cable doesn't serve your block and you're too far from the DSLAM. I'm just glad I have 250 GB per month to play with and the option to remove the cap entirely by upgrading to business-class service.

How well does that work with servers behind round-robin DNS? Or isn't that possible with DNSSEC?

Also funny that it says www.comcast.com is *not* secured by DNSSEC, contrary to TFA.

Unfortunately, no other provider in the area (Twin Cities) offers static IPs and permission to run servers.

I'm pretty sure Comcast serves the Twin Cities (at least some portions) and they offer static IPs and you can run servers. You need their business package, a few bucks more perhaps. I use this (not in Minnesota), and find it very stable and consistent, and they never give me any crap about what ports I open.

For directly connected CPE, we will allocate an individual IPv6 address (/128), since we know that only a single device is connecting, with no additional need to subnet.

-- from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

Heh. So much for ISPs implementing standards.

We might also note that, for most people, their ISP is a local monopoly. If you don't like their Terms Of Service, you can move. Or live without Internet access.

It'd be nice if your local government would enforce the Internet standards. But we should all know the likelihood of that ever happening in any jurisdiction.

(Actually, it is conceivable that various courts might decide that offering "Internet service" means supplying all the capabilities in the RFCs. To my knowledge, this has never happened in any court. But it might be something to keep in mind, and push for if you're ever in a situation where you can explain it to the court. After all, offering "Internet service" and denying some capability in some RFC really should constitute "consumer fraud" in any honest courtroom. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this to happen. ;-)

If you hang out on the IETF v6ops list, which representatives of all the world's major ISPs do, you will see that none of them have any intention of offering customers a single /128.

Oh?

For directly connected CPE, we will allocate an individual IPv6 address (/128), since we know that only a single device is connecting, with no additional need to subnet.

-- from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

For clarification: the audio streaming was for the personal use of me and my family, and in practice, only I ever used it. I made a point of making sure it was only accessible through passwords I'd assigned, in order to be able to claim, credibly, that I was only making my music collection available to members of my household. Initially, I was using Ampache as a Web-based front end for controlling the audio stream; later, I found I had better results using mpd to generate an http stream, and MPDroid to control it and listen to it on my phone.

So, to get to your questions: I use Comcast, and I checked their acceptable use policy. It prohibits "public servers", but permits providing network services for "personal and non-commercial residential use". I'm fairly sure that covers the sort of use I'm describing.

As for bandwidth use: using the approximation of one megabyte of data per minute of audio, a month of continuous audio is roughly 42 GB of bandwidth, out of a 250 GB limit on bandwidth per month. In practice, I was listening to no more than a few hours a day, so the bandwidth use was considerably better than that.

Other ISPs doubtless have different rules, but at least in the case of Comcast, running your own personal streaming audio server is viable within the rules with a typical residential broadband account.

The reason it even occurred to me to set up a personal streaming audio server is that there's a fair amount of discussion about how best to do it on the Ubuntu user forums, and the software used has been around since well before Ubuntu One was introduced. I'm sure it's not as convenient as uploading content to be hosted through Ubuntu One, but there are similar services being offered by Google, Amazon, and Apple.

Perhaps I shouldn't have described Ubuntu One as useless, as the music hosting service seems at least comparable to the services others are rushing to offer.

http://www.comcast.com/homesecurity/iControlSMA/index.htm Only Window/Door Sensors (4) Motion Detector (1) Wireless Keypad (1) Keychain Remote (1) Touch Screen (1) Cellular and Battery Backup Included what will more Sensors cost $0.25 /m each? Motion Detectors at $2 /m? added keypad $5-$10 /m? added Keychain Remote $3 /m see how much they bill you rent the cable box + they also bill you to rent the remote as well. That cost can go up fast. Also is there a Cellular modem rent fee like how you have to rent the emta that is not part of listed price.

Netflix Subscriber Base Eclipses Comcast's

Yeah, except this isn't 250 gigs, it's 31.25 gigs, also known as 250 gigabits.

Except it's not:

"As of October 1, 2008, data usage above 250 Gigabytes ("GB") per month per Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customer account is considered excessive."

http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FAQViewer.aspx?seoid=frequently-asked-questions-about-excessive-use

Consumer routers supporting ipv6 properly? None

Ahem. It's freaking Comcast, FCOL! If they can do it, a real NOP has no excuse.

As for myself, my router runs OpenWRT with IPv6 PD since a few months. Before that, I've been running dd-wrt with IPv6 RA support for two years.

But Comcast only advertises 15MBps. So where does this 50MBps - 100MBps number come from?

that since they're BUSINESS lines, they'd be static IPs.

    Actually, that's an incorrect assumption.

Actually its not an incorrect assumption, its a reasonable normal assumption:
from a comcast web page, note the last item in the feature list:
Comcast Business Class Internet \n Blaze new trails with big business features.

Whatever the size of your company, it needs to respond quickly to the needs of customers, communicate reliably with suppliers, and find smarter ways to increase employee productivity. That's why Comcast Business Class Internet offers:

Downloads up to 50Mbps, uploads up to 10Mbps
Internet speeds up to 64x faster than T1
Flexible Web hosting options
Norton Business Suite security and virus protection
Free Microsoft Communication tools
** Static IP addresses **

http://business.comcast.com/internet/index.aspx

but then, of course, they are engaging in a not so subtle misrepresentation. following the link to the next page you find out you have to pay extra for a static IP.

As for verizoned - well they're still selling like they are the phone company: "Hot Dead Chickens! gett your Hot Dead Chickens! "
http://smallbusiness.verizon.com/products/internet/hsi/plans.aspx?tfn=s2&CMP=KNC-SMB_D_P1_CS_Z_Z_U_Z165
note the AD is targeting small businesses like a hair dresser, and then uses terminology like 3/7 mbps/kbps to describe what they are selling.
Here the static line is an extra fee option.

Frankly, calling any service "business class internet service" that doesn't include a static IP as the standard base is false advertising as its useless for a business identity, a web server, and email on the internet without a static IP. But hey: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."

comcrap and verizoned - both fraudulent by nature. In a truly free market neither would exist, but wired/fibered telecomm will never be a free market and neither of those companies is at all interested in competing in a free market. See "regulatory capture".

You can run a server with any ISP, but you can't use this server for BUSINESS if you have a residential plan

That's not what the acceptable use policies that I've read state. From Comcast Xfinity Internet AUP:

prohibited uses and activities include, but are not limited to, using the Service, Customer Equipment, or the Comcast Equipment, either individually or in combination with one another, to: [...] use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;

From Verizon DSL and FiOS Internet AUP:

You also may not exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may establish from time to time for the Service, or use the Service to host any type of server.

Don't forget your new domain name: http://comcast.com/~users/underachievement or underachievement.comcast.com whichever you like best.

I actually found Comcasts extensive Q&A's on this subject very informative - and its surprising how much you sound like a Level 3 shill...

http://blog.comcast.com/2010/12/20-qs---with-accurate-as---about-level-3s-peering-dispute.html

http://blog.comcast.com/2010/11/10-facts-about-peering-comcast-and-level-3.html