[ale] OT: Comcast'ers
Daniel Howard
dhhoward at comcast.net
Sat May 27 13:48:53 EDT 2006
I also have to confess that I've been a Comcast HSI customer for over 5
years and have only had outages when storms cut the power to my house.
I use Level 3's DNS on all my home PCs and the second DNS is a backup
Linux DNS cache in my house.
Of course, since I designed some of the signal processing in the
Broadcom chips that power cable modems and the cable modem termination
system (CMTS), naturally I'm a fan, but it really depends on your
neighborhood and the age of the drop lines to your home, so I did try
DSL and a cable modem both initially. The DSL service from BellSouth
was putrid, with network outages several times a month, and the DSL
service from Speakeasy via Covad (who finally replaced the 50 year old
drop line that still had paper insulation to my house...) was just too
slow for the price.
I now have no twisted pair service to my house; main phone is Comcast
digital phone, also very reliable and the one time I did have an issue
(noise) they were out in less than 24 hours and replaced the box on the
side of my house, and no problems since then. My other phone is a
Vonage VOIP, which was fantastic initially and still only costs 3 cents
a minute to Europe, but lately has had more interference on the line,
possibly because Comcast is throttling back that port to encourage folks
to take their VOIP service. Hopefully the recent net-neutrality ruling
in Congress will address that, but unfortunately since I wrote some of
the DOCSIS 1.1 and a lot of the 2.0 specs, it will always be possible
for the cable operator to offer a better quality of service for their
VOIP than a third party using best-effort traffic; higher QoS for voice
packets is built into the spec in multiple ways.
Daniel
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