I Hate Comcast.

[Sock Full of Boiled Dimes]

I have to deal with Comast because it's the only Internet Service Provider in Little Rock.

To be frank, they fucking suck.

I wasn't aware of this, but Comcast has had many complaints against it over the years ranging from customer complaints to diliberatly slowing Internet service.

When it comes to customer service Comast is horrible. I've had to deal with some of the rudest people ever who know less about computers and the Internet than I do. I had to deal with a lady who was talking to a cowoker behind her while I was standing there and she didn't pay attention to me. Finally I said, "I need some help."

"In a minute"

Finally after being patient enough I ask why my Internet is being slow. What I am really trying to ask is why is my Internet only slow when I'm downloading from a Bittorrent program. She gives me this, "I don't know what you are talking about," look and then tells me to call a number which I don't even bother doing.

I decide to look it up only to find out that Comcast is diliberatly slowing down Internet for people uploading and seeding. You might say, "Well that might not be a problem." Well, it actually is.

See, most Bittorrent programs require you to seed at least at 10. So you are uploading anyway. Since your internet is slowed by Comcast by uploading your dowloading speed is slowed as well.

Which means when I have a download speed of up to 3MB a second Comcast decided to give me the middle finger and say, "Fuck you, you use our service on our terms." Which means I download at 5KB a FUCKING SECOND!

This is all really recent too which means that Comcast is deliberatly lying to their customers and violating Net Nuetrality. Course, why the fuck should they care because they can do whatever they want with their own buisness.

In short I'm not going to pay $30 a month for an Internet service when I can't even use Bittorrent. I'll just use the campus Internet and be done with it.

[Decade]

without reading a single word of your post:

AMEN BROTHER :clap:


With reading a word of your post:

Yea, I've known for months that Comcast was doing that (it was on engadget).

It is epic bullshit

[Urameshi YuSooKey]

Makes me glad I chose Verizon.

Also, wasn't this same thread made like 3 months ago?

[Decade]

Comcast hate renews itself very often.


You can youtube some horrible freakin stories about their customer service

[belladonna]

oh yeah, comcast is insanely awful... my dad's job pays for our internet and therefore we have comcast, we had bellsouth before which was faster and had fewer problems. it's craptastic!

[Roxie]

To be fair, she probably didn't know what the hell you were talking about. But I've heard Comcast does some shit to fuck with your BT's...but mine have been fine.

I had a woman call me and actually not understand that I could not make time move "faster" for her. She told me I was providing bad service b/c I couldn't make her wait time go fast enough for her.

[haterllnation]

They have faster speed here than Roadrunner (which I have). I've heard about the customer service problems. My friend actually has kept his cool about them when I know he wants to jump the counter and just play the neck snap game. They must have seen that because he got money refunded back for his On Demand going out all the time.

Hmm, you shouldn't be forced to be at 10. uTorrent will fix that issue right up. I am pretty sure Azureus, too. Those are both the recommended torrent programs out there. You could put it on zero until after DL, then when you seed, make the UL infinite (unless you are at a private tracker). It's still lame that they do it with such an Act (which is kind of loose for US at the moment).

[Plekto]

Okay, here's the way around this.

- download and install Azureus. You can throttle the connection down to as little as 1k/sec up and handle multiple cues and so on.

- Comcast has filtering software that dumps about 1/2 of all torrent and sharing program packets. You can still get through, but your error rate is so high that you get blocked by everyone quickly and it slows to a crawl as only seeds are giving you information after a couple of hours(peers al have dropped you for timeouts and dropped packets). Since it isn't a *denial* of service, there's nothing you can do about it.

Cable and ADSL providers routinely do this sort of behavior unless you buy their top level package(Comcast no - torrents are stil nerfed, Charter for instance, yes). Of course, for $50-$80 a month, you might as well just get a synconous account/business service. That isn't filtered and you can slam it 24/7 and they don't care.

