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Comcast Raises Bandwidth in Shot at DSL
bigtallmofo writes "In a move sure to be applauded by DDoS botnet owners everywhere, news.com.com is reporting that Comcast is raising the speed of its cable Internet offerings. The standard rate will change from 3 Mbps downstream and 256 Kbps upstream to 4 Mbps downstream and 384 Kbps upstream. Customers that currently pay extra for faster service will see a 50% speed increase over what they have today to 6 Mbps downstream and 768 Kbps upstream." Combine this move with the VoIP announcement and the rumblings about more Baby Bell mergers -- we should see an...interesting landscape soon.
As it has hiked speeds, Comcast has been giving customers more to do with that bandwidth. Its Comcast.net home page has become more of a media portal, with emphasis on higher-bandwidth services such as video news clips, on-demand video games, a flashier interface and more personalization tools.
That's all well and good, but will they let us do something actually useful with our service like run a web server? Not that I'm trying to run a big website out of my home, but I'd rather to be officially allowed to run my own photo gallery on my linux box for my family rather than have "a flashier interface," whatever that means.
To pay more when they raise the rates in six months...
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
Last Summer, TimeWarner/RoadRunner upped my cablemode speeds from 1.5Mbps/150Kbps to 3Mbps/300Kbps, without announcement. Why would they do that?
--
make install -not war
Doesn't matter how much more bandwidth you're given if you can't use it without fear of getting a letter saying you're over whats considered reasonable bandwith use in your area, which is why I've stuck with 1.5m/384k DSL.
Thank god I chose Comcast and scoffed at my folks for getting DSL. ::dials comcast and orders the extra service::
Porn is now even faster.
All the cable companies seem to be increasing the bandwidth of their cable service. The cable company in my city recently upped to 5mb down, 1mb up. How are they making their bandwidth so much higher without changing the cables? Is it all about voltage, or has coax been able to handle this all along, that they have just been throttling back?
It took forever for InsightBB to raise from their base 128kbps up speed to 256kbps. Let's hope cable stops being so greedy with up speeds!
/would still switch from cable to DSL if he could get DSL in his area
...the upstream bandwidth still sucks, so this is still a "casual websurfer" product. Granted, that's the mass market, but I'd be a little cautious about calling this a massive boon for botnets--that will come when 1.5Mbps upstream meets poorly maintained Windows machines.
comcast also has invisible bandwidth caps of which they have been reluctant to publicly disclose. for those that have sbc's 6/608 or verizon's 3/768 service available to them, i would suggest dsl instead. oh yeah, comcast only gives out a paltry 2GB of newsgroups transfers, further diminishing the value of their services compared to dsl offerings with unlimited newsgroup access.
has in the last year doubled the download speed of all of it's packages from their starting point. They've done it, I think, because our cost to them has got less and they're passing it on.
Last time comcast sent out the notice, it took weeks before my area actually got the improvement. I think they target the inner cities / urban areas first for speed boost.
300kbit -> 1mbit
:)
/
750kbit -> 2mbit
1.5mbit -> 3mbit
They are asking for a one off fee of £25, but it definately looks rosey
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/03/ntl_q3_04
liqbase
yawn - RCN already offers either 5 or 7 MB/s depending on which service package you've bought.
I still can't even get DSL yet... I'd sell my soul to them if they'd just bring cable out here...
Because last friday, when /. posted the story about the Avalon developer preview, I was seeing 5mbit+ on my Comcast connection.
Here's a question though: what's the best way to actually know my upstream bandwidth, so I can adjust my traffic shaping scripts accordingly? A third party measuring tool like DSLReports?
Comcast never lets me know when they bump my speed up, and this is the third bump (1.5 to 3 to 4 now to 6). Not that I'm bitching about the free speed, I just want to make sure I'm taking advantage of it as best I can.
As for competition with the telcos, great. Telcos are starting to offer digital TV, and cable is starting to offer telephony.
Where once there were two isolated monopolies, there is now one very competitive battlefield. And hey, let's not ignore wireless and satellite providers yet either. The customers (should in theory) ultimately win.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
With this bandwidth raise, I'll finally be able to get first post on slashdot!
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
The minimum price is $43 for comcast customers and ...
almost $60 otherwise.
I think $29 for 1.5/384 servce from verizon looks a lot more attractive.
The extra bandwidth will not improve my experience 2 fold
YOU SHOULD TOO ;)
I'm in central florida, and brighthouse (time warner) is upgrading everyone from 3mps to 5mps for free! Upgrade takes place 1/31/05.
About a year ago (maybe less) my provider (Cox) decided to upgrade everyone, I went from 2.5mbit down to 5mbit and 256kbit up to 512kbit, with no price changes. Now if only they'd remove the stupid 30 gig/month download limit (max 2gb a day).. Not that I've had any problems with that since I go over all the time and they've never contacted me about it.
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even though it is slow and slightly against the TOS... check mine, it isn'ty commercial, just a quote and a place to create a haiku... They aren't going to cut off your service if you have a photo gallery
I'm hoping the next shot will be against the penalty for not subscribing to the Cable TV service. I could see them taking a proper shot to woo users off Satelite TV by offering a Cable TV discount. But nailing non-subscription TV users with a extra charge (disguised as a internet price break for having cable TV) is why they don't have me online with them yet.
The truth shall set you free!
Why dont they understand that i dont care about the download? it was more than fine at 2mb a yea ago, i just need more upload. if they had a 1/1 option i would get it in a second, or even a 1/768 for the same price. its bullcrap that they cant provide us with more upload, there just still scared that where "going to run servers". they need to get with the times like speakeasy/ /. dsl and have more open policies. -and better upstream bandwidth-
like why my bit torrent seeding speed went from 30k/s to 40k/s about two weeks ago.
Comcast could offer 10gb/s and I still wouldn't go to them. Me and every single person I know who's had Comcast has nothing but complaints when it comes to their service.
... that's just my opinion though. :)
After I was given the run around trying to get someone to actually install my cable and internet they sent someone to do an "audit" of my building (i.e. they just cut all of the service in the building and wait for people to call and complain to find out who is really a customer.) Then they never sent someone out.
Comcast is the epitome of the evil monopolistic corporation.
