On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 11:36 AM, Richard Stovall <[email protected]> wrote: > Anyone have the 50/10 service from Comcast? Any thoughts or > experiences?
I can't speak to the 50/10 service level, but we've had Comcast for a few years here. It's fine for what I call "disposable bandwidth" -- web browsing, downloads, etc. Blazing fast and dirt cheap. But I would never put anything "mission critical" on it. We have another feed (fixed wireless, through a local ISP) for that. Comcast still basically sees everything as TV. If TV is out, it's an inconvenience, you have some upset customers, you maybe loose some PPV dollars, but ultimately, it's just not that big a deal. Their phones and Internet are the same way. They actually work okay most of the time, but hey, if they go down, no big deal, right? Don't put a mail server on it. Simply being on Comcast weighs against you in many spam filters. Maybe 2 or 3 times per year, it flakes out. We have to power off the CPE, wait a minute, power on to get it to resume. Comcast is an HFC (hybrid fiber-coax) system. HFC runs fiber to "optical nodes", which are large boxes hung off utility poles. Coax runs from the nodes to your premises. The nodes need elecricity and are supplied by city power. They might have batteries, but they don't last very long. No generators. So if power is out in your area for more than an hour or two, you *will* go down, and you'll be out for the duration. We've had two big storms in the past two years where Comcast was out for days. No power at the node, though we had power at our plant. Our copper telephone lines never even flickered. The telcos know how to build a robust system, I'll give them that. (Or they used to know -- consumer FTTP is another story entirely.) Comcast's SLAs are a joke. Their standard SLA says, "If you don't like the service, you're free to cancel". Their "Symmetric" SLA says if it does down for long enough, you can get some money back, but it's prorated down to the hour and *they* decide what "down" means. So packet loss is 30% and next-hop RTT is 300 ms might qualify as "up". -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