- Contact Earthlink or another provider and get DSL service. It's cheaper and it works. Get Dish or similar for your TV. The combined cost is less than Cable which forces you to have cable TV as well.(ie - dish is $30 and internet is whatever you decide)

Earthlink doesn't filter stuff but you get slower service/have to pay a bit more for higher speeds(ie - the basic connection isn't monitored either but is dirt cheap) . The reason is because each line is piggybacked on your telephone, so there's no overhead or hardware issues until it hits their servers/back end. Cable has to serve up cable TV and phone and all their other things on their wire, and so you get faster speeds for less money, but it's routinely filtered AND the speed isn't guaranteed.

A DSL account is usually guaranteed speed, and since it's not dynamically allocating overhead/bandwidth(ie - you get a fixed chunk and that's it), it runs very decently fast.

Fractional T1 or SDSL are of course better. But the cheapest SDSL runs about $60-80 and up last I checked. Fractional T1 is $100 and up, but can be run for miles as opposed to 2-3 miles like SDSL.

In practice, I can get about 50-100K a sec max, but often only 20-30K out of a 5MBit connection with Charter. When I had Earthlink DSL, I got about 40K flat, no matter what(384K account).

[ミュー]

I get better torrent speeds in Japan than I ever did in the US. Reason being, 100M down and 50M up. There's like a 150-300ms ping between most servers in the US and here, but it still goes faster than Comcast. The funny thing, though, is when I play Counter-Strike on a US server and don't lag...

[Knife-Fingered Sue Sanderson]

Never used comcast for internet but I did use them for digital cable. I ended my service in April and they said that I would be getting about $120 back (why? who knows).
It didn't come until September.


Lame...

[Scarabomb]

German internet sucks straight out, I'm just going to clear that up now

**On topic, I'm switching to Verizon myself and apparently, don't quote me on this though even though I'm typing it, most internet providers are trying to halt file sharing and torrenting. What Verizon tells me is they're takin' the heat from whoever (RIAA maybe?) and allowing their customers full DL AND UL speed. I'm getting this 20M/20M thing which should allow for smokin' torrents. I don't really torrent much anymore ever since I got into Streaming (Veoh TV since I'm running low on Harddrive space) but when I do torrent, like you, I want my stuff to be blazin'.

I use Brighthouse right now which is a pretty good ISP and hasn't done me wrong yet but if Verizon is that much faster, I get a free HD TV and I get FIOS (20M/20M... I'd expect faster but it's America) for a mere $104 a month then hey.... by all means I'll take it (right now I pay about that much for 15M~7M/3M).

And there's a YouTube video out there of a COMCAST employee that was on duty sleeping on a couch because of the call center's ridiculously long wait times.

And to Roxie, I have no sympathy for horrible customer support whether they do or don't know what you're talking about. If they don't know what you're talking about, they better get on the ball and find out what the hell is going on by asking someone who might know the answers to your question. The thing about being customer support isn't dealing with stupid customers, it's dealing with a consumer that impacts your company no matter how retarded, awkward or confusing their questions may be (even if there are stupid customers out there).

[Kleshya]

Comcast has been in the news a lot over at Arstechnica.com, latest story is not internet related but: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080115-crippled-network-dvrs-alive-could-be-so-much-more.html

and more on topic, this is about the FCC investigating Comcast about the Bittorent: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080114-fcc-officially-opens-proceeding-on-comcasts-p2p-throttling.html

[Roxie]

Scarabomb, The thing about that is that is not often possible. I don't know how comcast's system works, but if someone called me about a website problem with IBM or some consistent problem they were having that hadn't been company acknowledged I would have absolutely no idea who to call to ask about it.

I could let my manager know, but I could almost guarantee that she wouldn't know anything about it. Our departments are so cut off from each other and ignorant about knowing what each one does, it's ridiculous.

It's the way the system is set up and "operates". I mean we're the first ppl you talk to and we have NO technical knowledge about hardware at all.

