[JustTim]

Comcast is on my list today for a different reason. We have Comcast Business Class service at one of our FL locations.

Tuesday we could not access VNC nor our remote database services from that location. All port 80 traffic was fine. I had one of the staff call, wait on hold for an hours.

Just as I suspected Comcast had implemented port blocking on a high priced business account. It took the guy a second to release it. It put our company down for two to three hours.

Also the speed of Comcast service drops to 15-20% of advertised from 2:30 to 5 PM when kids arrive home from school.

Once the contract is up we are moving the service to someone who understands "business class"

[austenallred]

The same thing happened to us recently. I can't remember which port they blocked, but it took out rubygems, bitbucket and github in all of Utah.

It took a while before someone finally figured it out and word spread on Twitter. I'm sure hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of productivity were lost that day.

[tlunter]

Future reference, github SSH can be used over 443: https://help.github.com/articles/using-ssh-over-the-https-po...

Helpful when 22 is blocked (train stations and such)

[omribahumi]

This is cool! Any open source proxy that can direct HTTP traffic to one port and SSH to another? OpenVPN supports this with the port-share option [0]

[0]: https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/Openvpn23ManPage

[j_s]

See this discussion of a lot of the options (sslh, haproxy, and a handful of other projects):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923092

[omribahumi]

Thanks!

[matwood]

This change is also required when sbux moves to using Google internet. I was scratching my head when it worked one week and then stopped working the next.

[JustSomeNobody]

I sincerely hope you can _find_ someone else to do business with.

[unoti]

And that is the root of the problem. Normally when a business has the kind of terrible customer service and can't-be-bothered attitude, I just take my business elsewhere. But in the last 15 years I've never had a real choice what to use for Internet service. A couple of places I've lived I've had one additional choice that was even worse. Lack of choice and diversity in Internet providers is the problem here. I'm not sure what the root of that problem is, but I suspect it's governmental corruption and lobbying to maintain status quo.

[a3n]

The root of the problem is the legal difference between POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), which has been around a long time, and broadband, which came much later and had the POTS environment as an example of what to avoid (from the POV of Comcast and their ilk).

The old dialup ISPs were allowed to resell internet service on the local provider's POTS lines. There was quite a lot of competition, and the service was generally excellent, even generally better than the carrier's.

There is no requirement for broadband providers like Comcast to allow resellers. The barrier to entry for laying other broadband lines is huge; Google is one of the few who can do it. So unless there's a quantum leap in wireless to the curb, there will be no meaningful competition to amoral corporations like Comcast; we're stuck and it will continue to suck.

[car]

The real root of the problem is lack of regulation. A scarce resource like the last mile copper and cable, is owned by the oligopoly of Comcast, AT&T and a few others. This constitutes in essence a monopoly, which are illegal for obvious reasons and led to the breakup of the old AT&T. Other countries have a last-mile sharing requirement, like for example in Germany. This provides at least a modicum of competition and consumer choice in the ISP market.

[EDIT] Corrected wrong assumption that old AT&T was government owned.

[e40]

Yep. I have the choice of Comcast or AT&T, the latter of which only recently got competitive in the speed category. I was with AT&T for many years, before my current 10+ year stint with Comcast. They are both horrible on customer service and IT (managing their own infrastructure). It's really a toss up as to which is worse.

I know Google fiber will never come to the East Bay (SF area). It would be so nice to have, though.

[Quinner]

It's really a mix of over-regulation and under-regulation, with a lot of regulatory capture. In this case the monopolies are not illegal, they're actually protected by regulation.

[JamesBarney]

The root problem is that telecommunications is similar to utilities in that it is a natural monopoly.

