Oldro, (Thoth too) I'm not here to make enemies. Really, I'm not trying to anger you to the point of disliking me or being upset in any way.

What I am trying to do is keep Comcast's reputation from going further down the toilet. I work for them, and I work hard to banish the stigma of poor customer service, money grubbing, and terrible services that everyone seems to arbitrarily apply to them. The reason I do this is because the mentality of everyone I've been in contact with at the various levels of management and fulfillment in this company has always been the same: Customer first.

I have personally bent over backwards on countless late work nights and situations where "we" (as a company) have bent the rules, added credits, or just plain agreed to demands of customers who were angry or having trouble. (Those two things aren't always present at the same time, you'd be surprised what people try to milk out of us)

Everyone thinks that Comcast has this big agenda, whereby they'll do anything to make more money at whatever social cost comes of it, and it's just not true. This whole charade about packet blocking is an excellent example of that.

The reason they started "delaying" packets was because people were having issues with their internet - it was affecting customers who weren't torrenting. I believe them 100% when they say their motivations were to help manage traffic on their network in the interest of the whole, and not to harm a specific group or organization of people. I guess they figured that people were transferring illegal content anyway, and it wouldn't upset the FCC that much.

And, really, I kind of don't blame them.



Put yourself in the NOC. You've got 5,000 subscribers in Philadelphia who are complaining of slow internet problems. You check the usage statistics of the affected nodes and it turns out, 250 of the 5,000 people are consuming upload bandwidth by uploading torrents, and 90% of them aren't even downloading anything - they're probably just afk using their residential internet account as a hosting service. (These are all made up numbers, FYI, I don't have the actual data)

Well, what do you do? You can't very well go to management and tell them they need to buy you bigger and faster switches, or that they need to overhaul the upstream system of the physical plant. Even if they did agree to do that, it would take a year to get everything in place, and there are 4,750 angry people calling the call center right now demanding that their service be restored to what they're paying for.

So, you come up with a system to manage the packets. Don't block them - just delay them until they start downloading again, when they're presumably at their computers. The vast majority of internet subscribers you have are now much happier, even though you had to but a damper on some file sharing.



There are a lot of hurdles in using a residential internet account for hosting. From a physical standpoint, upstream is probably the biggest connection killer I deal with. Lots of times, if someone is having a problem other than not knowing that the blue thing with antennas should be plugged in, it has to do with upstream issues. Think about the logistics of this: the vast majority of internet traffic comes from, let's say, 100 major source websites. Movies, pictures, communications, everything. It's much easier to transfer data from 100 sources to the 4.5 million destinations (subscriber homes) because those 100 sources have the physical infrastructure and connections to handle exactly what they do every single second of every single day.

A subscriber's home does not have that kind of communications gear or connections to multiple points, and implementing anything resembling hosting practices would be prohibitively expensive. (If you're not familiar with that phrase, look it up) So, while we (the human race) are always making advancements in newer, better, faster ways to do things, for now we're stuck with the standard hybrid fiber / coax plant, and the connections we DO have.

Combine the majority of customers being angry, the limited connectivity you can provide to a subscriber, and have it all caused by people who are (most likely) doing something illegal anyway, and you have Comcast's problem. Was it right? I don't know. If I had been calling the shots, I'd have found a way to reduce the amount of bandwidth used by torrenting subscribers that were afk, rather than delaying it until they came back. What I am sure of though, is that Comcast had the majority of it's customer's best interests at heart.



If you had to make a choice between two evils, I'm sure you'd choose the one that pisses the least amount of people off. I know I would.

--Locane

it would appear that locane has again thrown down the gauntlet

comcast has been shady to me, but I worked the system to get what I wanted when they were my ISP. (mainly having them turn it back on, despite the fact they had an automated system shutting it down every couple hours for a "lack of payment" that didn't occur)

Damnit! I wouldn't have had this conversation if I'd known that. Was wonderin' why ye were defending them so vehemently, but yeah, most of yer argument goes against what Comcast themselves are saying. In other areas, I'm sure a lot of the flack Comcast gets has to do with the number of customers they cover - although I've a feeling that's part of their problem - they've over-extended themselves (this is likely, especially true of their customer service record). No one carrier SHOULD be covering that many customers, but well, changes to the FCC laws over the years have allowed that, and I think while Comcast has benefited from that, it has also suffered.
_________________
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." - William James
Thothie

I don't attribute the problems with Comcast to any particular malice on their part, Locane, and I don't doubt that you work very hard trying to satisfy their customers in your region, but the fact is that whatever the reason, they provide a service that is terrible. I've also experienced it firsthand, watching our connection turn to shit overnight when they implemented those policies. Admittedly, if you to compare them to other cable ISPs they don't look quite so bad, since basically all of them provide a horrible service. But then, internet service in America is terrible pretty much all around.