Comcast probably isn't telling their employees about the shit they've been doing with BitTorrent. "Oh yes, well, we've been slowing the speed w/bt b/c it is mostly used for illegal downloading and uploading".

And part of customer support is dealing with stupid, disrespectful, ugly entitled customers. Por ejemplo, with that woman I told her I would hold on with her and make sure she got connected to someone who could help her, but that wasn't good enough. She wanted me to make time go faster.

Don't get me wrong. the people who answer the phone shouldn't be rude to you either. They should as accommodating as reasonably possible and do all they know how to get you the help you need. What I'm saying is some times their hands are tied by others and there are barriers.

[SlickWilly440]

Screw Cumcast, I'm switching back to 56k Dail-up...NetZero here I come.

[Roxie]

Woah. Are you sure? That's pretty drastic.

[Plekto]

Screw Cumcast, I'm switching back to 56k Dail-up...NetZero here I come.

Wow. BTW, business DSL is never filtered. But it costs more as a result. OTOH, It can cost as little as $60 a month, plus gives you a fixed DNS as well so you can do things like register a homepage, run your own game server, or whatnot.(obviously it's also simple for authorities to backtrack the address to you if you ARE downloading stuff illegally)

Comcast has two things going on that it is doing(verified by a friend who works in the internet security industry and others I know):

1 - if you exceed a certain limit per month, they nerf your connection for the rest of the month down to their lowest level for uplink speed. Since most sharing services give you data based upon how fast you share it back, a 5 or 10 per second uplink speed is horrendous - yet a web server you connect to like this one needs maybe 1K a second at most from you so it goes fast.

Note - the recent versions of Azureus and others bypass this software block, so you can set it to whatever up or down speeds you want. I recommend 15-20K. This is under their radar in most cases as most games send 10-20K a second, and the speeds you get back aren't your full bandwidth, but a good chunk of it.

2 - They filter torrent and file sharing packets like I said. The don't block them. they just drop a large number on purpose so that the thing DOES run, but as poorly as possible. In essence, it's like they pulled two spark plug wires from your engine. It'll run but not even a fraction as well as it should.

Apparently most ISPs do unless you have a business account or are getting their top level service - mostly because the cheap accounts aren't affecting their bottom line like their business customers are - who run servers and so on and usually peg the limits of their connection all day long.(when was the last time your IT department didn't complain about not having enough bandwidth?)

- Also, dialup can work well. You need to get an ISP that allows you to connect multiple times under the same account though(have to specifically ask about this, about half do). This way you can run 2 or 4 lines at once and run them through a modem switch to get DSL speeds. The advantage is that this works like a fancy ISDN line - so you can get low end DSL speeds from almost any place on the planet. You do need two phone lines or more, though.

(this is how DSL started, btw). Modems are usually assigned a block of DNS ranges at the providers - that are well known by hackers who avoid those DNS ranges. Modem connections suffer from almost no attacks as a result(they want high speed connections of course for the botnets and so on)

I mention this as a lot of people have two phone lines and 112K isn't half bad from two 56K modems working at once.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307849
This used to be very popular - and still is for people who can't get high speed internet any other way. (Say you're in a town 20 miles from nowhere in Montana)

It's called modem sharing or modem bonding(better application of the technology).

Ebay Item number: 190190972829
A dual modem router. 112K if you use both phone lines and it'll drop one line if you have an incoming call and reconnect when you hang up.

http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/detail.jsp?tab=features&pathtype=purchase&sku=3C888-US
Info sheet on this. You can connect two in theory and have Windows do the sharing between them to run four if you really wanted, but these go for pretty cheap prices these days and every home in the U.S. has two lines into it at a minimum.(4 conductors, only 2 are usually used)

[Y.T.]

Hah. I can settle for hating O2.

There isn't much to hate though. Except maybe poor value compared to connections in western EU... They have some kind of pricing war over there..

I pay 35$ per month for 2048/512 dsl. No noticeable packet filtering, but they apply
Fair User Policy .. that is if you exceed 9 gb in a month or so your speed goes down to 256/256..

