travis' brain dump

Well, I’ve successfully gotten myself un-hooked from the Comcraptic network and I must say I’m quite pleased with my decision. Yes, I will end up paying a little more in taxes on my Qwest line but you know what? It’s WORTH EVERY DOLLAR!

I’m getting twice the speed down and twice the speed up consistently! For a few bucks less per service and a few bucks more in taxes, I have a full 7mbit (6Mbit after overhead) down instead of throttled 6Mbit and 900Kbit (768K after overhead) up instead of the throttled 384Kbit I had before. I mean c`mon, after throttling I was getting maybe 2-3Mbit down and 128-200Kbit up… So why was I paying for throttled 6/384?

Oh yeah, and did I mention that Qwest doesn’t care if I host stuff out of my house and they let me have a static IP for almost nothing? Not to mention they still at this time believe in giving you what you pay for. 

I’m most definitely not alone on this one… (for another rant, click here) It inspired me to write my rant up as well. 🙂 Congratulations on shedding the bandwidth throttling and coming over to the greener pasture.

Now, keep in mind that doing some network-management is ok when the occasional users abuses the “fat pipe” they are paying for but to be consistently throttling someone based on a specific protocol or a blanket policy on the user account for all time is a little overboard. IF a such abuse occurs then balance the equation based on a specific time duration on a SINGLE SESSION and ONLY if it is impacting other network traffic sessions competing for the same allocated hardline…. do some real network-management or something instead of sticking a customer in “time-out” indefinitely…

When I first heard about these issues people were having with Comcast I decided to run some tests…

The first week I downloaded some files from my test server and capped my pipe. I was pulling stuff from this server in particular at 4-5Mb a second without a single hitch. I personally thought people posting up complaints were insane. But I continued testing. Within a matter of *DAYS* my download test DROPPED to a matter of Kbit download speeds from my system. Assuming a possible problem with routing or other traffic, I tried the same test on multiple occasions on different days only to find that it was capped dead at a specific level. Excuse me?! Not only were my speeds affected directly to this system but they were everywhere… my bandwidth speed tests to other locations had also dropped dramatically for my once a day test to three seperate sites over the course of a few days.

Way to go chuckleheads.

At least things are better now… all is well. 🙂