My ISP is upgrading my cable modem service to 8Mbps/512kbps on Tuesday at no charge! Press Release
I apologize for moving away on you. Now that I live in Eastern CT I'm stuck with a crappy cable company, ECC. Would you please gobble up this pathetic company into your growing empire. And while you're at it would you please allow people to run servers at home with that 384 up bandwidth. I'd much rather host my own website than be forced to just share torrents all day. Oh and I promise not to extract any HD content from the new Motorola 6412
Thank you,
A former and soon hopefully future Comcast disciple.
Some of us running the older DOCSIS 1 compliant cable modems can only get a max of 3Mbps download. This move could also mean more money for Comcast with more people wanting to rent their cable modem to capitalize on this increase in bandwidth.
Linux at home
Comcast upgraded our area to 4Mbit close to a year ago with no announcement or additional charge. That's great, but I've been thinking about switching back to DSL anyway since Comcast's high-speed Internet access has been dropping out several times a month in my neighborhood. Sometimes it drops out for an hour, sometimes for a whole day.
When I had DSL I only lost service once in the course of an entire year.
LINK
LINK
I have had DSL for 3.5 years. I'm still at 1 meg down 128k up, and I really have never felt like I was too slow. I can't really bitch or expect our Coop to spend the money to change their equipment though. The town is only 1500 people, so I am fortunate to have broadband anyway.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I'm in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and just got the new Fiber Optic service from Verizon. I'm currently using the slowest package offered, which is 5mbps down and 2mbps up. There are also 10 down and 30 down packages. I was paying $60 a month for Comcast at 3mbps down, but now I'm paying half that for this new service. I had nothing but trouble with my Comcast connection, so this little bump in speed isn't going to help them much.
I have been a Comcast subscriber since July and I must say I am truly impressed with their service here in NH. I don't ever remember the cable internet connection going down, download speeds are insanely fast (and getting even faster now!), and their service seems to be top notch here. Only issue I have had is the upload speeds are sorta slow when sending large files, but this new speed upgrade will help out a little there.
Even better, when I moved in October I only called a few days in advance to switch everything. At first, the support rep said I should have called up to 2 weeks in advance to guarentee a smooth transition. So I asked when was the earliest time she could get someone over to hook up cable. Turns out, the exact day we were moving in she had a tech available (she was just as shocked as I was). Worked out perfectly.
Why are US DSL lines sooo asymettric. 6Mb down, 0.25Mb up, etc.. My experience here in yrp is that things are more even, 8Mb down usually gives 2Mb up, etc.
Do US provides buy their upstream bandwidth asymetrically too? So they have to cap customers upload.
Or are they just a bunch of ex TV retards who think of the Internet as a TV with the remote connected directly to their marketing database? and are horrified/confused by the idea that other people might want to broadcast too.
Maybe I'm too cynical, and this is just how people want it.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
One of my clients has Comcast cable internet, and he's been having no end of trouble with it this past week.
When they came out for service, they gave him a new cable modem, an RCA DCM425. This thing has a built-in NAT, and no apparent way to disable it or map inbound ports-- it has an extremely sparse web interface, so I can no longer remote into his fileserver to diagnose and fix problems (a big deal, since he's 40 miles away).
One thing that the cable modem's web interface DOES do, however, is report on the maximum number of computers that it is set to provide NAT services for. This feature appears to be disabled at the moment, but it made me remember this old article.
I wonder when they're going to let the other shoe drop and start charging on a per-connected-machine basis and change their ToS to disallow the use of other NAT devices?
I already have 6.0/608 DSL, I can run servers, no ports are blocked, there are no invisible bandwidth caps, my ping times are better, a couple infected PCs nearby won't slow my connection down like it does with cable, plus the price is lower.
Oh, and I don't have cable TV because Dish is less then half the cost and yes I do have a land line beacuse its a lot more reliable then any VoIP will ever be, and its very cheap with no long distance package or extra features I don't need, so its no big deal.
Morphing Software
At least in my area, bottom-of-the-line DSL is significantly less expensive that bottom-of-the-line cable, especially if you don't already have cable. (And I don't, because I'd rather spend my time on the Internet and watching movies from Netflix. Or maybe even going outside.)
Certainly I'd appreciate more bits than my 768 connection (which usually nets me significantly less), but for basic web operations (email, browsing) it seems more than tolerable. I can even download movie trailers as long as I'm willing to be a bit patient, and I do that infrequently enough that I'm willing to be patient. If I decided that wanted to go even further down on my entertainment expenses by dumping Netflix for Bittorrent, maybe I'd want more bandwidth.
Mind you I've had reasonably terrible service from Verizon DSL, which is quite flaky, and I've heard good things about cable reliability (which seems odd, but I hear they've changed their tune since the last time I had cable in a year beginning with 19). But I find that raising both prices and bandwidth in cable doesn't lead to the price point that I want.
So, we bitch when they cripple spam zombies, then we bitch when they raise the bandwidth cap.
Unbelievable.
Well, I, as a Comcast subscriber, am very happy with this change.
Cable rep: um....er....whats that?
I personally think that there should indeed be a law that all internet access providers must have their contention ratio prominently displayed. What good is 6Mb download if you have to share that with a thousand subscribers? Yes I know that DSL has its own contention ratios at the DSLAM but nowhere near the mess that cable trys to sell. But still they should be required to display this information as well.
When I first signed up for Comcast's services several years ago, before they put up and down restrictions on it, I'd get 512 kilobytes up and down. Now they're giving us 512 up and 48 down. Until I get back what I originally got, I don't see an improvement.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Sorry, what?!
When I move house in April, I'll be getting 100Mb/s fibre installed, for around $US80 a month.
That kind of service has been available for years here in Japan.
Broadband users are spoiled. In my area, the fastest connection is ADSL. The problem is that the ISP's half T1 connection is maxed out so much that you can only download at 6 kb/sec, and the service costs $200 USD to set up plus $50 USD per month. Dial-Up here is only $23.95 USD in my area. On my 100 mbit LAN, clients download through my FreeBSD router's 28.8k ISA hardware modem at about 1.8 kb/sec.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
An ISP in Canada that provides cable broadband Internet refuses to give out numbers like "our service will give you 4 Mbps downstream". Instead, their site just says "Up to 100 times faster than dial-up". They say they can't guarentee the bandwidth, that's why they won't give numbers.