Basically imagine if someone owned the only bridge into San Francisco. They could charge whatever people were willing to pay. But you would think if they charge too much money or scream obscenities at everyone who drives through, then someone could build another bridge and steal their customers. The problem is that if anyone builds another bridge the bridge owner could stop screaming obscenities and lower his prices. Then the second bridge could not make the return on capital. The prospective business owner and current owner know this so the status quo of one expensive and crappy bridge remains.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

[brbsix]

Unfortunately I think this is the experience of most people in the U.S. At least in my adult life, the choice has mostly been between AT&T and Comcast. I was lucky to get 100Mbs for $50/mo for a while (obviously with a small ISP), but that was just a particular building that happened to have a point-to-point wireless setup on the roof. Now things are worse... I happen to live somewhere that actually has fiber in the ground (thanks to some federal grant the city received) but there is no service provider that uses it! I would be happy to ditch AT&T/Comcast for life if it were possible.

[virtuallynathan]

Can you email me about this? nathan (_) owens (@) cable (.) comcast.com

[archildress]

With all due respect, your customer service policy should be based on doing the right thing regardless of the forum, as opposed to simply responding to those who have an audience.

The data caps you've recently put into place in my market are going to effectively double my account price per month. I look forward to the day that I have other choices.

[samtho]

The employees are not to blame here. If he is browsing HN, he knows the pain points with Comcast and is just trying to help.

[organsnyder]

No one is blaming individual employees. Quite the opposite, in fact—they're blaming the organization for failing to address issues unless the right individual is reached.

That's been my experience, as well. In two instances (one business class, one residential), I had issues getting their construction department to actually do the work they promised until I was able to get through to the escalation department—once via Twitter, once (IIRC) on dslreports.com back when the Comcast direct forum was monitored. Once the escalation department was engaged, things moved very quickly, with them calling me almost daily with status updates.

There are clearly individuals at Comcast who care about customer service. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be the ones in charge of organizational policies and processes.

[Eldarrion]

Agreed. I recently decided to give Comcast another go because my current provider has some horribly bad upstream speeds, but even with brand new service, I seem to be having issues where my connection drops 4-5 times a day. It is not too big a deal when you're trying to work from home, but it can be a massive pain in the neck when you're trying to play anything online. I've been trying to resolve this issue with their customer support but I've gotten nowhere so far and feel like I'll probably just go ahead and cancel out of the contract before my first month is up.

They do advertise that they spend millions of dollars on improving their customer support, but I've yet to see anything happen on their end. Amusingly, our Comcast business contract at work has at least a couple of issues every week, too. We only don't notice them if they are to happen over the weekend, but when CRON jobs that require internet connection haven't run over the weekend, it's easy to figure out who needs blamed.

[archildress]

I agree with you. I'm troubled though by this new era of customer service where the focus is on having a team of people who monitor social media for the loudest complaints and devote resources to solving those out of fear of bad PR.

[virtuallynathan]

I do my best (customer support is not my day job) - if you are having issues I'd encourage you to try out the tool I helped build here: https://speedexperience.xfinity.com/

[douche]

Does it ever say anything but chat with an agent?

Some listing of what the actual issue is would be kinda useful, even if you shove it in a collapsible div to hide it away.

I (and most people) are more likely to rage-quit and go do something else than try to navigate three layers of outsourced customer service that is designed and optimized to deflect people, waste their time, and only if they are sufficiently insistent, and border-line belligerent, maybe give them an answer more involved than "unplug your modem and plug it back in"

[virtuallynathan]

Yes, it depends what the issue is. We check:

- If your modem is EOL

- If you modem's ethernet port is 100Mbps, and you have >100Mbps service

- If your modem is otherwise capable of providing your speed (i.e. number of DOCSIS channels)

- We check your signal levels to make sure they are in spec

- We check if you have been impacted by our Protocol Agnostic Congestion management system in the past 1 day or 30 days.

If any of these checks are triggered, we show it on the page. If nothing is triggered, we allow you to go straight to a chat.

We'll be adding more checks as time goes on, mostly around Wifi - MCS Index, Link rate, RSSI, etc.

[metal]

Ironically on that page the "highly recommended" link to https://speedtest.comcast.net/ times out.

[virtuallynathan]

Thanks for catching it! I'll fix it now! (We just did a revamp of the site text this week, must have slipped - we only 2 of us work on it :) )

EDIT: fixed! let me know if you see anything else out of place.

[pavel_lishin]

At least one employee would be to blame, right? Comcast's network hasn't become sentient, and isn't actively rebelling against human businesses by shutting down random ports. At some point, someone either made an explicit decision to do this, or decided to skimp on training.

