Does the FCC have any actual pull here, or are they as impotent as the Better Business Bureau? I'd like to actually believe that somet good could come from all this talk..
What amuses me here is the BBB 'thinks' my issue with Comcast has a positive resolution when in reality it hasn't made ANY progress.
And they refuse to change the case to unresolved.
The BBB is a waste of time. In the future I'll deal with the city directly when working on issues with a company.
Oh and it seems Qwest will be rolling out fiber to the home here in Salt Lake City. So I may be getting my 50 Meg pipe sooner than I thought:-)
Who gets the maintenance contracts? How much do we pay for the maintenance contracts? How much maintenance should be spent on all fiber or should only dense populations get it? How dense do the populations have to be? How do we pay for it, do we inflate the currency through debt or do we increase tax?
Who gets to use the fiber? How much do we charge companies to use this fiber? How do we ensure its being used for the right purposes and companies aren't bidding for contacts and locking in those customers? Who is responsible for faults in the network? How are costs allocated?
The market is fine, the solution is to deregulate so companies are forced to compete, as opposed to the more segregated systems that we are used to now a days.
I don't recall anyone ever saying "To have a free market, it must be provided by public Government services", a free market can never have any Government regulation or intervention, else it is not a free market.
Well... we already have been paying for fiber to the home since 1994 so why not have them do what we already paid over $200 billion (conservative estimate) in taxes for???
Hell, my dad almost bought into it. Even with his lousy and expensive cable service he got Comcast. Luckily, he bought one a new HDTV and actually started caring about his shitty cable service. Now he has AT&T (gotta love duopolies) and Dish Network. I hope it doesn't rain!(after all, while it's raining/storming nobody wants to watch TV)
I've heard people complain about the weather and Dish TV. So far we've had only one issue and that was when it snowed really hard this last winter, we lost the signal. Of course going out there and hitting the dish (not very hard mind you) with a broom brought the snow down and there ya go. We're back:-)
Duopolies are ok. At least there is some competition there. DSL isn't the fastest but then again, at least it's not Concast.
Heck, Concast even started mailing us flyers to come back because they care. After abusing my family AND putting us through hell (they were a monopoly at that time here). My family asked if there was any creative way we could respond to this lousy company. Turning off the Internet because we used it too much sounded VERY fishy so we had to respond.
And after a little effort, my family and I came up with an idea how to answer...
It was soo much fun, we're thinking of putting more videos explaining our experience with the company. Maybe this spring we'll post a couple more:-)
What interests me is considering Concast's history, people still believe the company will do the right thing and give the customer what they are paying for. A Internet experience with a fast pipe and no limits on where they can go or what they can legally do.
How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?
50Mb sounds nice, but if they cut you off after 100GB per month for "excessive traffic", what good is it?
And don't forget, that 100 Gig limit is just a 'guess' not a number they advertise. Some people have been terminated for using as little as 40 Gigs a month and the rejects will come out saying "I'm glad you weren't my neighbor for being a bandwidth hog"...
Honestly, that's their whole argument. Pretty pathetic when you look at the rest of the world. Other countries don't have a problem with that but somehow our Internet here in America can't handle traffic considered normal elsewhere.
Yeah, that's the question. How do we know we are breaking the unpublished rules?
And now that the 12 month suspension of our account is over, the company wants my family to sign up again with them.
I had no way to validate what they were saying our consumption was and still they don't provide that information. Our current ISP (using DSL) has a 100 Gig a month limit AND we can validate our usage. Plus the service is outstanding and the people are technical when I have questions.
I wish I could get FIOS in Minneapolis, but I doubt it's going to happen any time soon. I cancelled Comcast for being such a crappy ISP a couple years ago and went with 1.5M/768K DSL. It's slower, but the service is far better.
At any rate, I'm not going back to Comcast even if they offer me 150/50. They're a horrible company to deal with.
same here. Since Concast terminated my families internet for 12 months, we decided to stick with DSL since the termination is now over and the company wants our business.
With their stock tanking, I'll bet they really want our business now.