But our broadband is expensive: 45 euros for 512/128 ADSL :(
Regards,
Sergio Hernando
I've been able to use my cable line to its full extent on multiple occations. The most notable of which was when I was downloading HL2 off Steam, and was getting 3.1mps. This makes for a happy HL2 Download.
It's funny, Slashdot runs alternating stories about what a technological backwater the US is because these other countries with brand new installations in denser areas have more bandwidth, and when the US cable companies boost bandwidth, they complain because the zombies will take over.
"US researchers invent cure for cancer, threaten jobs of Chemotherapists abroad." Mark my words, that headline is coming.
from what I here, $15 a month will buy you 30 mbps downstream transfer rates in japan.
Actually roadrunner just upped the cap in the Houston area to 6mbit down and keeping the 384 up.
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
Seriously, this isn't the biggest news to have ever come out. I've got Cox HSI at home for 40 bucks a month bundled with my digital cable. I get 4/512 and (after testing with speakeasy and cnet) it's regularly higher then that. I didn't even know that they had doubled my bandwidth until I went in to upgrade to a DVR box and I asked the rep. what my bandwidth was.
Cox HSI Page
Plus, out of the horror stories that I've heard of people having poor service from the DSL providers (one friend of mine was left waiting for over a month for his DSL, and still never got it; he just said screw it and went to cable). I get great service from Cox, and their prices are better then most other cable providers.
Is the increase in speed that big a deal to the casual user? Are they really going to notice the difference? Probably not. This is just marketing scheme to steer people away from alternatives and for Comcast to pad their prockets in the process.
Comcast is robbing the majority of people by only offering a high speed/high price option. I would like Comcast to offer speeds for the web/email only crowd (the majority?) at a reduced cost. Would we ever see that? Probably not, as it might be in the best interest of the customer and not in Comcast's best interest.
I'm sorry for the angry tone, but I'm disgusted to see people wastefully pay for what they do not use.
You really can't fail with responsive organisational projections - the consultants recommend interactive administrative time-phases. Actually the solution can only be homogenised management mobility..
Until I start getting some broadband service where I live at a price where I don't have to be a Middle Eastern potentate to afford it, Comcast and every other broadband provider can shove their increased speeds right up their collective asses.
I'm still waiting for true broadband while I poke away on my measly 1.2/768 DSL line....
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
We're never going to get anywhere with companies like comcrap and other cable isp's holding back bandwidth from its users.
Optonline offers 1MB/s down and like 150kb up. Unfortunately if you upload for longer than 30minutes they cap you to 15kb up.
I'm holding out for Verizon's fiber service. These companies need to wake up and just deliver the fiber! Cable, dsl etc.. waste of investment. They should just go straight for the raw speed and advance us as a society once and for all.
First post from Comcast broadband!!!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
- Faster downloading of Porn.
- Faster bittorrent fetching of illegal MP3s
- faster downloading of Warez
- All that and I can upload junk faster
Too bad I don't do any of those illegal activities. (Or maybe it's a good thing?) Come to think of it I'm not even in a Comcast service area.Comcast themselves had no idea that this would happen, and even failed to believe that the problem was on their end. People had been calling customer service for the first two weeks of the new year (Comcast made the switchover on Jan 1st), and were reporting general problems. The biggest problem was the fact that the changeover also affected just about every major DNS server Comcast had in existance, which were then also dropping packets as well. This added about a 5 second delay to most customers, in addition to the other problems occuring.
So, we have customer systems dropping packets, and Comcast servers dropping packets, and adding the two together created huge usability issues across the entire network. But Comcast still refused to take responsibility for the problems in the early weeks, with the goal being to clear up the customer service lines as opposed to take problems down. Comcast has finally appeared to fix some of the issues within the last week by sending out upgraded software to customer cable modem boxes. I still believe they are having DNS issues (but then again, when is Comcast NOT having DNS issues), but I do not know as I stopped using their DNS servers 3 years ago due to how unreliable their DNS servers are (they were failing at least 2 times a week for at least 1 day at a time).
In anycase, there has been speculation that there will be a price increase in 6 months timeframe, but this may not happen now. Origionally, the speed increase was going to coincide with a $5-$10 price increase as well, but that plan was dropped when news was leaked to customers. There was also supposed to be another $5 increase in 6 months, but that too may be dropped now as well. The other huge backlash Comcast is recieving is for removing unlimited newsgroup access for the former AT&T customers, who were origionally told at the time of the Comcast buyout that no loss of current service would occur, which was also a condition of the buyout/merger. Comcast's normal customers already had lost unlimited newsgroup access when Comcast took over the @HOME network in certain areas several years ago, and limited users to 1 gig a month newsgroup access. That limit was increased to 2 gigs a month Jan 1st at the same time they dropped support for the unlimited access for the former AT&T customers (in an atempt to appease them).
I for one can not wait until Verizon brings fiber to the home. I live in one of the lucky few test/rollout states (NJ) which will begin to recieve service during this year. Comcast is going to have some serious problems when that occurs, as the initial pricing is actually cheaper then Comcast's normal cable modem service, and is faster then Comcast's premium 6mbps service, with much less restrictions (i.e. Verizon does not care how you use it, as long as it is legal, so servers for web, email, ftp, etc., are all allowed, and unlimited newsgroups service is included).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
At this point, bandwidth speed doesn't matter as much to me, in comparison with "reasonable bandwidth" limitations. My Time Warner Cable of NYC offers me plenty of speed, but if I queue up even a few torrents for simultaneous downloading, I'm guaranteed to have my connection dropped within 30-60 minutes.
If the cable companies are really trying to compete with DSL, they need to allow customers to take full advantage of the bandwidth they purport to offer 24x7. Otherwise, cable modems will remain at a disadvantage for people who need more bandwidth.
Dammit! They told me "What happens if Vegas stay in Vegas"!
Granted, fiber wouldn't eliminate the need for the hardware at the head end, but wouldn't fiber eliminate the cable companies' bandwidth limitations? Personally, I say eminent domain should be extended to cover all of the dark fiber that's lying unused around the country right now. I bet you'd see them rush to light it all up after that........
