Comcast is Not My Friend – But I’m Stuck with Them
There are days that I don't mind that Comcast is a big organization that really is horrible at customer service and responsiveness to their customer base. Then there's the P2P spoofing that's annoying, but for the most part, even this is glossed over in my day-to-day interactions with them. After all, there aren't a lot of choices in the broadband market in the Chicago area. But then today happens and it really starts to make me angry.
I was trying to simply upload a few web pages to my home servers - nothing special, but I wanted to upload them and then look at them. But Comcast's monitoring of the 'standard' ports and hindering them got in the way. See, because I have multiple machines with the same servers (web, ssh) running, I needed to do port forwarding on the firewall, so only one machine is on the 'standard' ports, and the others are on clearly non-standard ports, but since I know what they are, I can deal with it.
So I try to SSH to a non-standard machine and I get in fine. I try the same thing to the standard port machine and Comcast times out on me. I go to the non-standard machine, get in fine, and from there, SSH to the standard machine just fine. So the machine is not the problem - it's bloody Comcast and their crappy port hindering/filtering/dropping rules. Why? What does it matter if I use the capped bandwidth for web serving or downloading stuff from their web site? Who cares? Are they trying to legislate/regulate morality? Computer usage? What gives?
I try the same thing with the web servers. The standard one fails and the non-standard one gets in just fine. So I'm sure that it's Comcast, and they have a record of the P2P problems and now that's a class-action lawsuit. When will they learn? Be the "Good Guys", and just let people use what they have paid for. Don't waste your time on the filters, spoofers, lawyers, etc. Just sell us the service and let us decide how to use it.
Do the phone companies regulate how you use your phone? Nope. How about the water company? Nope. Why should we allow these crappy ISP companies to do it? Because most people don't know or care.
Grrrrr... makes me mad.