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Comcast is on my list today for a different reason. We have Comcast Business Class service at one of our FL locations. Tuesday we could not access VNC nor our

by JustTim 11y ago

Comcast is on my list today for a different reason. We have Comcast Business Class service at one of our FL locations. Tuesday we could not access VNC nor our remote database services from that location. All port 80 traffic was fine. I had one of the staff call, wait on hold for an hours. Just as I suspected Comcast had implemented port blocking on a high priced business account. It took the guy a second to release it. It put our company down for two to three hours. Also the speed of Comcast service drops to 15-20% of advertised from 2:30 to 5 PM when kids arrive home from school. Once the contract is up we are moving the service to someone who understands "business class"

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
I sincerely hope you can _find_ someone else to do business with.
- unoti 11y ago
  And that is the root of the problem. Normally when a business has the kind of terrible customer service and can't-be-bothered attitude, I just take my business elsewhere. But in the last 15 years I've never had a real choice what to use for Internet service. A couple of places I've lived I've had one additional choice that was even worse. Lack of choice and diversity in Internet providers is the problem here. I'm not sure what the root of that problem is, but I suspect it's governmental corruption and lobbying to maintain status quo.
  - a3n 11y ago
    The root of the problem is the legal difference between POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), which has been around a long time, and broadband, which came much later and had the POTS environment as an example of what to avoid (from the POV of Comcast and their ilk). The old dialup ISPs were allowed to resell internet service on the local provider's POTS lines. There was quite a lot of competition, and the service was generally excellent, even generally better than the carrier's. There is no requirement for broadband providers like Comcast to allow resellers. The barrier to entry for laying other broadband lines is huge; Google is one of the few who can do it. So unless there's a quantum leap in wireless to the curb, there will be no meaningful competition to amoral corporations like Comcast; we're stuck and it will continue to suck.
  - car 11y ago
    The real root of the problem is lack of regulation. A scarce resource like the last mile copper and cable, is owned by the oligopoly of Comcast, AT&T and a few others. This constitutes in essence a monopoly, which are illegal for obvious reasons and led to the breakup of the old AT&T. Other countries have a last-mile sharing requirement, like for example in Germany. This provides at least a modicum of competition and consumer choice in the ISP market. [EDIT] Corrected wrong assumption that old AT&T was government owned.
    - e40 11y ago
      Yep. I have the choice of Comcast or AT&T, the latter of which only recently got competitive in the speed category. I was with AT&T for many years, before my current 10+ year stint with Comcast. They are both horrible on customer service and IT (managing their own infrastructure). It's really a toss up as to which is worse. I know Google fiber will never come to the East Bay (SF area). It would be so nice to have, though.
    - Quinner 11y ago
      It's really a mix of over-regulation and under-regulation, with a lot of regulatory capture. In this case the monopolies are not illegal, they're actually protected by regulation.
  - brbsix 11y ago
    Unfortunately I think this is the experience of most people in the U.S. At least in my adult life, the choice has mostly been between AT&T and Comcast. I was lucky to get 100Mbs for $50/mo for a while (obviously with a small ISP), but that was just a particular building that happened to have a point-to-point wireless setup on the roof. Now things are worse... I happen to live somewhere that actually has fiber in the ground (thanks to some federal grant the city received) but there is no service provider that uses it! I would be happy to ditch AT&T/Comcast for life if it were possible.
  - JamesBarney 11y ago
    The root problem is that telecommunications is similar to utilities in that it is a natural monopoly. Basically imagine if someone owned the only bridge into San Francisco. They could charge whatever people were willing to pay. But you would think if they charge too much money or scream obscenities at everyone who drives through, then someone could build another bridge and steal their customers. The problem is that if anyone builds another bridge the bridge owner could stop screaming obscenities and lower his prices. Then the second bridge could not make the return on capital. The prospective business owner and current owner know this so the status quo of one expensive and crappy bridge remains. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
austenallred 11y ago
The same thing happened to us recently. I can't remember which port they blocked, but it took out rubygems, bitbucket and github in all of Utah. It took a while before someone finally figured it out and word spread on Twitter. I'm sure hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of productivity were lost that day.
- tlunter 11y ago
  Future reference, github SSH can be used over 443: https://help.github.com/articles/using-ssh-over-the-https-port/ https://help.github.com/articles/using-ssh-over-the-https-po... Helpful when 22 is blocked (train stations and such)
  - matwood 11y ago
    This change is also required when sbux moves to using Google internet. I was scratching my head when it worked one week and then stopped working the next.
  - omribahumi 11y ago