Few people understand how Cable bandwidth actually works. It all hinges on your QAM modulation and the number of customers combined to the downstreams and upstreams. The max dowstream bandwidth at docsis 1.1 per cmts blade is about 35Mbit and the max upstream is roughly 10Mbit. This is at 256 QAM on the downstream and 16 QAM on the upstream and upstream channel width of 3.2Mhz. Now I manage 18 CMTS in my day job, that average customer count per blade is around 1250. Each blade has it's own downstream channel and 6 upstreams. So now you have 35 Mbit on the downstream shared between 1250 customers and approximately 125 customers sharing 10 Mbit up. You can get more bandwith by reducing the node combining down to a 1:1 ratio where each node has it's own upstream channel but that involves plant redesign work and additional investment in more CMTS's (big $$$$) and by running different frequencies. But the big gain would be to move to docsis 3.0 (2.0 only offers an additional 10Mbit on the upstream) where they say each downstream channel will be able to offer 200Mbit down and 100Mbit up. And yes I am a RF Network Engineer.
I watch that kind of stuff closely (something about wanting to feed the family and not likely layoffs that usually result from such mergers), but nothing has blipped my radar till this!
Ok, anyone have any good stuff I can spread around at the office?
Wow, 6MB down? That would be awesome except that there are few sites that can serve me that fast!!
The real problem is the uber-stingy 256 up, now raised to a BLAZING 384k. That's still a pittance, and takes a long time for me to upload pictures to web sites or send large emails.
I really think that unless the cable providers fix this uplink disparity that DSL will win in the end, as it seems like they tend to have higher uplinks which people will grow to care about more and more in the next few years. The computer industry promises us all kinds of cool bandwidth easting uses like VOIP with attachemnts and so on, but for all that to become appealing people need higher uplink speeds!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's one thing to be cynical but another thing to just be biased. Do we always have to be so negative. Extra bandwidth in general is good for the customers. I see way more benefits than harm in this case.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
This is from their acceptable use policy:
"(xiv) run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited services and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;"
Yes, and the excerpt you quoted is taken from the Prohibited Uses and Activities section of that document.
I'd kill a nun for that bandwidth!!
(only option is this crappy Direcway services at a cheap(NOT!) $70/month)
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
What I would love to see is a cheaper service, say $15/month including modem rental ($3/month these days) that includes say 512kbps down, and 128kbps up.
This would increase the availability of internet access to a MUCH larger percentage of the lower to middle income bracket households. And remove the "it's not worth N $" excuse people use for sticking to dialup.
I live in Quebec, Canada very near Montreal and our cable provider here is Videotron. Standard cable modem speed is 5.1Mbits Downstream and about 768 upstream (not very sure about the upstream). That's what they advertise, but I'm actually running about 600 KBytes/secs when I download. Just a bit slower, but hey, it's VERY stable and always fast, all the time...
:-) Really... Too bad though...
What is very cool with them, is they're currently beta testing VOIP, so my local phone line is provided by them also using the very same cable modem and it works perfectly. Some minors glitches at first but now, it is perfect. I'm not even connected to Bell Canada anymore.
Btw, anyone who is deserved by them can be part of the beta testing, you just have to reside on the south shore of Montreal and call them, here's the number: (514) 380-7763. I got set you up for free and have 4 months of free local service and Quebec (province) long distance calls free, they also have a web page with some details (I only have the french page on hand though, sorry...
RedVortex
P.S. I don't work there
Comcast doesn't have any quotas like that.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
Happened in Tampa over a week ago. Upload rate is still the same :(
They also raised the price for many customers this month. I got the service as part of a package including digital cable (TV) and phone service. This was advertised at $99 and I was specifically told it was not a promotion but a regular price. I even saw advertisements highlighting the fact that it was not a sale or promotion. Then 6 months later I get a notice telling me that the "promotion" is over and my rates would increase approximately $30, effectively eliminating any advantage for running all three services.
Sorry the small increase in speed was not worth it.
RCN starts at 5 megabits down, with an upgrade to 7 megabits, and both are 800K up. I can't believe how pathetic comcast looks in comparison.
Forget the 4 mbits down/384 kbits up...give me 2 meg down and 2 meg up any day...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Screw servers, I just want to be able to be able to upload to my offsite backup at that 4 Mbps rate they're giving for download.
The same people who give me cable boxes that can barely respond to pressing keys on a remote want to speed up their 'net service? How about a damn cable box that actually fucking works? Or better yet, how about digital channels that actually look better than the "inferior" analog channels?
When are we going to get decent upload speeds from broadband providers?? VOIP on a pathetic 256 or 358 upload is just crappy. I hope VOIP forces these guys to start giving more upload b/w
I use starpower and at least they give us 1mbit upload, which makes it possible to run my own web server and use VOIP if I want.
I'm rockin' 8mbits on a crappy cable modem, and my friend with a motorola surfboard 41000 is getting 12mbit, and we have for the last like year or so lol
Time Warner here in NYC has standard as 5mbps down 384k up, and I pay for the premium service which is 8mbps down and 512k up.
:)
I can't honestly think of leaving Time Warner, once they switch to all digital I can supposodely reach a cap of 500mbps down. That's not too shabby.
Again I would love to run my own web server, as I have to pay for a hosting provider as it is now just to host a personal web site. Those thinking that the problem is with the ISP are wrong.
The problem is with DOCSIS® not allowing for increased upstream. Once all the analogue streams go to digital streams that problem should be fixed as well. Expect to pay about $5 more for being allowed to host from your house in the future. We are talking about Cable companies here
Cable modem companies had serious performance problems in the early years - cable TV distribution equipment was pretty shoddy, and the cable modem equipment was relatively experimental, so the native performance wasn't very good, and they didn't have any effective way to limit user's upstream bandwidth. They were absolutely terrified that somebody would trash their neighborhood's cable modem performance by using too much upstream, and especially terrified that the bandwidth would be hogged by somebody running a Pr0n website, back when pr0n on the internet was still a somewhat scandalous concept. Their performance really wasn't all that good, and Pac Bell's "Web Hog" TV ads, while dishonest, were extremely effective.
So they made inflexible hard-core policies against running anything server-like, and it became a religion for them. The fact that they didn't understand what a "server" really was wasn't relevant - an Instant Messaging client is a server, and interactive game programs are servers, and they like both of those, and "email servers" don't consume scarce upstream bandwidth, they use plentiful downstream bandwidth.