I'd really like to know why you think this. What makes the service "terrible"?

95% of the time, when you have trouble with your residential cable internet service, it's some kind of bad cable or poor connection in the house.

Seriously. It happens maybe 5 times a year that I can't fix something because it's the head end or the system and completely out of my control.

Comcast brings service to your house, and whatever cable was there when it was built is what is being used. (Legally, the subscriber is responsible for anything after the ground block, but we know that's not really feasible so we fix stuff anyway) Most people decide they can just buy any old splitters and coax jumpers and hook them up anywhere in their system and call it a day. Most people don't realize you're NOT supposed to shut the coax cable in a door, or smash it behind a wall plate and kink it, or that when you put a fitting on, if even a tiny little bit of braid is sticking out it's going to cause problems.

Then, when the internet goes down for lack of signal, or too much ingress, they sit at their computers and yell "FUCKING COMCAST!"

Chances are, Black Sun, the issues you've experienced with Comcast's cable internet is due to one of the aforementioned coax problems.


My point is that people use old and crappy cable connections, they modify it, they add to it, they remove things from it because they think they know what they're doing, and then when it goes down they assume that some switch somewhere in some server room has booted them off.

You can say "Comcast sucks" all day if you want, but the reality of the situation is that 95% of the problems people experience are caused by bad cable or passives in the home. Comcast will fix problems in your home for you, most of the time without charging you a dime, but blaming Comcast for trouble you have in your house is wrong.


I'd really like to know more about the symptoms you were experiencing first hand, I could probably give you a good idea of what the problem is just by hearing about it.

And, ask Goobag. Does anyone remember when he was lagging out like balls? It's because he had a cascade of 2-way splitters with unterminated ports hooked up through his attic with a cable he ran himself to the back of his modem. The cable guy ran him a new outlet, and it almost solved the problem completely - I remember talking to him a couple days after and he said he was still lagging out every once in awhile, but it was nowhere NEAR as bad as it was.

Goobag has Time Warner, btw.

--Locane

I moved out shortly after, but my brother switched over to a new cable ISP shortly after and immediately the problem was resolved. The same problem countless other people have suffered. Other stuff worked, but torrents were completely unusable. Things were fine until they implemented those new policies, and we were happy with the service. I couldn't complain until then.

Internet service in America is generally horrible less due to the last mile problem, in my opinion, than the fact that we basically have regional monopolies all over the place. There's barely any competition in many places, so no incentive to improve the services. In the end, we pay more for less than basically any other first world country out there. And the telcos ripped us all off to the tune of some 200 billion dollars, on top of that. We were supposed to have fiber optic cable laid out across the country back in the '90s after the government handed out a shit-ton of cash, which was neatly pocketed and never accounted for. The whole situation is infuriating.

Oh, so it wasn't the internet connection so much as it was the torrents. For some reason I took away that you were having trouble with the internet in general, not just torrents. Maybe you should use the word "torrents" next time instead of "service".


I'm all for competition, I'd love to see it. I fully agree with your point. Here in Seattle, we have 1 and 2 MB upload speeds to compete with the fiber that's being installed in northern Oregon by Verizon.

I'm not familiar at all with the government handing out cash for fiber installations. I've never heard of it. I do know, however, that fiber is running pretty much everywhere but to your house, and Verizon is doing even that as we speak.


Hopefully, in the future, we'll all have infinite speed internet and pay a low monthly fee for it. I'd love to see it become a utility regulated by the government, that way people wouldn't have a reason to complain, and they'd have more direct control over it.

--Locane

Poor choice of words, I suppose. Yet the fact remains that Comcast was not remotely providing the service we were paying for, at that point.

