[ale] OT: Comcast'ers

[Daniel Howard]

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