So what they do now is throttle your connection back out of spite. If I have any kind of sustained download, I end up at sub-dialup speeds on my supposedly 6 mps Comcast cablemodem. It works very predictably -- 7mbs for about the first 10 seconds and it starts dropping, and then a while later I am at 40 kilobits per second, I kid you not. If I stop the transfer and start it again I get the exact same "loss of service" curve.
Either throttle OR they terminate your connection for 12 months if you go above their 'secret' bandwidth limit.
So people will be able to hit the limit faster. Cool;-)
What? Socialized infrastructure? Maybe even offering everyone the same goods for the same price, leveling the playing field instead of offering discounts for large corporations to give them an edge over the smaller companies?
Careful there, it may lead to a free market system, and I doubt that's in the best interest of the corporations and their politicians. In other words, don't expect to see that anytime soon.
I keep telling them that we don't have a free market and they keep telling me I'm nuts?????
I have a cable connected to Concast and can't use the damn thing for any other provider. I don't want Concast after that crap they put my family though last year (terminating the Internet account because we used the damn thing too much). So we're using DSL which is ok. So what competition are we talking about? All 2.5 options?
Man... We're really lagging behind and Bush has the gall to say our Broadband policy is working. What a tard.
What about all the modern infrastructure U.S. tax dollars paid for, which the telcos 'forgot' to install?
Sounds like somebody has been talking. Now we can't have that can we. I mean if people starting talking it would just give them more incentive to 'slow' down your network some more eh ?
An extra RST packet here... another there...
Before you know it, you're receiving nothing BUT RST packets;-)
That's why I told Concast to stuff it then told the FCC they need to fix this crap.
Saying this patent applies to Guitar Hero is like saying that milk is the same as beer. You can drink them both, but the experience is completely different.
so instead of saying free as in beer we'll start saying free as in Milk?
That's like the phone company saying that you talk too much, and in order to slow down your talking they will suddenly and without warning hang up both telephones on the two ends of the conversation for you. Since you have a Redial button, this should only be a minor inconvenience for you at most.
that is unless Concast terminated your account. Then you are without service for 12 months.
Another reason I submitted to youtube and vuze.com my testimony about Concast and why this is a problem and needs to be resolved.
Otherwise you will hear about more people like me being terminated. The video services on the internet aren't getting smaller. They are consuming more bandwidth today than ever before.
It's already happened to several people on my street. I guess the termination rate is higher than the.001% they 'claim' it is.
What? Concast lie? that would never happen right;-)
So you're saying that you owe society nothing for providing the stimulus to your amazing brain? That everything that comes out of my brain is MINE MINE MINE and has nothing to do with the world I live in? You know this kind of bullshit thinking harks back to Aristotle right? and that even he decided it was wrong.
I was thinking that if IP really was property then why isn't it taxed?
We tax everything else. And I mean the owner should be taxed. After all, isn't all other property taxed?
If they don't like it then perhaps after a few years it should revert to the public domain.
Companies such as Yahoo, Google and others are already moving into the pipeline, further making telcos more and more irrelevent to the core business of the internet. I easily imagine the telco's, cable co's, even RIAA/MPAA becoming fringe players in the future, as information truely takes on a new dimention. It is evolve or die time.
Part of the problem is also we don't have a great infrastructure in place to handle all the new services coming online. The bandwidth crunch is what companies are fighting against. Some companies (Concast) are either break applications or terminating their customers internet usage to solve the bandwidth problem. And saying.01% are being affected is silly. If that number is really low then why are there three of us in my neighborhood who were terminated? The odds of that are just not in line with their statement.
Anyway, I'm hoping we can get the same infrastructure that other countries are running to the home and business. They are building their future on fiber lines and we're still rolling out copper (Unless you are with Utopianet.org or Verizon).
From the blurb, it is first said that the bill would designate ISPs who block a range of prohibited materials as child friendly. Then the quote specifically says about blocking pornography. So which is it? Is Utah going to be a nanny state and tell its citizens what is and is not prohibited or is it going after just pornography?