Napster was another big issue - not only was it a bandwidth hog, but it was Pirating Content, and TV stations are really in the content business so that was obviously Bad Bad Bad. Not everybody at Comcast was clueless - when I talked with some of their engineers privately, their opinion was "Like, duh, why do you *think* people buy broadband? It's so they can download music faster, and Napster's the best marketing tool out there for us, even if we officially pretend to hate it."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Archive.org offers thousands upon thousands of hours of live music, all completely legal to download. I can get a 3 cd show in about 2 hours. Amazing stuff.
Hopefully this move will knock the profit margin out of BPL (the power companies can't compete on bandwidth so they'd have to knock the price WAY DOWN) and give the power companies second thought toward even offering the product.
We don't need BPL leakage shit polution.
I can't believe my "little" cable company/ISP bumped us up to 4 megs down/384 up before Comcast did.
Metrocast (southern Maine/New Hampshire) raised our speeds 2 months ago.
Normally we run about a year behind any changes made by Comcast.
Go figure.
David
Do you have information to back this up? Verizon's TOS for residential DSL is very similar to Comcast, and most other broadband providers, with servers in particular being forbidden. Have you seen an official TOS or FAQ for residential FIOS that indicates otherwise?
The most informative information I've found so far about Verizon FIOS has been at broadbandreports and at the curiosly "unofficial" FTTP Deployment Center website.
All outbound traffic on port 25 is or will be blocked. Outbound email must be routed through their authenticated SMTP agent.
I ordered SBC DSL basic service and was considering a switch from cable modem (mediacom). I requested that the port 25 block not be applied to my account and was refused (they advised me to upgrade to the more expensive service).
Remember that there was a recent court decision allowing ISPs to read your email when it touches their hard drive.
I dumped them, and I told them exactly why. You should too.
Another important thing these companies are doing is making room for a "value" segment of the market. Cox in Phoenix, after raising all $50/mo customers from 3Mb/256 to 4MB/512 then began (very quietly) selling "Value" cable internet of bidirectional 256k for $25/mo. Now they can squeeze Qwest DSL from both directions - the cheap aspect with "better than dial-up" speed at a fairly low price, and the speed aspect, where they come much closer to obliterating Qwests's bidirectional 768. It's always about a bottom line.
...which would solve the botnet situation nicely.
Just as you need a chauffeur's license to drive a complicated vehicle, you should be required to demonstrate that you can use upstream bandwidth responsibly.
Eventually, corporate America is going to realize that bittorrent protocols are useful. NBC will start bunding their shows, with advertisments and DRM, via bittorrent streams.
Upstream will become critical at that time.
Those 5% that do need to serve data can get a "business" connection that has a more balanced upstream, and whose contract allows the customer to run servers / LANs / etc off the connection.
A common misconception. If it were true, I'd gladly pay $95/month for a full-service pipeline. But if you order the Comcast Pro product for $95/month you are still subject to the same crappy TOS. From the agreement:
2. Use of Service. The Subscriber Agreement is hereby modified to permit You to use the Service for small business commercial purposes in accordance with Comcast's then current published Comcast High-Speed Internet Pro product description (which may be changed from time to time in Comcast's sole discretion); provided that no servers will be placed behind your connection (i.e., HTTP, SMTP, NNTP, FTP, DNS, DHCP, etc.). Comcast does not represent or warrant that the Service is appropriate for business or commercial use or will work as desired. There is no service level agreement covering the Service...
Need I go on?
As someone who's involved with the deaf community I can say that this is very good news. One of the biggest problems for video relay services is the upstream caps. VRS is where a deaf person uses video conferencing to a remote interpreter to make phone calls in sign language. Most of them get around 218 or so upstream with overhead and everything, makes it a fair bit choppy. With sign language you need 30 fps if possible and the higher the resolution the better. The jump to 384 upstream will bring a noticeable quality improvement. I can't wait to try out some H.264 when Tiger comes out also, there's a few VRS services that support iChat. Wonder if those DLink videophone-type boxes can be flashed to use H.264 or if they'll soon be outdated.
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
My parents have a Comcast cable modem here, and for the past 6 months or so they have had a 5Mbps connection at no extra charge. Mine is 3Mbps, so I was rather upset when I found out they are getting the higher transfer rate.
It was listed in the service agreement at 5Mbps down, and I think 512Kbps down, but I can't be sure. I did some speed tests, and it does indeed seem to match up.
Perhaps they were part of some sort of "beta" period for the higher rates, but they are in a smaller town in Michigan, not some large metropolitan area or anything...
Who know...
Oops. I guess I'm not, since I'm in a Charter area, and (with the exception of a very few dense urban areas) you dont have a choice of cable company.
Cable vs DSL is better than nothing, and in some cases where one is in an area served by one of the large ILEC's (SBC, Verizon), you might even have a choice between multiple DSL providers, but when one is stuck in an area served by a small independent telco, which is exempt since it isnt defined as a 'monopoly', (even thought it really is, its just a smaller one) and isnt obligated to allow 3rd party DSL providers in, then you either have no DSL, or you have only incredibly expensive DSL from them.
one was a badly manufactured piece of junk whose power cord kept falling out
another got nailed by lightning (I think - both the modem and my router (which has one hardwired line that goes around the outside of my house) died after a big storm)
When Comcast announces the speed upgrade in my area, maybe I'll have another modem failure so they can give me a shiny new DOCSIS 2.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Cox Cable, did the same thing a few months ago, and even took it up a notch, in the sense that for a little extra per month you can go up to 5mbps......
I'd personally like to see the following changed:
1. Make it acceptable in the TOS to run a *non-commercial* server on the home plan. Many home users now like the idea of file sharing so they can access their stuff from work/school... but Comcast can (and occasionally does) pull the plug on you for that.
2. Deliver bandwidth. I so rarely can reach 3Mbps right now. It's not that the sits I download from can't deliver that (I get it from other places). It's the busy comcast network. Stop advertising "capable", and start advertising "you get".
Comcast isn't nearly as bad as it used to be (used to have constant outaged... now it's rare). But comcast is far from perfect.
I am ameritech also. I found the notice on dslreports.com.
Port 25 Block Notice
On Mon, 1 Nov 2004, SBC Service Abuse wrote:
Thank you for contacting SBC Internet Services' Security Policy Team. We have received your request to be removed from our Port 25 filtering.
We are unable to grant your request. If your needs require that you run a mail server we recommend upgrading to an Enhanced DSL account which allows you to sun your own server/s. Please call 888-827-5722 to order and use promotion code ______. Otherwise we recommend you look into a list server such as the free service offered at http://groups.yahoo.com.