[jarfil]

It could also be an endemic culture problem, where lots of people skimp on lots of tiny things to the point that the final performance goes down the drain. No one to blame, but everyone to blame.

[asd]

> I look forward to the day that I have other choices.

Same here. They are very aware that we have no other choices. They will continue provide the least amount of service for the greatest cost until this changes.

[knodi123]

The week after google fiber arrived in my neighborhood, my cable provider "spontaneously" decided to double my connection speed for the same price, "because we care about our customers and want them to have the best experience possible."

[douche]

As usual, South Park absolutely skewered cable companies, and pretty much said all there is to be said

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0sAVtOt2wA

[Killswitch]

I had Comcast when I lived in Chicago. They basically run that city. You can't get any decent internet anywhere else. All the other providers for some reason in the city, didn't cover any neighborhood I was in.

The biggest thing I liked, moving back to Iowa was decent internet provider.

[tosseraccount]

What is your default throttling algorithm?

[virtuallynathan]

You can read about it here: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6057. It impacts an extremely small percentage of users for short periods of time.

[unprepare]

TL;DR

>For a CMTS port to enter the Near Congestion State, traffic flowing to or from that CMTS port must exceed a specified level (the "Port Utilization Threshold") for a specific period of time (the "Port Utilization Duration").

>Given our experience as described above, we determined that a starting point for the upstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 70 percent and the downstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 80 percent. For the Port Utilization Duration, we determined that the starting point should be approximately 15 minutes

>Thus, over any 15-minute period, if an average of more than 70 percent of a port's upstream bandwidth capacity or more than 80 percent of a port's downstream bandwidth capacity is utilized, that port is determined to be in a Near Congestion State.

>For a user to enter an Extended High Consumption State, he or she must consume greater than a certain percentage of his or her provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth(the "User Consumption Threshold") for a specific length of time (the "User Consumption Duration").

>we have determined that the appropriate starting point for the User Consumption Threshold is 70 percent of a subscriber's provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth, and that the appropriate starting point for the User Consumption Duration is 15 minutes

> A user's traffic is released from a BE state when the user's bandwidth consumption drops below 50 percent of his or her provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth for a period of approximately 15 minutes.

[LockeWatts]

So, if I'm reading this right, if you use more than 80% of what you pay for, they throttle you to 50% of what you pay for?

[unprepare]

hmm, actually i don't think i caught how much your speeds are actually reduced.

Its throttled until you've used less than 50% of what you pay for for at least 15 minutes.

That threshold is so low specifically so that a line doesn't end up cycling between throttled and not every interval if its 79% once then 81% the next, etc.

It seems obvious to me that Comcast et al are vastly overselling beyond their capacity.

They then market these strategies as methods to ensure quality to their customers, when their customers bought a service that was misadvertised as having enough capacity for them in the first place.

Just like airlines - they sell more tickets than they have seats, because they figure they can squeeze more profit out of the people who paid for a ticket but didnt show up, then when everyone shows up, someone has to get bumped.

[CuddlyChud]

I believe it is that if you use more than 80% and someone else is using 60%, IF throttling occurs on the network, the person using 60% will have priority over you.

[virtuallynathan]

Only if the CMTS is also over 80% utilization for over 15 minutes, and you are using your connection at >80% for over 15 minutes.

[CuddlyChud]

Just to add to this. From the document:

Question #1: Is the CMTS Upstream Port Utilization at an average of OVER 70% for OVER 15 minutes?

    Result #1: CMTS marked in a Near Congestion State, indicating
               congestion *may* occur soon.

    Action #1: Search most recent analysis timeframe (approx. 15 mins.)
               of IPDR usage data.

  Question #2: Are any users consuming an average of OVER 70% of
               provisioned upstream bandwidth for OVER 15 minutes?

    Result #2: No action taken.

    Result #3: Change user's upstream traffic from Priority Best Effort
               (PBE) to Best Effort (BE).