Actually you have to understand the politicians here in Utah. I've been fighting with several of them over Utopianet and it's future. Some of the proposed bills were simply outrageous! All sorts of strange restrictions which ONLY affect Utopia and not other's like Concast.
What does that have to do with this Bill?
Well again, the politicians 'think' they are doing something good for the people without realizing it will have unintended consequences. This the Patriot Act. It's 'father' (Senator Orrin Hatch) said it would "never be used against Americans". Well guess what... he was very wrong.
I see the same thing here. Yeah, we need to protect our kids from this crap. It's called parenting.
Furthermore, I am paying for an unlimited service. Thats what its called and advertised as, unlimited. Well, fucking with my speeds and sending fake reset packets, well, that seems like a limit to me, doesn't it?
The Advertisement when I signed up said "Unlimited use for a flat monthly fee" not unlimited access. So when Concast terminated my families Internet on January 19, 2007 I was livid! They said we used it too much and were not provided service for 12 months. And NOW the company wants us back as a customer. They are sending us fliers and want our business.
While Qwest DSL isn't as fast, we don't need Concast's lousy service. Competition fortunately has sorta caught up here and I'm pushing for Network Neutrality plus Utopianet fiber to our home.
What I don't understand is why Concast won't use modern day QoS software and manage their network like many other ISP's.
Oh that's right, I keep forgetting about the Monopoly thing.
Must be nice for them. Creating products which benefit THEM and not the consumer.
This is why I'm fighting for Network Neutrality. With it the company can't decide who get's to do what on the lines. We paid for them and it's legal content. So why can't we do what ever we want? It's our dollar
Rather than allow people like me to use the lines we paid for, they are also terminating people's accounts.
I'm pretty sure the video my girlfriend made of me chasing her around the apartment dressed as Captain Cocktastic doesn't actually violate any laws (There's nothing on the books in Canada about good taste as far as I know).
On the other hand, I doubt whether having it posted on the internet would help my political career all that much, if I had one. Unless I was running in Toronto/Rosedale, of course.
Makes sense. Look at what happened in the US to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Some of the questions were just unreal!!
Yeah I know what they were looking for. Still it was below good taste IMO.
We all have something to hide. We're Human Beings:-)
Or ISPs could stop over-selling their capacity, then no one would need to "police" themselves by making sure they use less than the bandwidth they're paying for.
But then if you are a Concast customers, you don't know what you are paying for (how much bandwidth do you get?). And if you upgrade to a business account like we did, you get more bandwidth. I asked, the salesdroid said it. When I asked how much more bandwidth do we get. His response?
My favorite analogy: It's more like AT&T interrupting a phone call to your buddy, faking his voice to you and saying "Oh sorry, gotta go" and hanging up. As if that weren't bad enough it fakes your voice to your buddy doing the same thing. This is fraud, they inject RST packets and make it look like it's legitimate traffic from the other computer. It's an awful way to do QoS if it can even be construed as such. Why don't they just add in nice shaping rules like everyone else?
Because Monopolies can make products that suit their needs over the needs of their customers.
If you really understand Concast management, you would realize that in their minds they are doing no wrong. They really think this is an acceptable network management method instead of implementing QoS services.
Yeah I know. They have strange people working over there.
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Does the FCC have any actual pull here, or are they as impotent as the Better Business Bureau? I'd like to actually believe that somet good could come from all this talk..
:-)
What amuses me here is the BBB 'thinks' my issue with Comcast has a positive resolution when in reality it hasn't made ANY progress.
And they refuse to change the case to unresolved.
The BBB is a waste of time. In the future I'll deal with the city directly when working on issues with a company.
Oh and it seems Qwest will be rolling out fiber to the home here in Salt Lake City. So I may be getting my 50 Meg pipe sooner than I thought
Screw Concast. They sux0rs
Who gets the maintenance contracts? How much do we pay for the maintenance contracts? How much maintenance should be spent on all fiber or should only dense populations get it? How dense do the populations have to be? How do we pay for it, do we inflate the currency through debt or do we increase tax?
