Ok, I have a little more time now to rant on this... iirc, the Docsis or whatever it's called doesn't have any SLA. They did have something when we used it... but it was like: for a day long outage they would refund a small part of your bill. Great... not. We actually had a 20 HOUR outage with them once. They had no idea how to fix it. Many people on their support staff didn't even know what docsis 3 was, they only knew how to support docsis 2.0. There was also like 3 pieces of equipment that they had to install - and they all were consumer grade. And they always froze up. I finally installed a telephone operated power supply to all 3 units because I had to reboot them all the time. Also, no local support after hours. Everything is routed to (Denver?) - and they are complete idiots there. Local support always bitches about the people in Denver, and vice versa. Each (Local vs. Denver) had a COMPLETLY different was of doing thinks.
Seriously, even one of their actually brilliant techs drew out the backbone of their network to my on my whiteboard. It's terrible. If you have comcast business, do a tracert. Then do the same tracert on another isp - you will notice MANY more hops on Comcast. They never let us out of the contract even though everyone at Comcast agreed we had a terrible experience. I didn't bother fighting it, I just dumbed it down to the $59 a month plan. I got back on fiber VERY quickly. Luckily . Also, they TREAT SMTP TRAFFIC LIKE THE DEVIL. Do NOT ever put a SMTP server behind this. (Their techs told me this). They will just sporadically drop SMTP traffic out of the blue. It's something that carried over from the consumer side. Everybody at Comcast hates this and wants this practice to go away - they seriously just don't know how to un-implement it, technically and on paper. Red tape is everywhere in the company. Luckily they told me this upfront, so I didn't put our SMTP traffic on their IPs. -Sam I wrote this in flash, sorry for any typos. -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 5:44 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: OT: Comcast Business Docsis 3.0 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/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