More pr0n for me!
And how long until SBC blocks that too?
...for a service provider. However I rarely get anything like the speeds they advertise right now; I suspect that there's a much lower cap than the advertised one, which activates when traffic on the local network gets too high. Makes sense when you consider that 40% of the town's population is college students, and a chunk of those people are putting a strain on the system with illegal downloads. The TOS allows them to do this (speeds aren't set in stone) so I don't have a basis for complaint.
I could also do without the weekly outage. Once a week during the morning the service will cut out and reset, which takes about ten minutes. Sometimes it'll happen more often than once week. It's definitely a planned event but most people don't notice it since they're usually busy getting ready for work, or on their way to work, or doing the same for classes if they're students. But it can interrupt processes I'm running and even abort some of them, which is annoying.
Never got any hate mail from Comcast though, no matter what I was doing, even when I sometimes put a real strain on the system non-stop for days running. Not a single peep. Compared to friends in other parts of the country with other services, Comcast seems to have a "let's not piss off the customers with nasty letters" policy and I really, really like that. I'll happily live with the weekly resets and the occasional reduced speed caps if it means that Comcast will leave me the hell alone and let me do what I want to do (a 'blind eye' attitude).
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Thou hast been shown the true path. Will thy goest upon it, or will thy falleth upon thy ass (again)?
"And before you say why would someone have cable to only looking at webpages and email...I ask myself the same thing, but it seems to be the norm."
I use to have cable, and the main thing is that it changed the internet experience. Even if it's the same thing that dial-up would have brought...eventually. It even changed my web site designs (a richer experience). I mainly used it to keep my systems updated, and listen to legal streaming music, along with the occasional ISO.
Unfortunately the bottom fell out of the economy, and between the cellphone ($50) plus broadband ($50) it wasn't worth it. Now if they would only have an offering that was catered for the broadbander on a budget.
DSL is so 1900's, it just isn't worth worrying about. DSL cannot reach far enough to affect all that many Comcast cable customers.
What Comcast is really worried about is Verizon's new fiber rollout, which provides far more bandwidth (15Mbps/2Mbps) for a whole lot of customers at a very reasonable price ($50/mo.).
Nuking our unlimited Usenet service. Only 2 gb of pr0n a month? No way!
All big providers have some benefits and some negatives; I am lucky with Comcast actually; I have gotten excellent service, very few outages (1 that had anything to do with them in the last 6 months) I have never recieved any nasty letters from them at all (regardless of how much bandwidth I was using, though I was not stupid enough to uncap my modem). I have had speeds exceeding 400kb down and well over 180k up (yes i use bit-torrent, and yes Naruto is a REALLY popular torrent...). I have been with Earthlink, Verizon and now Comcast. Earthlink was very solid, but nowhere near as fast. Verizon's service and speed were awful. I had them for 4 months; I had 7 outages, atrocious speeds, and at first they told me that service wasn't available in my area (though my neighbor had it). I went with Earthlink at that address at first, then Verizon offered a cheaper deal right as my contract ended with Earthlink. Big mistake. I have gone with Comcast, got digital cable and got my internet for $40 a month; ditched my phone (saving me another $25 a month, or more) so even though I paid more for cable i ended up saving money. it isn't exactly like any of these guys are all for the little guy. of all of the providers i think Earthlink is probably the most geek-centric of them, (the have extensive and very helpful how-to articles, that I still use).
Please stop giving me speed increases I haven't asked for, and instead split your billing options into several plans. I don't need 3mb/256k or 4mb/384k. I would be happy with 1.5mb/128k. And please make such a lower speed plan cheaper than your almost $50 a month current rate.
(I'd go with DSL, but the costs of a land line + DSL service is pretty much on-par with Comcast)
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
Yeah...I'm sure it will be an interesting landscape...and I'll still be connecting at 56k.
%#%@^ rural areas!
There's no place like
It was 300 gigs per month for a while, but all of a sudden it appears to be 200 or 225 gigs for last month (they just placed the calls last Friday).
The problem is that if you only get notified 13 days into the month that you went over last month, you're still dealing with everything you downloaded the first thirteen days of THIS month, and if that amount is too much for next month's cap (say they move it down to 150 gigs next month), then you just lost your internet connection and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
To add insult to injury, they say it's a "courtesy call", and suggest that you might be interested in their business offerings (which have the same exact limitations), and many people get the impression that there aren't these limitations with the business accounts, they order the more expensive business accounts, download away, with one strike already against them, and end up getting disconnected the next time around. It's evil.
They were cracking down on upload last year, but at the moment it appears to be something like 200 or 225 gigs per month combined. They crack down, though, whenever they upgrade the speeds so next month it could be 150 gigs per month or too much upload - which is usually anything over 30? or 40? gigs - something like that -
It's evil. It's just totally evil. I suppose it's better than some of these cable internet services with caps of 45 gigs a month or whatever; but it isn't anything even remotely approaching the rock-solid knowledge that you can download whatever you want, whenever you want (provided it's legal, of course) with your DSL line.
You need to be really, really careful with Comcast - they are very very unpredictable when it comes to using your internet connection. It's sort of like owning a Ferrari or something, but having a national speed limit of 70mph which you can practically reach in first gear. The speed is there, but you can't use it. It's very strange.
I wonder which packages allow outbound traffic on port 25. I've got one of their more expensive packages: 6M/608K w/ static IP address. Port 25 isn't blocked for me.
Recently, I had been using Multimedia cable, until they were bought out by Cox. And just like a Pentium IV 3.0ghz processor has more gigahurtz than an AMD64 2.0ghz processor, Cox was marketing two different speeds. Never mind that if you were not a "sporatic" user of that bandwidth, they would impose a cap so that you didn't actually *have* the bandwidth for which you paid.
Between DNS servers going down, and Cox actually dropping the connection to my cable modem, dialup would have been faster. It would have at least been reliable, and I could count on being able to check the weather and news on a consistent basis. I just up and moved to SBC DSL, because it was the only real alternative. Cox offered me a lower price if I'd stay with them, but it wasn't even worth what they were wanting.
Sure, my "maximum" bandwidth on DSL is much less; 384kbps upload, 1.5mbps download. But I get that reliably. I can rely on being able to browse the web. Over the course of a day, my DSL is far faster than cable, simply because I'm not waiting for web pages to load.