  Question #3: Is the user in Best Effort (BE) consuming an average
               of LESS THAN 50% of provisioned upstream bandwidth
               over a period of 15 minutes?

    Result #4: Change user's upstream traffic back to Priority Best
               Effort (PBE) from Best Effort (BE).

[DHJSH]

If they're blocking ports, they're not selling "Internet." They're selling something else.

I would hope that someone with the resources and knowledge to make them pay for these shenanigans will....

[sneak]

Only a tiny fraction of consumers actually believe that. For the vast majority of users, Internet == 80+443, and 25+983 for people with smartphones.

[vezzy-fnord]

Systems do not change just because a sufficient mass of people believe otherwise.

[jarfil]

Gamers would disagree.

[sneak]

Good point - Skype and FaceTime too.

[ParadoxOryx]

As much as I hate Skype, it does seem to have a magical ability to connect in even the most restrictive networks.

[erichmond]

Gamers are a tiny fraction of consumers.

[butterfi]

Games made more then Hollywood last year, so I would suspect this is still a large audience.

[noir_lord]

Also the audience (after possibly developers) who are willing to pay for really high speed low latency connections.

[dsmithatx]

He was talking about Business class Internet not home users.

[enlightenedfool]

What other provider choice do you have? Whoever they are, they all collude to inflict maximum pain for maximum gain - a hallmark of modern capitalism. Good luck though.

[talmand]

That's not my definition of modern capitalism, I call that corruption. A corruption enabled by government agencies that enforce monopolies that no consumers want to exist.

[soylentcola]

I agree that in lots of places there are franchise agreements and in others, there are specific laws that deter municipal networks.

That said, you could argue that data networks are mostly a natural monopoly because it's not feasible or efficient to roll out several redundant fiber/cable networks.

Even if there were no franchise agreements in place, very few companies (excepting ones that have other revenue streams) would roll out a second or third cable/fiber network in a city where there is already one in place. Even if you managed to split the market and get half of the potential customers, you'd need to account for the cost of digging trenches and laying cable (which cable TV companies have long since recouped). Makes it hard to stay solvent at such a disadvantage.

It's why a lot of people think the ideal situation is for a single physical network to be built and then service providers pay for access and compete on service to businesses and customers. With physical networks divorced from service providers, the company or municipality in charge of the actual cable/fiber makes their money from maintaining and improving capacity so they can sell access to more providers. Providers compete by offering the best services and customer support in order to profit and pay for more bandwidth on the physical network.

But yeah, it's more complicated (in terms of both business and networking tech) but it's an ideal that many would like to move toward.

[talmand]

What you describe is how the power grid where I live is handled. That's one solution I would be more interested in than these monopolies that only seem to create horrible customer service, high fees, and poor product.

But in the end, I'm not sure what's the best way to handle it. I just know that many would agree that the current methods are not optimum, and possibly detrimental.

[knowaveragejoe]

How would an effective monopoly not exist in something with such a massive upfront capital requirement and vast land requirements?

[tremon]

By letting the government build and own the infrastructure, then lease the exploitation of it to private companies, and have other companies do the maintenance. This has its own challenges too, but at least the monopoly is in the hands of people who can be voted out.

This model was used regularly for rail and power networks in Europe, but these have all been privatised in the past few decades citing "cost reductions". The net result is that our infrastructure is deteriorating, consumer prices are rising way faster than inflation, and critical infrastructure is now in the hands of a few international power brokers (e.g. the Dutch national telephone grid is owned by Carlos Slim).

[talmand]

If that's how it came about then I would be more apt to accept that. But in the U.S., I find it doubtful any current telecommunications monopoly came to exist without government involvement. A good chunk of that upfront capital and land requirement was given away by the government for promises those companies didn't keep.

[yeukhon]

Yet, you need money from the beginning, so you are now back to issuing more bonds, and perhaps, raising capitals with venture investors. This is basically the model of the 19, 20th century railroad race. Of course the government wasn't directly building the railroad, but they were the one who gave the lands and even troops to open up the new frontiers.

[spinlock]

The sad thing is, the government broke up AT&T before they had a chance to connect every home in America with fiber. The project end dat was 2000 :/