rant mode on

I live in a certain area that is to far from the "CO"/ Central office / DSLAM Aggregator Head end Unit to get Good DSL, except "iDSL" or DSL over ISDN, giving me 144Kbit/sec (wooo welcome to 1995 for me when I ran a FIDONET BBS Internet mail gateway). I am at 19,800 effective cable feet away, being to far for any kind of "high speed".

AT&T uVerse is plagued by infrastructure problems with pile-on from the iPhone and other similar things... plus I had a business relationship with them with a SLA agreement for a 144MB/sec ATM Internet feed... which they failed miserably at. So, AT&T is out of the question.

This basically leaves two options:

1) Bring in a dedicated T-1 (1.54Mbits/sec) at about $350/month for the T-1 service and another $200/month for the Internet Service.

2) Comcast High Speed Internet... (Extreme Speed "16Mbit/sec" with throttling and with Download Cap) for $67.95/month

So, I've had cable Internet for 14 years. Started out with "@HOME" service from the AT&T Cable Service around here. Then AT&T "renegotiated" and with-held nearly $2B in payments to "@HOME" and cause them to go into bankruptcy... after which in liquidation AT&T purchased the bulk of the network for a few pennies on the dollar debt.

AT&T sold off the Cable Subsidiary due to "regulation" clamp down... to another HORRIBLE Cable provider and the ISP side became a quagmire of failings. Service outages became the norm... when the whole cable company got bought by Comcast.

Great! I heard wonderful things about Comcast (at the time), some friends in Philly area had them and loved them.

Well, things changed, about 7 years ago, for the BAAAD.

Since I am a Senior Network Engineer and Systems Administrator (Mainly UNIX, Linux and *BSD), I have tools available to me that the average Joe doesn't.

I use a hand made firewall, with all the "rules" hand crafted as well. I can run my firewall in promiscuous mode. listening to all the traffic on the wire. Holy Smokes! They had a horribly configured network setup. Effectively *8* different 16,382 (meaning 131,000 computers/nodes) networks all using the same wire (actually collision domain).

Horrible dropping packets, horrible throughput... features that were available before no longer were (Static IP addresses for instance, that I was still paying for, among other QoS feature just disappearing).

So, all in all things have improved since then, but now that Comcast has aserious attidue towards its customers:
http://techdirt.com/.../1624136747.shtml

And now starting December 1, 2009 Strict enforcement of it 250GB Cap... introduced in August.
http://news.cnet.com...9-10028506-2.html

Of course, they sold the Comcast Blast (16Mbit/sec) service as *Unlimited* as recently as June 2009... of course you can now only use 50% of your bandwidth for 15 minutes before throttling happens or if you go over the 250GB cap you are limited to "non-priority traffic", IOW if anyone else is using the Internet at all, you have to wait...

So... we come to the real ball of wax I am pissed about, Since Late November 30th (about 7PM) and Every Night since starting about 7PM ET, the network just falls over. Existing connections to things, work... but browsing, video, streaming, ssh connections, e-mail, DNS resolution pretty much everything just *HALTS*

Watching everything with my tools I have, gives me all the info I need. They are now shoveling a new "tftp" config to the cable modems across the whole network. Putting the Cable modems in "maintenance mode" and then being overwhelmed and not able to complete the configurations sequence and the Cable modems broadcast for the Maintenance mode 0 commands... nothing returned. I am also seeing huge numbers a QAM, Channel Syncing and DHCP response (from the management network for the Cable Modem) problems. All this starting at 7PM ET.

I've called Customer Service and gotten run through the Script and then they offer to send out a tech the next day... Of course I've asked for pro-rating of my bill, this impacts me horribly as I am a telecommuter from Grand Rapids to Denver. They then politely say they are working as hard as possible to rectify the situation, of course the obligatory works "Are you going to remove the cap system causing this problem?" and of course the Obligatory response is "What system?"

GRR!

end-rant