I liked Sam's idea of doing ISP reviews for the local ISPs.  At least
will be able to find this information in the list archives.


I used Comcast from June 2001 until August 2003.  When I started they
were MediaOne, then AT&T Broadband for a while.  They are a cable ISP.
Overall I would rank them as acceptable.

Their service used dhcp to get an address and you needed to provision
your modem with them.  It was pretty easy to set up and fairly reliable.
They don't offer a static IP or let you run services, but their IPs were
static enough for hobby servers.

As a Linux user, don't expect to get any tech support out of them.
There were some techs that would provide some support, but didn't know
enough to really be helpful.  Other techs would raise a red flag and
flat out deny you support.

There are three things that I would like to note about my time with
Comcast. 
  1. The Code Red outbreak
     Things were so bad that they blocked port 80 for several months.
     
  2. Their Acceptable Use Policy
     MediaOne had a great AUP that would allow you to run services as
     long as you didn't interfere with anyone else.  After they got
     bought a few times it was unclear what their AUP really was.
     During the Code Red outbreak they would point to an unlinked page
     on their web site that said services were not allowed.

  3. Network topology change
     One day they decided to change their network topology such that
     DHCP requests were getting answered from Denver, CO.  That's more
     than the 16 hops that dhclient supports.  I had to patch my OpenBSD
     firewall to support that, which became an upgrade headache.

Nate

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