Who gets to use the fiber? How much do we charge companies to use this fiber? How do we ensure its being used for the right purposes and companies aren't bidding for contacts and locking in those customers? Who is responsible for faults in the network? How are costs allocated?
The market is fine, the solution is to deregulate so companies are forced to compete, as opposed to the more segregated systems that we are used to now a days.
I don't recall anyone ever saying "To have a free market, it must be provided by public Government services", a free market can never have any Government regulation or intervention, else it is not a free market.
Well... we already have been paying for fiber to the home since 1994 so why not have them do what we already paid over $200 billion (conservative estimate) in taxes for???
Or they can just give it back...
Hell, my dad almost bought into it. Even with his lousy and expensive cable service he got Comcast. Luckily, he bought one a new HDTV and actually started caring about his shitty cable service. Now he has AT&T (gotta love duopolies) and Dish Network. I hope it doesn't rain!(after all, while it's raining/storming nobody wants to watch TV)
:-)
:-)
I've heard people complain about the weather and Dish TV. So far we've had only one issue and that was when it snowed really hard this last winter, we lost the signal. Of course going out there and hitting the dish (not very hard mind you) with a broom brought the snow down and there ya go. We're back
Duopolies are ok. At least there is some competition there. DSL isn't the fastest but then again, at least it's not Concast.
Heck, Concast even started mailing us flyers to come back because they care. After abusing my family AND putting us through hell (they were a monopoly at that time here). My family asked if there was any creative way we could respond to this lousy company. Turning off the Internet because we used it too much sounded VERY fishy so we had to respond.
And after a little effort, my family and I came up with an idea how to answer...
It was soo much fun, we're thinking of putting more videos explaining our experience with the company. Maybe this spring we'll post a couple more
What interests me is considering Concast's history, people still believe the company will do the right thing and give the customer what they are paying for. A Internet experience with a fast pipe and no limits on where they can go or what they can legally do.
But then again we're talking about Concast right.
How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?
:/
50Mb sounds nice, but if they cut you off after 100GB per month for "excessive traffic", what good is it?
And don't forget, that 100 Gig limit is just a 'guess' not a number they advertise. Some people have been terminated for using as little as 40 Gigs a month and the rejects will come out saying "I'm glad you weren't my neighbor for being a bandwidth hog"...
Honestly, that's their whole argument. Pretty pathetic when you look at the rest of the world. Other countries don't have a problem with that but somehow our Internet here in America can't handle traffic considered normal elsewhere.
Sad
And the monthly GB limits are?
Yeah, that's the question. How do we know we are breaking the unpublished rules?
And now that the 12 month suspension of our account is over, the company wants my family to sign up again with them.
I had no way to validate what they were saying our consumption was and still they don't provide that information. Our current ISP (using DSL) has a 100 Gig a month limit AND we can validate our usage. Plus the service is outstanding and the people are technical when I have questions.
Why would I go back with Concast agani???
I wish I could get FIOS in Minneapolis, but I doubt it's going to happen any time soon. I cancelled Comcast for being such a crappy ISP a couple years ago and went with 1.5M/768K DSL. It's slower, but the service is far better.
At any rate, I'm not going back to Comcast even if they offer me 150/50. They're a horrible company to deal with.
same here. Since Concast terminated my families internet for 12 months, we decided to stick with DSL since the termination is now over and the company wants our business.
With their stock tanking, I'll bet they really want our business now.
Would we go back with a 50 Meg pipe?
Not with Concast... ever.
So what they do now is throttle your connection back out of spite. If I have any kind of sustained download, I end up at sub-dialup speeds on my supposedly 6 mps Comcast cablemodem. It works very predictably -- 7mbs for about the first 10 seconds and it starts dropping, and then a while later I am at 40 kilobits per second, I kid you not. If I stop the transfer and start it again I get the exact same "loss of service" curve.
;-)
Either throttle OR they terminate your connection for 12 months if you go above their 'secret' bandwidth limit.
So people will be able to hit the limit faster. Cool
50 mbps, throttled, copied to the NSA, squeezed on the same cable as too many HD channels.
