On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 2:40 PM, Robert LeBlanc <robert.lebl...@aanmpc.com> wrote: > Can anyone give any insight (good and bad) to Comcasts Business Class > internet service.
In no particular order: It's fast. It's cheap. We use it for web browsing, and it works great for that. Cheap, disposable bandwidth. The important stuff (mail, VPN) runs on a "real" ISP. Mail in particular is significant, as simply originating your SMTP traffic from a Comcast IP address is enough for some filtering systems to score you as spammy. (Sensible or not, it happens.) Comcast is about as reliable as any consumer-class Internet feed -- which is to say, most of the time, for most people, it works okay, but when it doesn't work, you have no recourse. None. Zero. Nada. Zip. If it breaks, you get to keep the pieces. Their SLAs are a joke. Their standard SLA is "if it doesn't work, you are free to cancel the service". Their premium SLA is "if it doesn't work, you can request a refund for the outage". Comcast gets to decide what constitutes an "outage", and if those conditions existed, and should they actually admit there was a problem, you get a refund for a few hours worth of your monthly bill. All the "Business" in the title means is they know what a static IP address is, and tier 2 knows what a PTR record is. Oh, and they do less traffic filtering/shaping. The business customer service is a better than the consumer side of the house, but that's not saying much. It's mostly okay; occasionally horrible. Around here they have a problem where their docs and support scripts don't match the equipment and systems they're actually using, which is always fun. Any prolonged power outage will result in loss of service for the duration, as the coax is fed from "optical nodes" in pole/field enclosures, and the batteries only last so long. This isn't like the old-school PSTN, which would keep running as long as you fed it diesel, and was considered critical national infrastructure. Technical quality varies by locality. Different head ends have different types and vintages of equipment, depending on which acquisition supplied them. Work is in one town; it's reasonably good for the price. Next town over is an old Adelphia town, and their equipment is crap. The Comcast feed goes down once or twice a year. More often then not power-cycling the CPE will fix it. Occasionally we have to call them; usually it's a non-individual outage. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
