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Maybe it’s my phone line quality, but Comcast’s service has been far superior to any Bellsouth DSL I had. The bandwidth limits have been discussed for years. Mostly it has been people downloading hundreds of gigabytes per month. Lately I’m reading that video and audio streaming has caused people to get dumped. Hopefully that is not the case, because I’m “guilty” of listening to online radio and downloading movies directly from Amazon with my Tivo.

I don’t use Comcast email, but it looks like you’d have to subscribe to their Brightmail spam outsourcing to be affected, and apparently Symantec was getting spam complaints about the website in question. Dunno. I wouldn’t use Brightmail, and I wouldn’t use anything Symantec.

Since the days of the independent, local ISP are pretty much over, I’m guessing just about any of the giants we have to subscribe to are checking our email, if not listening to our phone conversations. Have we slipped down that slippery slope into fascism yet? Will we know if/when we get there? Inquiring minds want to know. In the meantime, I’m chugging along at 8/768 and hoping the bottom doesn’t drop out.

Posted: 11:15am.

Successful Trolling Achieved: 1:29pm.

Not bad for a Sunday morning.

Had to get in that 8/768 dig, too, eh?

I do understand what you are saying … but I think a lot of it has to do with inertia. For example, me and Earthlink. The sole reason I am still there is inertia. Mine.

But I’m looking. And these issues definitely impact on my choice. I know many of those cut off were using 100GB+ per month. I also have read of cases where the usage seemed well within norms, with evidence provided, and yet they were still cut off. That’s a bit too vague for me. As for the email issue, some are in a situation that requires them to use at least the outgoing SMTP of their ISP. And the particular site in question was political in nature, and they got “jobbed” by some of their opponents. They were not signed up for Brightmail. But everyone who was did not get their emails. The opportunity for someone who is mad at you to abuse the system appears too risky to me.

So if my choice is those fat caveats with 8/768 (and no servers), or 3/384 DSL via Speedfactory with no bandwidth limit or server restrictions … I’ll poke along at a speed ~107 times faster than when I first got on the Innerwebs.

Grrrr…hook in mouth disease again! And it isn’t even April 1. But don’t you have an overheated processor to attend to? It’s nice to be running a Cray, but hey…....

I know I’ll be howling like a stuck pig if I get dumped for my radio and Tivo habits. And I’ll be howling into forums and generating pretty much nothing but a little sympathy and a lot of “told you so’s”. As far as Brightmail, I have trouble feeling sorry for people who rely on corporate entities to filter their email. You kind of get what you rtfm for. If email is important to you, maybe read up on different solutions? Otoh, couldn’t Comcast do better than Britemail? And if they’re dumping subscribers over bandwidth abuse, you’d think they’d be a little quicker to shut down some of their spam zombies. My corporate email has been joe-jobbed a ton of times, and for months I would send Comcast abuse the headers of the zombie machines on their network that were spewing it. Not only did I never get a response, a year later, a lot of the machines I reported were still spewing.

I think Speedfactory was bought out by somebody, but checking their web page, 3/384 is $79.95/mo!! Whoa. So if you want to run servers it’s either Earthlink or pay an extra $30 at SF. I might be inclined to think inertia had its virtues.

“I have trouble feeling sorry for people who rely on corporate entities to filter their email”

The thing is, many otherwise knowledgeable business people have as much Net-savvy as your Grandma. And, from what I’ve seen, there’s a handful of business providers out there, who sell the less than net-savvy folks A Whole Package; Internet connection, email, and web hosting. 2 of those 3 offerings are always sub-par.

You and I have to remember we’re not normal. Normal people hear “less spam” and say “sign me up.” Normal people run Norton … and call weirdos like us when it borks their system. They don’t even know “Symantec” is a cuss word.

And $79.95? That’s for DSL at a location zoned as a business. Try $49.95. Static IP and networking support is $10 more. And, yes, they were bought out, but appear to still be locally run.

So it’s going to end up costing me $20 more a month to double my speed, once I can reach a “break point” that will allow enough breathing room for a few days downtime.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to sound all superior because I don’t have to deal with Comcast. I still have BellSouth, even if they now insist I call them by another name.

I think it may be an equivalent level of Hell.

Okay, I had the static IP addressfor 59.95, so it’s still the same. I know it was my phone lines because with both Bellsouth and Speedfactory, I had very flaky dsl, and I couldn’t run voip or fax over it. Cable internet solved all my problems. If the same employees are still at SF, they’re good, reminiscent of the old Mindspring. You might be surprised by the “few days downtime”. Try a few minutes to a few hours for the switch-over.

“I have trouble feeling sorry for people who rely on corporate entities to filter their email”

Spoken with the confidence of a man who farms his own food, mines his own aluminum and built his own car.

“Try a few minutes to a few hours for the switch-over.”

Yes, they sort of imply that. But I have to plan for the worst case, which means finding a predictable hole in my schedule. Which, right now, is similar to grasping a greased pig.