Recent Stories with tag comcast

So you're sitting at home, and you decide you want to watch something on Netflix. You've got Comcast (excuse me, Xfinity) broadband, streaming is a snap. You pay extra for that bandwidth, but it's worth it and now is one of those times. 

You'd be upset if Comcast looked over your usage and charged you $1 for streaming a movie from Netflix, wouldn't you? You're already paying them for bandwidth. And Comcast knows that.

So that's why they're charging the company that streams Netflix movies instead. Level 3, Inc., operates one of the internet backbones that Netflix uses to stream their content, and Comcast presented them with a "take it or leave it" offer on November 22. If they didn't pay up, Comcast subscribers wouldn't get Netflix, at least, not online.

"With this action, Comcast is preventing competing content from ever being delivered to Comcast’s subscribers at all, unless Comcast’s unilaterally determined toll is paid--even though Comcast’s subscribers requested the content," said Thomas Stortz, Level 3's Chief Legal Officer. 

"Comcast, the largest U.S. cable TV company, has set up an Internet 'toll booth,' charging Level 3 whenever customers request content," sums Bloomberg. It may be a toll booth, but it's a phantom toll booth, at least to Comcast customers. If Level 3's costs go up and they charge Netflix more, and Netflix's costs go up, and they charge you more, that's...well, that's good for Comcast's On-Demand division, isn't it?... (more)

When internet service goes down, who should know about it first? In Seattle, it's not internet provider Comcast. Their customers announce the outages.

This morning, The SunBreak HQ, like many offices around Seattle, was abuzz with complaints about our Business-Class High-Speed Internet from Comcast. Pages were stalling, IM clients weren't loading, everything was slowed down to molasses speed. After performing the usual rites and incantations (unplugging the modem and router, restarting the laptops), nothing had improved.

I had limited connectivity, so I checked on Comcast's status: all green! But it did say, "Please sign in to see local Network Health messages," so I tried that. Still all green. It was time to try online support. 15 people were in the queue ahead of me, so it took 5-10 minutes for my customer service bot to ask me how my day was. Slow internet service? Had I tried unplugging everything? Oh. I had, eh? Well, perhaps I could provide my name and account number. Now if I would just wait a few minutes while they pulled up my account...

While this was happening, I was watching my Twitter stream to see if anyone else was having issues, and TechFlash tweeted "Comcast outage in parts of Seattle." Never mind, I told the bot, the outage is on your end, and signed out. Meanwhile, ComcastWA was tweeting to TechFlash's John Cook that they were "checking to see what's going on." This was about an hour into my experience, and it was the first tweet from ComcastWA on the subject.

By 10:30 a.m. the snafu was resolved, and someone from @comcastcares sent me a tweet to let me know. (Which, you know, thanks, but I can tell when the internet is working.) What's not explained is why Comcast's status maps were all green throughout the outage, or why support staff were telling people to try unplugging their modems and routers first.... (more)

The net neutrality Internet is like a series of happy pipes, glad to see all kinds of data. Thanks to our Flickr pool's zenobia_joy for this wonderful shot.

Special to The SunBreak by Mark Rushing of Orbis Lumen

[Ed.: A proposed agreement between Google and Verizon has pundits debating its merits at warp speed, while pixels are still free. Wired has the "real" story. HuffPo has seen it all before. We asked Mark to take a step back and give us the lay of the land. Here's the first part in a series on net neutrality.]

Would you be happier if you no longer were charged for voice minutes? What if you were no longer charged for voice minutes, but strangely you had unlimited voice talk time?

What if you suddenly had unlimited text messaging capabilities for free? And unlimited multimedia messaging as well? And what if you also were given a new telephone number for free, that rang your cell phone and home phone simultaneously, or any other phone, too? And all your voice mail messages were  recorded and transcribed, then emailed to you, and you never had to worry about copying people and their contact information to your phone again?

Well, you can get this right now, and the mobile telephone companies are not too pleased. Google, one of the Great Horsemen of the ongoing Internet Apocalypse--which is seeing the slow demise of such power institutions as traditional newspapers, the music industry, publishing, and is transforming the way we perceive our role in government, international issues, and the way we organize--well, Google is ruffling the feathers of the Powers that Be, namely the very few companies who own all the pipes that this Internet thing flows through.

And the power that forced these giants to allow others--such as Google--room to grow was...you and me, through the principles of net neutrality.

We may smugly believe the Internet has already arrived, but it is actually still in the process of arriving. And sometimes this behemoth of decentralized interconnections between us looks more like a planet crashing in ultra-slow motion through a steel and glass china shop than it looks like, well, just an amorphous thing of stuff, doing this and that. That china shop has been many things. Right now, that steel-girdered china shop is the mobile telecommunications industry, and they're doing all they can to stop that world from crashing through it.... (more)

It's never too early to begin fake datamining our stats to get to know you a little better, readers. The first thing that jumps out at me is that there are 2.9 times more Comcast customers than Qwest DSL customers. (Really, who bothers with DSL anymore, unless you have to? I just got a Qwest "upgrade" to 3 Mbps. It's broadband Kafka.) You use Firefox, IE, and Safari in about equal measure. A good portion of you spend 1-3 minutes on the site, and 53 percent of you are local. Only one of you will something in a contest we're about to run, so stay tuned.