Where do I send my 150$ again?
and don't forget the 'secret' bandwidth cap they can't tell you about...
But don't go over it or you are terminated for a year...
What? Socialized infrastructure? Maybe even offering everyone the same goods for the same price, leveling the playing field instead of offering discounts for large corporations to give them an edge over the smaller companies?
Careful there, it may lead to a free market system, and I doubt that's in the best interest of the corporations and their politicians. In other words, don't expect to see that anytime soon.
I keep telling them that we don't have a free market and they keep telling me I'm nuts?????
I have a cable connected to Concast and can't use the damn thing for any other provider. I don't want Concast after that crap they put my family though last year (terminating the Internet account because we used the damn thing too much). So we're using DSL which is ok. So what competition are we talking about? All 2.5 options?
Man... We're really lagging behind and Bush has the gall to say our Broadband policy is working. What a tard.
Perhaps this is something that Microsoft should embrace for their own good...
:-)
The problem Microsoft is facing today is nobody wants to Pirate Vista.
What about all the modern infrastructure U.S. tax dollars paid for, which the telcos 'forgot' to install?
;-)
Sounds like somebody has been talking. Now we can't have that can we. I mean if people starting talking it would just give them more incentive to 'slow' down your network some more eh ?
An extra RST packet here... another there...
Before you know it, you're receiving nothing BUT RST packets
That's why I told Concast to stuff it then told the FCC they need to fix this crap.
Saying this patent applies to Guitar Hero is like saying that milk is the same as beer. You can drink them both, but the experience is completely different.
;-)
so instead of saying free as in beer we'll start saying free as in Milk?
I'm sorry but that just doesn't sound right
At least it would give me someplace to put all that data I downloaded from Concast over the last four years.
;-)
;-)
Let's see. My family is supposed to be consuming about 300 Gigs a month on the average according to Concast that is.
So 300gigs times 12 months over four years.... WTF!!
that's a lot of data. Where the hell have I been putting it!
Guess I should purchase the new drives when they come out
That's like the phone company saying that you talk too much, and in order to slow down your talking they will suddenly and without warning hang up both telephones on the two ends of the conversation for you. Since you have a Redial button, this should only be a minor inconvenience for you at most.
.001% they 'claim' it is.
;-)
that is unless Concast terminated your account. Then you are without service for 12 months.
Yeah I thought it was a joke until January 19, 2007
then I learned how sick this company really is.
Another reason I submitted to youtube and vuze.com my testimony about Concast and why this is a problem and needs to be resolved.
Otherwise you will hear about more people like me being terminated. The video services on the internet aren't getting smaller. They are consuming more bandwidth today than ever before.
It's already happened to several people on my street. I guess the termination rate is higher than the
What? Concast lie? that would never happen right
So you're saying that you owe society nothing for providing the stimulus to your amazing brain? That everything that comes out of my brain is MINE MINE MINE and has nothing to do with the world I live in? You know this kind of bullshit thinking harks back to Aristotle right? and that even he decided it was wrong.
I was thinking that if IP really was property then why isn't it taxed?
We tax everything else. And I mean the owner should be taxed. After all, isn't all other property taxed?
If they don't like it then perhaps after a few years it should revert to the public domain.
What's that in Library-of-Congresses per fortnight?
;-)
Well... if you are Concast they will give you those numbers in terms of photos or mp3's or emails downloaded in a month.
Personally I like to know in terms of how many 8 track tapes I can download a month.
Companies such as Yahoo, Google and others are already moving into the pipeline, further making telcos more and more irrelevent to the core business of the internet. I easily imagine the telco's, cable co's, even RIAA/MPAA becoming fringe players in the future, as information truely takes on a new dimention. It is evolve or die time.
.01% are being affected is silly. If that number is really low then why are there three of us in my neighborhood who were terminated? The odds of that are just not in line with their statement.