    This is cool! Any open source proxy that can direct HTTP traffic to one port and SSH to another? OpenVPN supports this with the port-share option [0] [0]: https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/Openvpn23ManPage https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/Openvpn23ManPage
    - j_s 11y ago
      See this discussion of a lot of the options (sslh, haproxy, and a handful of other projects): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923092
      - omribahumi 11y ago
        Thanks!
virtuallynathan 11y ago
Can you email me about this? nathan (_) owens (@) cable (.) comcast.com
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  What is your default throttling algorithm?
  - virtuallynathan 11y ago
    You can read about it here: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6057 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6057. It impacts an extremely small percentage of users for short periods of time.
    - unprepare 11y ago
      TL;DR >For a CMTS port to enter the Near Congestion State, traffic flowing to or from that CMTS port must exceed a specified level (the "Port Utilization Threshold") for a specific period of time (the "Port Utilization Duration"). >Given our experience as described above, we determined that a starting point for the upstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 70 percent and the downstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 80 percent. For the Port Utilization Duration, we determined that the starting point should be approximately 15 minutes >Thus, over any 15-minute period, if an average of more than 70 percent of a port's upstream bandwidth capacity or more than 80 percent of a port's downstream bandwidth capacity is utilized, that port is determined to be in a Near Congestion State. >For a user to enter an Extended High Consumption State, he or she must consume greater than a certain percentage of his or her provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth(the "User Consumption Threshold") for a specific length of time (the "User Consumption Duration"). >we have determined that the appropriate starting point for the User Consumption Threshold is 70 percent of a subscriber's provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth, and that the appropriate starting point for the User Consumption Duration is 15 minutes > A user's traffic is released from a BE state when the user's bandwidth consumption drops below 50 percent of his or her provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth for a period of approximately 15 minutes.
DHJSH 11y ago
If they're blocking ports, they're not selling "Internet." They're selling something else. I would hope that someone with the resources and knowledge to make them pay for these shenanigans will....
- sneak 11y ago
  Only a tiny fraction of consumers actually believe that. For the vast majority of users, Internet == 80+443, and 25+983 for people with smartphones.
  - jarfil 11y ago
    Gamers would disagree.
    - erichmond 11y ago
      Gamers are a tiny fraction of consumers.
      - butterfi 11y ago
        Games made more then Hollywood last year, so I would suspect this is still a large audience.
        noir_lord 11y ago
        Also the audience (after possibly developers) who are willing to pay for really high speed low latency connections.
    - sneak 11y ago
      Good point - Skype and FaceTime too.
      - ParadoxOryx 11y ago
        As much as I hate Skype, it does seem to have a magical ability to connect in even the most restrictive networks.
enlightenedfool 11y ago
What other provider choice do you have? Whoever they are, they all collude to inflict maximum pain for maximum gain - a hallmark of modern capitalism. Good luck though.
- talmand 11y ago
  That's not my definition of modern capitalism, I call that corruption. A corruption enabled by government agencies that enforce monopolies that no consumers want to exist.
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    I agree that in lots of places there are franchise agreements and in others, there are specific laws that deter municipal networks. That said, you could argue that data networks are mostly a natural monopoly because it's not feasible or efficient to roll out several redundant fiber/cable networks. Even if there were no franchise agreements in place, very few companies (excepting ones that have other revenue streams) would roll out a second or third cable/fiber network in a city where there is already one in place. Even if you managed to split the market and get half of the potential customers, you'd need to account for the cost of digging trenches and laying cable (which cable TV companies have long since recouped). Makes it hard to stay solvent at such a disadvantage. It's why a lot of people think the ideal situation is for a single physical network to be built and then service providers pay for access and compete on service to businesses and customers. With physical networks divorced from service providers, the company or municipality in charge of the actual cable/fiber makes their money from maintaining and improving capacity so they can sell access to more providers. Providers compete by offering the best services and customer support in order to profit and pay for more bandwidth on the physical network. But yeah, it's more complicated (in terms of both business and networking tech) but it's an ideal that many would like to move toward.
    - talmand 11y ago
      What you describe is how the power grid where I live is handled. That's one solution I would be more interested in than these monopolies that only seem to create horrible customer service, high fees, and poor product. But in the end, I'm not sure what's the best way to handle it. I just know that many would agree that the current methods are not optimum, and possibly detrimental.