As for how badly we Americans have been bent over the knee of the telcos... Here, you may find this enlightening. Long story short, we paid something like $200 billion to have 45 Mbp/s fiber, up and downstream, across the country and got... higher phone bills.

hey lawlcane,

http://daviswiki.org/Comcast?sendfile=true&file=comcast_tow.jpg

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I fail
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I had a terrible experience with comcast. And i'll just give the abridged version.

Up at school I moved into a duplex before the start of the semester. My roommate wanted to go with a "established" isp so he chose comcast even though there prices were ridiculously high. We called and set up an appointment for a week later. Which sucks because a week is a long time to wait on a meeting in any industry. They missed the appointment, and after many phone calls prioritized our reschedule so we could get our internet 2 days later. Anyways they come out and install it and everything is decent. They wont let me use my own modem, even though I had it in my hand ready to plug it in. Jerks. Anyways, a few weeks pass and the neighbors in the other half of the duplex move in and i guess got comcast too. When the installer came out he disconnected our internet to hook up the neighbors internet, instead of utilizing both connections and leaving us both connected. It took weeks of phone calls and a huge number of hours on hold and lots of broken promises before we finally gave up on comcast. We switched to Grande Communications, got next day installation and pay half the price as Comcast for the same quality of internet.

Yikes, what a cluster fuck.

I've experienced the same problem with duplexes, it's hard to tell who should be hooked up and who shouldn't sometimes. Technically, each separate customer should have their own separate drop, and it sounds like the techs out in your area dropped the ball on that big time.

You CAN use your own modem. The technician may have told you that because he was lazy and didn't want to call dispatch to have it added on - when you have your own modem it complicates things. I'm assuming the modem you have is a supported type, btw. Also, it's likely that he was a contractor. Sorry about that, we hate using contractors but they're a necessary evil sometimes.

A word of advice, for any Comcast customer: If a technician has to come to your home for any reason, request an "in-house tech", or in normal terms a tech that works directly for Comcast. Specify to the person on the phone that you DON'T want a contractor, and you'll be in good shape.

Also, remember that Comcast is there to serve you, if you're having trouble and haven't done anything wrong (IE, have the right phone number on the account, are actually home and answer the door etc) it's easy to make a case to the customer service rep and have them send a supervisor to your home to deal with it.

Supervisors are your fall back - when the person on the phone hears that word, you've got their full attention, and you will at the very least be in contact with a supervisor.

As a customer you are guaranteed working, reliable service. If you're not getting it, then you need to tell us and have a credit applied to your account for your trouble when it's fixed.




I could really go on and on about the changes that are going on behind the scenes to prevent exactly this kind of situation from occurring, but it's likely none of you would be interested in the technicalities of how things work. Suffice it to say that these complaints are what we try to avoid, and I'm sure if you still had an account with us, you'd have been credited for all the hassle you went through just to keep your service on.


--Locane

I had had ATT dsl from the time I moved into this apartment back in october up until a few weeks ago. ATT promised me a DSL line at the price of 24.99$ a month. Wanting to save money, this sounded like the most sound option to go with at the time, but the price they quoted me was an outright lie.

First off, you need a landline, they offered a "5$ a month" naked land line with a limit amount of local calls, no long distance etc. Not needing a landline for anything else, I decided this would suit my needs fine. So I went with said naked line.

My first bill came and it was 75$ I called them, asked them what the shizzle, they replied that was just an initial setup fee, it should be your quoted price by the next month.

Next month came around 112$, thinking maybe they had not removed my previous balance from my bill, I called once again. This month they were billing me for my modem/router (which I later found out to be defective).

The next month when it came time for my bill to arrive I was finally excited to save some money and I was hit with 47$. Now I was pissed, even with the taxes and fees they had quoted me on the phone line, they told me it wouldn't be more than another 7$ on top of the 5$. This would have made my bill 24.99+fees=37? Apparently I had been misquoted, so begrudgingly I paid my bill for 3 months, got fed up and switched to comcast.

Now I'm paying something around the lines of 42$ a month for comcast 7mb down 512kb up. I didn't even have to wait for a technician to setup my service, I called them in the morning, picked up a self installation kit in the afternoon (which was free), and by that evening I had cable service.

It took ATT 2 weeks to get my dsl working, and then they CHARGED ME not only for having the service "active" for those 2 weeks but additional fees for their technician to fix the problem with my line. Not the wiring inside my apartment mind you, but the phone line outside my complex, which I was under the impression was their responsibility to maintain.

