Friday, May 21, 2004 11:29 PM
Bye Bye Comcast
May 25 will be the last day of my Comcast service. Want to hear the tale? I knew you would. Comcast HS Internet is not cheap. It runs about $50/month for 3 mega-bit downstream and fairly good service in this area. Comcast wants to sell you more stuff, especially if you're just a cable Internet customer like we are. Comcast wants you to buy cable TV. Given how much they're charging my take on it is they should be giving us basic cable for free bundled with the ISP service. Well they don't see it that way.
At the end of March they sent us a little letter saying we were a bunch of freeloaders for only using their wire for networking and they had discovered that we were getting a $10/month discount that we didn't deserve because we were scum of the earth HSI customers and not glorious TV viewers. The gist of it was they were going to start taxing us an extra $10 unless we coughed up another $30/month for TV! Nope, that was the last straw. SBC/Yahoo is currently offering up to 1.5 Mb service for $26, no setup fees, no modem cost. Say what you will about the difference in speed but the bottom line is that your speed with a broadband (>1 Mb) connection is totally dependent on the speed of the server on the other end of your request.
SBC delivered on everything on or ahead of schedule. I'm getting >1 Mb downstream, my old Linksys router is running as the PPPoE client and keeping my connection hot all the time. Everything is going quite smoothly. The trade offs? Well, there's no free web site without ads but a personal site hosted much better than this one is easy to come by for no more than $5/month and that will include lots of server-side goodies that aren't available here. The absolute top downstream is less than a third but it's generally unnoticable and, hey, it's half the cost of these shysters!
So long cable guys. If you had a clue you'd still have some customers but I suspect a lot of others will be jumping your ship in the near future.
Saturday, March 27, 2004 9:55 AM
A ride through hell
Elena is a nuclear engineer and a motorcyle enthusiest. Sometimes she rides where no one else has the courage to go. In our push to "energy independence" these are pictures that must not be lost from our collective memory.
Saturday, February 28, 2004 4:55 PM
Follow up on the router problem
Comcast's online help told me to send email to customer.care@comcast.net but it bounced. That only proves there's no customer care at Comcast. Linksys basically replied, "Gee thanks for telling us about this problem. We'll think about fixing it some day."
Love them Republicans
Got a forwarded email from a HS classmate regarding some doubts about John Kerry's service in Vietnam. Rather sad. Seems they're losing out on the brave warrior front since Kerry actually went to Nam so they can't pull the old, "He's not patriotic" line so now they're going to roll out the "He's not patriotic enough" gambit ala Joe McCarthy.
Sunday, February 22, 2004 8:25 PM
Lots of fun and games with networking. About the first of Feb my email and newsgroups flaked out. This has happened with mail a few times in the past and generally it was something squirrelly in the infrastructure at Comcast, ne ATTBI, ne @Home. Well it never came back so I started fiddling with software. I had updated my Mozilla to 1.6 around that time so that's where the fiddling began. I uninstalled 1.6, reinstalled 1.5, uninstalled 1.5, reinstalled 1.6, installed Thunderbird, got some email functionality back, migrated as much as possible to Thunderbird, still no news, installed Xnews, same symptom with it. The symptom was the news readers could connect to the servers with no errors but no news protocol seemed to ever take place.
After determining Comcast wasn't conciously interfering with news in a dastardly plot to force everyone to Giganews, I tried Mozilla 1.4 on another PC and it didn't work any better. This meant basically a range of software on more than one machine was experiencing the same problem. The only program I could talk to the news servers with was telnet and that's not a very satisfying news reading experience.
Finally I decided the one black box I hadn't shook up was my Linksys router that was running the latest version of its software. So, out of desparation, I reloaded its software with the previous version and everything came back to life. I've reported the whole mess to Cisco/Linksys and I'll post the result here when they respond. So if you're running a Linksys BEFSR41, stick with version 1.44.2 of the firmware and be very leery of installing 1.45.7.