ARrgh Comcast

[mycatsellsclues]

Is everyone's Comcast "High-Speed" Internet gone to crap this week/last few days? In both places I use it (one a biz account, one a home) it's gone abysmally slow. This is for two different computers, yadda yadda, techgarble

Comments

[jimothy]

I've had to reset my router and modem a couple times in the past week. It could either be Comcast sucking a dick, the recent thunderstorms, or my router slipping into some death throes. Who's to say?

[mycatsellsclues]

The thing I'm least likely to blame is the router in that list. :)
Thanks. I've restarted and it's better but still not near what it was. Bleh.

[talldean]

It could be another customer - one of your neighbors - on the same switch. Comcast is blazing fast, but the connection is shared between everyone on the switch, or at least it was awhile back. So if your neighbor's kid perhaps uncapped the speed limit on their box, and had a heavy addiction to softcore porno, your connection will suffer until Comcast locks their account.

Verizon does per-house speed limits, which, well, counts for something.

[mycatsellsclues]

I'd totally blame a neighbor if it wasn't in both locations I use, where one basically doesn't have the neighbor possibility. Hurumph.

Verizon and I go way back with problems (phone didn't work when it rained, which was clearly an outdoor issue, but they wanted to charge me $75 per half hour to fix it, plus they billed for DSL when I never had it at the address in question, took months to resolve, etc.etc.) so I just can't even go there.

I keep hunting for a service I don't hate, but monopolies aren't so good at customer service.

[talldean]

With DSL, I had great luck with Speakeasy; they charged more, but they obviously spent more on customer service.

Both Verizon and Comcast make me feel squicky. I've had better luck with Verizon, recently.

[mycatsellsclues]

I've tried to contact a few of the alternate companies, but it never worked out for some weird reason. I'll try Speakeasy again. I'd love to get away from Teh Squickies.

Thanks!

[su_carbs]

Come to my office in Sharpsburg..the Crapcast connection there is *constantly* dropping. We've had about 30+ "techs" in to look at it. So far, they have no idea what's going on. Yet, the Verizon line, which is also in the building...hasn't dropped once. What's up with that?

[khyron]

Sometimes when you experience weird slowdowns in multiple places from the same ISP (different network segments, different switches, etc) the common denominator is that their DNS lookups are slow for some reason. Companies like Verizon and Comcast use their DNS servers to perform silly filtering and censorship duties, as well as hijack "misspellings" to sell advertising placements on fake search engines...so their servers often run into silly issues.

Next time this happens to you, try using someone else for DNS (like OpenDNS for example) and see if it helps. It might, it might not.

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/
http://www.opendns.com/solutions/overview/

[mycatsellsclues]

Thank you for the detailed response. I tend to suspect that it's all to blame on filtering and general asshattery by the company, but do try to entertain other possibilities that are more solvable in the immediate.

When my brain is back to something close to capacity, I'll see if I can grok that given the two locations and issues inherent for each. Herrrmmm.

[khyron]

...but do try to entertain other possibilities that are more solvable in the immediate.

Just in case I didn't explain myself well...changing your DNS server settings is something you can do immediately, and it's super easy to do.

win: http://www.mediacollege.com/computer/network/dns.html

mac: https://store.opendns.com/setup/device/apple-osx-leopard/

[mycatsellsclues]

I like easy. And really, really like simply-linky goodness like that. I will definitely try that out after giving the mac link a good looksee. I'll likely have to do it on a few of the computers at each spot to see if the change helps to all affected. And if that's the hardest part, I'm fine with that. It's not like I'm an admin with 100 computers to maintain.

Thanks again. Truly.