I've been perfectly happy with Comcast so far (even though I think its technically Time Warner).

Rawr contractors are a hoot especially when you get ones who do the same thing over and over they forget to handle installation problems. Up here in the land of freeze your but off (aka Canada) the installation guy couldn't figure out how to turn off my settings from manual ip connection to automatic I didn't realize it immediately either but hey its his job not mine. Oh and I was the one who solved the problem.
As for the whole lag issue people are having that isn't specific to Comcast, isn't it supposed to get worse? After all more people are getting hooked up.

Bleh, I don't read this for a few days and I have a book to read when I come back.

The topic was originally about comcast blocking traffic (well..originally about the laggy JP server, but you get the idea), not comcast's abhorent service record, which I also had to deal with when I was doing HP support a few years back. Comcast was probably the biggest problem ISP we had to deal with.

But, I digress. I run a company. I rent widgets to people on a plan. They can rent sets of up to 100 widgets at a time. I have 20 customers. However, most people usually only rent 5-10 widgets at a time. Knowing this, instead of having 2000 widgets on hand, I can get away with 100-200 widgets and cover everyone. I'll even double it to 400 just in case people need more. And all is good.

My company becomes very popular, and I get another 20 customers. Well, now my 400 widgets just barely covers everyone. No worries, we should be fine. Might be a few complaints on occasion, but not enough to justify the additional expense of buying more widgets. Keep in mind, I have a bottom line to protect.

One day, people start finding more uses for these widgets, and some start using 80-90 widgets at a time. Now, this is covered by the plan I sold them, but it means I'm going to run out of widgets a lot more often now. My customers are going to get a little more angry, and I won't always be able to give them 100 widgets at a time.

My options: 1) buy more widgets. That will cost me more, and I'd like to avoid that to protect the profits. 2) start limiting how people can use their widgets, and don't let them use them in the new way they figured out. 3) Tell people that are using their widgets in the new way that they only can use the widgets if no one else is, again, even though I told them they could use up to 100 at any time.

Now, 2 and 3 will cause more service issues, and more upset customers, but most of them won't want to switch widget providers since they're already setup with me. And the amount I have to pay a customer service department to handle complaints is a lot less than I'd pay to buy more widgets to cover this increase in demand...

Getting the picture yet?

By the way Locane, which department do you work for with Comcast? If it's marketing, this conversation is over. If it's customer service...fuck, I pity you.

On comparing internet services: I have DSL in China. Called them, had it setup same day, about 2 hours after I called. Service outside of China isn't great, both due to the firewall, and the earthquake last year that took out 5 of 7 fiber lines running out of the country.

I'm a cable guy, although I don't like using the term because it implies that I stomp around your house and break windows and then tell you to fuck off when you don't like the zig-zag pattern I've made with the new outlet I've installed on the outside walls.

Technically, the title of my position is "Communications Technician Level 3", and I'm taking a test and a practical exam on March 10th (2008) to be promoted to "Network Communications Technician Level 4" (Which just means that I'll be doing work on the distribution system instead of at the house). I also hold certification in fiber optic network management (troubleshooting, building, splicing etc) and the science behind the concept of how it works. (Which is really interesting btw)

I've always thought I would want to work for the marketing department until I talked to some people that used to work there. Apparently turnover is really high, and pressure to make quota and hit "numbers" is huge, so screw that.


Oldro, the trouble with your analogy is that people aren't using the widgets the way they were intended to be used, and further, the way they're using them happens to be illegal. Add that to wanting to protect your profit margins by keeping other customers who AREN'T abusing the widgets and the astronomical cost of building widgets that do what those few people are using them for, and you have your solution.

If you want to complain that expense shouldn't be that big of a factor, then why don't you build your own network to the people you're trying to transfer files with. Go ahead, get on it. I'll wait.

In the spirit of "The glass is not half empty or half full, it's just a fucking glass with water in it, and that water cost me $.10", I think Comcast probably made the best short-term decision. The way they went about it was probably a little over the top though, and it's going to get them fined by the FCC and introduce a whole new round of legislation I'm sure. As I've said before, the FCC HATES Comcast, especially the chairman.



Ideally, I'd like to see everyone be able to use their residential internet account as hosting services. It would be really sweet if we could all transfer information between eachother rather than going through ISPs like Comcast, but those days are far from here. For now, we're stuck with whatever the network can provide us.

--Locane