Cox has become absolutely terrible in my area. I say fuck'em. I will pay more for a reliable connection than I will for false advertisement.
Since most of my internet usage is surfing the web and reading articles, I do not really need a whole lot of bandwidth. Paying a reasonable amount for decent download and upload is more important to me than having excessive download rates. As it stands, paying over $50 per month is much too expensive for my tastes. I think $30 is much more reasonable for the general populace. For those that download gigabytes off of bittorrent all the time, they can subscripe to the higher tiered services to satisfy their need.
I really look forward to the day when every household has a fat pipe going into their house. Then telephony, television, and data can all be streamed using one connection and one cost.
Actually, with all due respect, it would be incorrect to say "many people have ordered the business services when they have been notified of excessive download" -- it's more accurate to say that a "limited amount" of individuals have done this in the interest, or in the hopes of having larger amount of data transfer being available to them - say, for instance, a family that has many teenagers and xboxes and audio streams and video communications and things like that - but the invisible caps appear to be the same regardless of the service levels you purchase.
The real problem is that people aren't given any clear guidelines how to go about limiting their bandwidth consumption (i.e. "how much is too much"), perhaps due to the invisible caps changing from month to month depending on various things, and of course, lots of people don't have a means of measuring how much they use anyway, which is probably the reasoning that Comcast uses when they instruct people to "just cut down".
They usually tell you to "just cut down", which, in the case of a single individual downloading tons of stuff is probably fairly self-explanatory, but when you have a shared connection with, say for instance, a houseful of college students, or a big family with numerous xboxes and such, this can become more difficult.
I think the solution would be to at least attempt to provide some sort of approximate guidelines, more specific than "just cut down", and perhaps institute a temporary suspension prior to cutting the service off for good. It's pretty clear that many customers would be perfectly happy to switch to DSL if their usage patterns are in excess of what Comcast would like, but DSL isn't available to them. In cases like these, it just seems that there ought to be some way to provide some sort of guidance for people as to how they can keep their connection, and not get cut off - something closer to a three strikes, you're out. The problem is that theoretically, at least, you may have used up too much bandwidth already for the current month by the time you get notified for last month's excesses, and you can do nothing but wait for the disconnect a month down the road. This has apparently happened to some people who were downloading extreme amounts of data, or to people who misunderstood what "just cut down" means. The invisible caps aren't advertised, and their existence isn't publicized anywhere, isn't in writing anywhere, and a number of customers have reported being caught totally by surprise, having had no idea that there were any kind of limitations on the data transfer they were allowed to do... DSL lines in the US certainly have no such restrictions. Nor does there appear to be any way to plead your case or get the service turned back on. These are just a couple things that Comcast could do to make the situation a little more "user friendly", I guess.
But as far as the connection, and the speeds, those are, for the most part, very stable and very good. It's just in these few isolated situations, particularly situations where you have a houseful of teenagers or college students all sharing the pipe, it becomes very difficult to know what to do; and it can be a very frustrating experience to deal with. It just seems that there has to be a better solution. Simply providing guidance to those individuals who have been warned wouldn't even require publishing any kinds of hard limits, and would still allow the limits to be computed from national aggregate data each month. Some people may not understand how to comply with "keep it under 100 gigs a month", or may not have any means to measure that, and for those customers, "just cut down" might be the best way to explain the situation, but there are plenty of tech-savvy people who have had this problem who would be more than happy to comply with "keep it under 100 gigs a month" or "keep it under 50 gigs a month" or whatever. There's just no reason to turn it into a guessing game, really.
I really don't mean to knock Comcast or anything, I am sure they hav
Remember: In Japan, consumers pay about $15 a month for speeds of 30 megabits or better -- USA Today
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'd like to be able to use redhat's default sendmail config. How do I change the outgoing port without rebuilding sendmail.cf?
I'll back this off if I can't send email to any important contacts.
...please read SBC's rejection letter above in the thread.
If you play online games, comcast is probably not the best choice for you. Many comcast customers ( at least on the west coast ) have terrible routing.
For example:
A Friend of mine lives in Issaquah. He used to get an average ping of around 30-40ms to servers in Northern California when it was still AT&T broadband. Once comcast took over, he would get automagically rerouted to Northern California servers *through* Chicago 10-20 times a day. It gets annoying when you are playing an online multiplayer game where latency matters ( q3, cs, aa etc ).
Another friend of mine who lives in Sac area has a very inconsistent ping to almost any server he plays on. His latency ranges from 20ms to 100ms. When he does a traceroute, the number of hops he has to go through varies from 13 to over 20. He is switching to SBC DSL in the next week.
Other people who I have spoken to have also had similar experiences. Comcast service is perfect for gaming for a day or 2 and then terrible for another 2 days.
Its quite possible that they oversell or their bandwidth limiters just make it a terrible service for gaming. I dont know if anyone in other areas have the same problem but here on the West Coast, its a terrible service.
- pramz
Makes it damn near impossible to host Internet games on either my PC, Mac, PS2, or Xbox.
One day I got a call and they offered me $20/month for 6 months and $20 install. The cost to try wasn't too bad so I bit. This month, the promo period ended and my bill went up to $60. I picked up the phone and told the clerk, "drop the price or I drop the service." She said she couldn't do anything so I said, "OK, I understand. Please cancel the service." At that point, she transfered me to someone who had negotiating authority. We dickered around for a bit and I settled at $30/month, or 50% of the posted price.
What I think is happening is Comcast doesn't know what the market will bear and is willing to dicker to figure that out. I'm getting ready to call Comcast back because Pac Bell came back and offered me DSL for $20 if I buy their long distance service from them. The only place I've found that faster than DSL matters is downloading video. But all too often, if everyone is going after the same video and nobody is using bit torrent, the speed advantage vanishes. Besides, $120 per year savings will buy me and my sweetie a nice night out.
I don't see what the big deal is, RCN(one of the major Comcast Competitors) Has lots of extra bandwidth curently speeds are capped at 7mbps down/800k up. Often gets much fast around 11 mbps area. The network supposedly has lots of extra bandwidth. Unfortanly you can't run server unless you purchase a static ip @ 20 bucks a month.(guess because it is considered business usage). But at around 50 bucks a monthe teses speeds can't be wrong
Over here in Australia, we get pitiful Internet connections. For DSL, the best unlimited plan (No download limits) is 512k, which is about $80 (AUD). As for cable... unlimited is unheard of. Don't complain Americans, you have it much better than most people.
