I’ve had Comcast for my internet service for a couple of years now. Initially the service was fine with few complaints from me. In the last six months or so though the service has rapidly gone downhill. It started with a slow down in overall speed frequently. This was not such a shock since cable uses a shared bandwidth system for the local area. What this means is that the more users in your local area the slower available bandwidth per user. But other things have come up that lead me to using the above title.
It began with the recent decision to start messing around with P2P traffic. They are doing this by sending what is called a TCP reset packet to people they decide are using P2P software. What this does is slow down traffic to that user. I am not a huge user of any P2P stuff so it should not affect me right? Well it seems that it has a bleed over affect on other types of traffic in general. For me, I saw problems with HTTP and mail access. This culminated in a suspicious outage a couple of months back that affected HTTP, gaming, and access to various sites. Comcast never fully explained this, but it also coincided with their enabling the P2P throttling. Comcast has since backed off on this since they are now being sued over it.
I’ve also had a number of unsolvable problems with my service. They insist it is not the modem, but the connection seems to reset itself multiple times a day. Often when I start really using the connection say for playing WoW. I’ve replaced lines, removed a splitter and they say nothing is wrong. I could have them replace the modem, but I am dropping the service instead.
The final straw for me has been a combination of bandwidth capping and their blocking of port 25 outgoing for anyone not using their specific servers. The bandwidth cap is not the problem in and of itself. It is Comcast’s vagueness on what the cap actually is. How can you keep yourself from going over if they are not forthcoming on what it is? Bigger for me is the port 25 blockage though. Port 25 is the port used to send mail to other people. If you use gmail, or some other service you may be using their mail servers to send. With Comcast this is no longer possible. They have blocked all outgoing traffic except to their own mail servers. This is a bad decision used only to force business customers to pay to use them I think. Luckily there are workarounds though.
These technical problems are a big issue, but the poor customer service overall has left me with a bad taste in my mouth over using them. I will switch to FIOS I think. Sorry Comcast, but you are not meeting my needs and are rather costly.
Tags: 3 Comments
3 responses so far ↓
I would be happy to discuss bandwidth caps, and that port 25 block when spam is reported from the IP address, which is common practice for ISPs, but I am more concerned with the technical issues you mention. The drops would be identifiable through the modem logs. I would recommend looking also at the router. I would be happy to troubleshoot both the router and modem with you.
By the way, with email, you would just change to port 587 with secured authentication and it would work with most, if not all, mail providers. If your mail provider does not support 587, we do have alternatives. This is outlined in the notification sent when port 25 is blocked. This notification is send to the Comcast.net email.
If you search the internet for Port 587 you will see that it is becoming the new standard for outgoing mail.
I just started following you on Twitter. If you DM the phone number on the account I can pull some statistics from the modem to see what might be causing you the trouble.
Thank you for the feedback and I look forward to helping you!
Have a great weekend!
Frank Eliason
Comcast
@ComcastCares on Twitter
We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com
Interestingly I’ve known a number of ppl getting blocked with no warning, including myself. I never received any notification. I had to just figure it out myself. A call to customer service basically told me to just use comcast mail servers and that I was obviously doing something wrong. I also use OS X so whenever I do call in the only help I get “reset your cable modem” and “you have to reboot your computer”. I like having to reboot my computer when the cable modem randomly resets.
I know for a fact no spam originated from my ip. More likely you are dealing with spoofing. (I do this stuff for a living). I do mac filtering on the internal side to allow access from computers on my local network.
Sorry I am not going to send you account information via Twitter since I have no idea who you are. I appreciate your attempt to help though.
I am a Mac person too! The trouble could be an email that was sent to a large audience or undisclosed recipients. If changing to port 587 is causing trouble, just let me know and I can see what I can do for you. I also understand your concern regarding identification. I have had a pretty good track record of helping. The link below is a google search that will show this success.
http://tinyurl.com/5fynsq
To further add comfort, my personal email is below.
Thanks again!
Frank Eliason
frank_eliason@cable.comcast.com