by JustTim 11y ago

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

I sincerely hope you can _find_ someone else to do business with.

unoti 11y ago
And that is the root of the problem. Normally when a business has the kind of terrible customer service and can't-be-bothered attitude, I just take my business elsewhere. But in the last 15 years I've never had a real choice what to use for Internet service. A couple of places I've lived I've had one additional choice that was even worse. Lack of choice and diversity in Internet providers is the problem here. I'm not sure what the root of that problem is, but I suspect it's governmental corruption and lobbying to maintain status quo.
- a3n 11y ago
  The root of the problem is the legal difference between POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), which has been around a long time, and broadband, which came much later and had the POTS environment as an example of what to avoid (from the POV of Comcast and their ilk). The old dialup ISPs were allowed to resell internet service on the local provider's POTS lines. There was quite a lot of competition, and the service was generally excellent, even generally better than the carrier's. There is no requirement for broadband providers like Comcast to allow resellers. The barrier to entry for laying other broadband lines is huge; Google is one of the few who can do it. So unless there's a quantum leap in wireless to the curb, there will be no meaningful competition to amoral corporations like Comcast; we're stuck and it will continue to suck.
- car 11y ago
  The real root of the problem is lack of regulation. A scarce resource like the last mile copper and cable, is owned by the oligopoly of Comcast, AT&T and a few others. This constitutes in essence a monopoly, which are illegal for obvious reasons and led to the breakup of the old AT&T. Other countries have a last-mile sharing requirement, like for example in Germany. This provides at least a modicum of competition and consumer choice in the ISP market. [EDIT] Corrected wrong assumption that old AT&T was government owned.
  - e40 11y ago
    Yep. I have the choice of Comcast or AT&T, the latter of which only recently got competitive in the speed category. I was with AT&T for many years, before my current 10+ year stint with Comcast. They are both horrible on customer service and IT (managing their own infrastructure). It's really a toss up as to which is worse. I know Google fiber will never come to the East Bay (SF area). It would be so nice to have, though.
  - Quinner 11y ago
    It's really a mix of over-regulation and under-regulation, with a lot of regulatory capture. In this case the monopolies are not illegal, they're actually protected by regulation.
- brbsix 11y ago
  Unfortunately I think this is the experience of most people in the U.S. At least in my adult life, the choice has mostly been between AT&T and Comcast. I was lucky to get 100Mbs for $50/mo for a while (obviously with a small ISP), but that was just a particular building that happened to have a point-to-point wireless setup on the roof. Now things are worse... I happen to live somewhere that actually has fiber in the ground (thanks to some federal grant the city received) but there is no service provider that uses it! I would be happy to ditch AT&T/Comcast for life if it were possible.
- JamesBarney 11y ago
  The root problem is that telecommunications is similar to utilities in that it is a natural monopoly. Basically imagine if someone owned the only bridge into San Francisco. They could charge whatever people were willing to pay. But you would think if they charge too much money or scream obscenities at everyone who drives through, then someone could build another bridge and steal their customers. The problem is that if anyone builds another bridge the bridge owner could stop screaming obscenities and lower his prices. Then the second bridge could not make the return on capital. The prospective business owner and current owner know this so the status quo of one expensive and crappy bridge remains. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

austenallred 11y ago

The same thing happened to us recently. I can't remember which port they blocked, but it took out rubygems, bitbucket and github in all of Utah. It took a while before someone finally figured it out and word spread on Twitter. I'm sure hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of productivity were lost that day.

tlunter 11y ago
Future reference, github SSH can be used over 443: https://help.github.com/articles/using-ssh-over-the-https-port/ https://help.github.com/articles/using-ssh-over-the-https-po... Helpful when 22 is blocked (train stations and such)
- matwood 11y ago
  This change is also required when sbux moves to using Google internet. I was scratching my head when it worked one week and then stopped working the next.
- omribahumi 11y ago
  This is cool! Any open source proxy that can direct HTTP traffic to one port and SSH to another? OpenVPN supports this with the port-share option [0] [0]: https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/Openvpn23ManPage https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/Openvpn23ManPage
  - j_s 11y ago
    See this discussion of a lot of the options (sslh, haproxy, and a handful of other projects): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923092
    - omribahumi 11y ago
      Thanks!