Don't ask about your transfer limits, either. What good is 6 Mb/s when your download limit is capped at 5 gigs? Fill your pipe up and you've got about 15 hours until full. Fantastic.
I've known about this for quite a while. Comcast sent me the letter weeks ago. These new speeds are still horrible. When I first got cable modem years ago, it was Comcast@Home, and I received 4Mbps upload AND download. The download may be faster after this, but the upload is still far lower than it use to be. From 4Mbps to 384Kbps is a real big cap. That is only ~8x the speed 56k modem. Oddly enough, I still pay the same price for service, which gives me less speed than I started out with.
I live in a suburb of Philadelphia that offers both Comcast and RCN. I opted for RCN. I get 7Mbps down, 800Kbps up, a static IP, and I can run servers.
Slightly off-topic, but has anyone had any experience with IP over power lines? Just wondering how that compares to cable. I haven't seen much on this technology recently, but I think I heard the initial testing was very promising.
Homer no function beer well without.
I went 'round and 'round with tech support rep once because I was having trouble connecting with a friend's computer so that we could play Warcraft 3. Oh perish the thought!! The guy was VERY adament about the fact that one of our machines was acting as a "server," and that as such, it was against TOS. I asked him what the hell the difference was between a direct connection, and connecting through Battle.net - the bandwidth would be exactly the same. He, of course, had no reasonable answer, but continued to insist that direct connections were a violation.
The way I see it, until Comcast changes it's TOS, they can increase the speed to 1MB/second, and it won't much matter because the restrictions are so tight that you can't do much with it. They're more interested in technicalities, than practicalities and common sense.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hopefully when raising the cap this time they won't have the problems they did when they raised it from 1.5 to 3.0 mbps. When they made that change, their network experienced spurious slowdowns and outages across the country.
My area was towards the bottom of the list to recieve the raised cap, and when the network problems occurred, Comcast delayed the change and I didn't get my cap
raised to 3.0 mbps for over two months later.
56.99 per month for non-cable subscriber with installation charge of $99 in Sacramento, CA.
I could get basic, basic cable $12.01 per month, add on the HSI from comcast for $38.99 per month plus any hidden fees and taxes that they pass on to the end user. I would still have to pay $50.00 for installation and rent a cable box and cable modem. I for one know I won't be switching over.
I currently have 10Mb/s fibre to the home for $49.95 plus basic (read local channels) cable.
a slut did tulsa
Something tells me that Comcast does not apply the same rules everywhere. When Americanisp ( I think that was their name ) told me they changed their policy so that normal accounts were port filtered, and for only a few hundred dollars a month I could have business-grade DSL with all ports open, I left them for estreet.com, who did not filter ( i.e. block ) any of my ports. When I decided to move to a new home last year, I decided to try out cable and e-mailed Comcast tech support asking if I would be able to continue running my own mail and web servers as I had for many years. They replied that there was not a problem, and gave me a list of ports they did block ( mostly Microsoft networking ports ), and added the caveat that if there was a large virus outbreak, they could potentially block ports that were not currently being blocked.
I found this agreement reasonable , printed it up for my records, and then signed up for Comcast Internet Service. My web/mail and everything else has worked fine, and haven't had any problems with Comcast bugging me about running SMTP and WWW services through my connected. In fact, they bug me much less than either Qwest or AmericanISP ever did over a much longer period of time than I have currently been with Comcast.
Has anyone else had a similar ( good ) experience with Comcast?
I can't afford a sig!
If this speed increase goes through, i'll be getting 12mbps and my friend will be getting 18mbps, if the speed increase is 50% and our speeds go up by the same amount.
As of this writing I cannot get Comcast (the Comcast.net people anyway) to appreciate that the fact that their main gateway boxes INCESSENTALLY arp. I receive something like FORTY (40) arp request a second from COMCAST OPERATED SERVERS. No, not just for me, for all manner of ip addresses, most of which are "forign" to my IP/netmask.
Clearly they have several problems with their administration and monitoring system. Either broadcasts just seep all through their backbone, or they have no concept of what a netmask is for.
I honestly beleive that they have some sort of probe running "as fast as possible" [e.g. anybody ever ask HP OpenView to ping the _entire_ internet? It's really easy... 8-)] and that the systems in question either don't have the arp-cache to hold the full region or the routers don't have the sense (settings) god gave a gnat to stay local.
I complain but I get no satisfaction.
The reason I complain is that it is several server doing this independently for different ranges of addresses, so I get (every couple of minutes) a "local maximum" confluence of noise that leads to drop-outs while gaming.
These people have their cable segments so clogged with crap out here in Seattle, that it is occasionally amazing that I can play (or work) at all.
I suspect that a lot of the problems go way back to the att broadband semi-static IP addresses, and the way they were mis-handled. But it's been like two years.
Ah the joys of living under the monopoly thumb.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I just took a look at the rate of the penalty. It's actualy $15.00 which is more than the price of my dial-up. It's more than the price of a good replacement hard drive every year.
Read it and weep here;
http://www.comcastspecial.com/
Non TV price $57.99/mo. (thereafter)
TV subscriber price $42.99/mo. (thereafter)
I don't count the intro teaser price.
The truth shall set you free!
FYI, from comcast the upgrade will not be completely done until 1/26/05.
As far as I can tell from the 1st circuit decision, when I have my own MTA and I send sensitive, albeit unencrypted data out, the ISP can of course read that email, but it *is covered by the wiretap act* and if I catch them doing it the penalties are high, so if they act in any observable way on this data, I can sue them.
Now if I cannot use my own MTA to directly connect and they automatically queue all outgoing email to their hard drive, then I lose the protection of the wiretap act, and they can do whatever they want.
- Wiretaps are available with a court order
- Even evidence that is not admissable at your trial can be used to satisfy "reasonable suspicion" or "probable cause" requirements to investigate you further and come up with something that is admissable
- That doesn't address what happens at the recipient's ISP. The email sits on their hard disk.
- For the love of god, encrypt your sensitive email and quit bitching about your ISP.
Your concerns about email sitting on your ISP's disk are trivial at best. Route your encrypted email through their MTA and quit belly-aching."Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent