[PLUG] Higher speed for hill-country? Your recs?

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Fri Jul 16 18:23:56 UTC 2010


> On Fri, 16 Jul 2010, Guy Letourneau wrote:
> 
> >What does the PLUG community feel about Comcast?
> 
On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 06:51:05AM -0700, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> Pros:
> Cons:

Paul covered it pretty well, though my experience with Comcast
was 1 to 3 hour outages about 4x per year.  That was probably
due to the high population of users in our neighborhood saturating
and overheating the amplifiers on the line.  After frequent
occurences, I started calling them "Com-cant".

You can indeed get Internet Only service from Comcast, though
they will try to sell a bundle with TV and phone.

Regards blocked addresses, I run an outbound VPN to an offsite
virtual server, and all inbound traffic comes though that.
I can even failover to a second IP address on the offsite,
(ab)using port 443 (normally https) for the link.  They would
have a heck of a time blocking that ...

I'm now using Verizon\\\\\\\Frontier FIOS, 15M/5M (their minimum
offering), and it works great.  I'm having trouble getting the
service undergrounded, and their phone support is based on a
horror story by Edgar Allan Poe, but the bits are fine. 

And like Comcast, they try to upsell me to TV service, and
don't believe me when I say I would rather put a two inch
auger drill through my skull than watch broadcast TV (the
drill is somewhat less damaging to my alleged intelligence).

A minor issue is DNS - both Comcast and FIOS intercept DNS
port 53, and send ads rather than standard "URL not found"
messages.  Pesky.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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