virtuallynathan 11y ago

Can you email me about this? nathan (_) owens (@) cable (.) comcast.com

tosseraccount 11y ago
What is your default throttling algorithm?
- virtuallynathan 11y ago
  You can read about it here: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6057 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6057. It impacts an extremely small percentage of users for short periods of time.
  - unprepare 11y ago
    TL;DR >For a CMTS port to enter the Near Congestion State, traffic flowing to or from that CMTS port must exceed a specified level (the "Port Utilization Threshold") for a specific period of time (the "Port Utilization Duration"). >Given our experience as described above, we determined that a starting point for the upstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 70 percent and the downstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 80 percent. For the Port Utilization Duration, we determined that the starting point should be approximately 15 minutes >Thus, over any 15-minute period, if an average of more than 70 percent of a port's upstream bandwidth capacity or more than 80 percent of a port's downstream bandwidth capacity is utilized, that port is determined to be in a Near Congestion State. >For a user to enter an Extended High Consumption State, he or she must consume greater than a certain percentage of his or her provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth(the "User Consumption Threshold") for a specific length of time (the "User Consumption Duration"). >we have determined that the appropriate starting point for the User Consumption Threshold is 70 percent of a subscriber's provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth, and that the appropriate starting point for the User Consumption Duration is 15 minutes > A user's traffic is released from a BE state when the user's bandwidth consumption drops below 50 percent of his or her provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth for a period of approximately 15 minutes.

DHJSH 11y ago

If they're blocking ports, they're not selling "Internet." They're selling something else. I would hope that someone with the resources and knowledge to make them pay for these shenanigans will....

sneak 11y ago
Only a tiny fraction of consumers actually believe that. For the vast majority of users, Internet == 80+443, and 25+983 for people with smartphones.
- jarfil 11y ago
  Gamers would disagree.
  - erichmond 11y ago
    Gamers are a tiny fraction of consumers.
    - butterfi 11y ago
      Games made more then Hollywood last year, so I would suspect this is still a large audience.
      - noir_lord 11y ago
        Also the audience (after possibly developers) who are willing to pay for really high speed low latency connections.
  - sneak 11y ago
    Good point - Skype and FaceTime too.
    - ParadoxOryx 11y ago
      As much as I hate Skype, it does seem to have a magical ability to connect in even the most restrictive networks.

enlightenedfool 11y ago

What other provider choice do you have? Whoever they are, they all collude to inflict maximum pain for maximum gain - a hallmark of modern capitalism. Good luck though.

talmand 11y ago
That's not my definition of modern capitalism, I call that corruption. A corruption enabled by government agencies that enforce monopolies that no consumers want to exist.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  I agree that in lots of places there are franchise agreements and in others, there are specific laws that deter municipal networks. That said, you could argue that data networks are mostly a natural monopoly because it's not feasible or efficient to roll out several redundant fiber/cable networks. Even if there were no franchise agreements in place, very few companies (excepting ones that have other revenue streams) would roll out a second or third cable/fiber network in a city where there is already one in place. Even if you managed to split the market and get half of the potential customers, you'd need to account for the cost of digging trenches and laying cable (which cable TV companies have long since recouped). Makes it hard to stay solvent at such a disadvantage. It's why a lot of people think the ideal situation is for a single physical network to be built and then service providers pay for access and compete on service to businesses and customers. With physical networks divorced from service providers, the company or municipality in charge of the actual cable/fiber makes their money from maintaining and improving capacity so they can sell access to more providers. Providers compete by offering the best services and customer support in order to profit and pay for more bandwidth on the physical network. But yeah, it's more complicated (in terms of both business and networking tech) but it's an ideal that many would like to move toward.
  - talmand 11y ago
    What you describe is how the power grid where I live is handled. That's one solution I would be more interested in than these monopolies that only seem to create horrible customer service, high fees, and poor product. But in the end, I'm not sure what's the best way to handle it. I just know that many would agree that the current methods are not optimum, and possibly detrimental.