Part of the problem is also we don't have a great infrastructure in place to handle all the new services coming online. The bandwidth crunch is what companies are fighting against. Some companies (Concast) are either break applications or terminating their customers internet usage to solve the bandwidth problem. And saying
Anyway, I'm hoping we can get the same infrastructure that other countries are running to the home and business. They are building their future on fiber lines and we're still rolling out copper (Unless you are with Utopianet.org or Verizon).
From the blurb, it is first said that the bill would designate ISPs who block a range of prohibited materials as child friendly. Then the quote specifically says about blocking pornography. So which is it? Is Utah going to be a nanny state and tell its citizens what is and is not prohibited or is it going after just pornography?
... he was very wrong.
:D
Actually you have to understand the politicians here in Utah. I've been fighting with several of them over Utopianet and it's future. Some of the proposed bills were simply outrageous! All sorts of strange restrictions which ONLY affect Utopia and not other's like Concast.
What does that have to do with this Bill?
Well again, the politicians 'think' they are doing something good for the people without realizing it will have unintended consequences. This the Patriot Act. It's 'father' (Senator Orrin Hatch) said it would "never be used against Americans". Well guess what
I see the same thing here. Yeah, we need to protect our kids from this crap. It's called parenting.
I wonder if we forgot that part of the equation
Furthermore, I am paying for an unlimited service. Thats what its called and advertised as, unlimited. Well, fucking with my speeds and sending fake reset packets, well, that seems like a limit to me, doesn't it?
The Advertisement when I signed up said "Unlimited use for a flat monthly fee" not unlimited access. So when Concast terminated my families Internet on January 19, 2007 I was livid! They said we used it too much and were not provided service for 12 months. And NOW the company wants us back as a customer. They are sending us fliers and want our business.
While Qwest DSL isn't as fast, we don't need Concast's lousy service. Competition fortunately has sorta caught up here and I'm pushing for Network Neutrality plus Utopianet fiber to our home.
What I don't understand is why Concast won't use modern day QoS software and manage their network like many other ISP's.
Oh that's right, I keep forgetting about the Monopoly thing.
Must be nice for them. Creating products which benefit THEM and not the consumer.
This is why I'm fighting for Network Neutrality. With it the company can't decide who get's to do what on the lines. We paid for them and it's legal content. So why can't we do what ever we want? It's our dollar
Rather than allow people like me to use the lines we paid for, they are also terminating people's accounts.
What a BS company
I'm pretty sure the video my girlfriend made of me chasing her around the apartment dressed as Captain Cocktastic doesn't actually violate any laws (There's nothing on the books in Canada about good taste as far as I know).
:-)
On the other hand, I doubt whether having it posted on the internet would help my political career all that much, if I had one. Unless I was running in Toronto/Rosedale, of course.
Makes sense. Look at what happened in the US to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Some of the questions were just unreal!!
Yeah I know what they were looking for. Still it was below good taste IMO.
We all have something to hide. We're Human Beings
Funny, when I mail an "unfair, not good enough" check for my Comcast bill, they just shut me down.
;-)
You must have been using your Internet too much. Either that or... uh.. well..
No that's about the only reason they turn you off these days.
Or ISPs could stop over-selling their capacity, then no one would need to "police" themselves by making sure they use less than the bandwidth they're paying for.
But then if you are a Concast customers, you don't know what you are paying for (how much bandwidth do you get?). And if you upgrade to a business account like we did, you get more bandwidth. I asked, the salesdroid said it. When I asked how much more bandwidth do we get. His response?
"I don't know, just.... more".
Yeah, great company.
My favorite analogy: It's more like AT&T interrupting a phone call to your buddy, faking his voice to you and saying "Oh sorry, gotta go" and hanging up. As if that weren't bad enough it fakes your voice to your buddy doing the same thing. This is fraud, they inject RST packets and make it look like it's legitimate traffic from the other computer. It's an awful way to do QoS if it can even be construed as such. Why don't they just add in nice shaping rules like everyone else?
Because Monopolies can make products that suit their needs over the needs of their customers.
If you really understand Concast management, you would realize that in their minds they are doing no wrong. They really think this is an acceptable network management method instead of implementing QoS services.
Yeah I know. They have strange people working over there.