Seems to me that I get a slightly better deal. Even though we have higher taxes here.

PLF could explain to me why is that.. after all, Bohemia & Moravia is a fairly communist region and as every good American knows, communism is not good for business..
And what's good for the syndicate is good for you, right?

[Radiance]

when was the last time your IT department didn't complain about not having enough bandwidth?

Actually, I do on a pretty much daily basis cause my company is too cheap to spring for a better connection, which frankly isn't a huge request since they rate limit the connection to half and use the other half for our VoIP. -.- I wish I worked for a larger law firm, or I worked in a data center.

As far as Comcast goes, I use their highest non-business package so I don't get rate limited, yet.

[Life25Karma]

Screw Cumcast, I'm switching back to 56k Dail-up...NetZero here I come.


......:boggled:
Good luck with that....:eyepop:

Comcast sucks yeti cock. I've been dealing with them over a year. I had trouble with Azureus due to their bullshit, so I went and got ABC(Another Bitorrent Client) - problems solved. Still those bastards are on some BS, and they hire some fucked up people. I don't visit the centers as much due to having to deal with the old ass, ugly face, skunk breath crossed eyed half toothed social scum that they put behind that friggin desk..I find it much less of a hassle to make a payment over the phone. Thus far, I have not dealt with any assholes, or ignorant techs, but eh anything could happen.
Eh fuck em!

[darighaz]

Comcast sends reset packets once you start seeding. They dont drop anything.

The download cap on their service is also incredibly high such that no one should ever reasonably hit it.

I have comcast, and regularly do 7kbps up and 300+ down on torrents. Maybe if some of you had any clue how torrents work you'd understand what dictates your speed on them.

[Plekto]

A small primer:
Torrents are different than typical old-school sharing in that you only need to connect to a few people, but to saturate their feed enough so that they are happy.(this usually means 3-5K per person and 4 shares at once). More than that tells the network that you are a big fish and it sends tons of requests and such to you. It's basically set up to see anything as less than 10K a second as a modem and low priority, 15-30K as high speed, and 30+ as a major server. Think of it as having a wad of little 5K boxes. If it's getting 4-5 from you, it's happy and you get good results(each 5K representing 52K modem(says 56K but limited to 52K by the FCC).

ie - beyond about 20-25K a sec up, you saturate your connection with background stuff and it doesn't move any faster. Experiment with your client and you'll see that about 1/4 of your total upstream is optimal. In my case, I have 768K up and set it to 20K.

Also, most ISPs have a 25K and above filter - less than 25K and it could be your PS3 that's online or you getting youtube or whatever. That's why games don't lag - you don't send more than that up despite the silly amount you pull down. So throttle it back to 20K and enjoy - the downloads will go faster and it's *upstream* speed that the ISPs use to calculate usage as well, because that's their most limited resource. You'll also be able to surf the web and such without much noticeable lag, since the torrent is using less than half of your bandwidth.

All too many people hop onto a torrent and leave it on automatic, which uses the entire bandwidth needlessly. Every cable box has a cable modem in it and needs that connection to get back to the server for updates, time, programming, PPV, and so on.

There was a nice article on slashdot yesterday about this - and it noted that their new plan is to warn you when you are reaching your limit (and as a side note that they give you the opportunity to upgrade to their highest level which isn't filtered). So there is a way around it - they just want their money since you're using way more than the typical 10-20K a second most people are using surfing the web. fair enough, I say - I just wish they were more up front about it.

Btw - 40% of the internet is bittorrent traffic.

[darighaz]

Most of what you said just now GREATLY depends on the tracker you're using.

Theres no generic "how BT works". It alllll depends on your tracker.

[Vincent]

F U C K COMCAST!!!!!!!

Do a google search for "comcast sucks".It takes 30 years before you are done simply scrolling through the results. And for good reason.

[darighaz]

because you dont know jack about how the net works beyond "its slow" or "its fast"?