fios vs comcast

[Robert Seastrom]

On Jul 6, 2013, at 7:48 PM, Alex Fraser wrote:

> Fios has arrived in my hood.   They set up a tent in a neighbors yard and have been making their pitch.  They point to prices and say "wow".  We have comcast already and price is not my only concern.  I have a feeling there are technical issues!

What specifically are your issues?  There are some congested links from Comcast to other networks, and then there are congestion issues on the edge (which are a pervasive DOCSIS issue, not just a Comcast issue).  If you are not already on one, I recommend buying yourself a DOCSIS 3.0 cablemodem.  Both the Motorola 6141 and the Arris CM820A (ironically now the same company since Arris bought Motorola Home) are highly recommended and will do IPv6 nicely for ya.

> I not allowed to have a server hooked up under Comcast.  Is  a Fios user allowed to set up a server?

What is it exactly that you are trying to do?  Run a web site?  Run your own email server?  Have a file or media server at home?  Something else?

In general on residential services (from any provider) you (a) do not have a static address, and (b) have port 25 blocked except to their servers so as to keep you from spamming.  Dealing with dynamic address changes is not something that Comcast (or Verizon, or whoever) wants to handle the support calls for, so it is "not allowed" in their contract.

Comcast does not block port 80 or port 443 [*], so running a web server at home is not an issue (see above caveat about dynamic address changes, but those don't happen so often).  Assuming it is not  super popular site causing a lot of bandwidth to run over their network, in practice they don't care.

[*] http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/list-of-blocked-ports/

FIOS is pretty much the same way for resi.

> This would be for a regular, not buisness customer.
> Related to the above I asked the sales person if fios used IP6 and of course he didn't know.  

Of course, having the provider support it is just the first step 

> So is IP6 available for me to plug in a wire at my house and have IP6 addresses on each device?

On Comcast, probably so assuming you are hung off a Cisco or Arris CMTS *and* have a DOCSIS 3.0 cablemodem (see above).  There are a few residual problems with the Motorola BSR so if you are on one of those your luck may be more variable.  You will have to buy your own if you're not subscribed to the higher tiers of service, but trust me it's worth it from a performance enhancement perspective (I can explain what the deal is but that would be a whole different email).

FIOS is getting there, but does not have IPv6 generally available yet so far as I am aware.

> Is that even possible yet?  What routers would I need?

You need a router that supports IPv6 and DHCP6-PD.  I have been fairly happy with the Mikrotiks although their support for PD is only about 80% of the way there.  That's what's at my parents' house.

The D-Link software seems to work well - we have a bunch of their (slightly older) wireless routers at work in the customer experience lab.  http://www.dlink.com/us/en/technology/dlink-ipv6-solutions

> On the TV side how would you compare comcasts HD quality to Verizons?  Is there much difference?

I'm not sure if Comcast is doing MPTS (multi program transport stream - multiple channels per QAM) for anything these days.  For like-to-like (same bitrate and encoding) the big difference visibly tends to boil down to encoder settings, subtleties in the encoder manufacturers' implementations, and (most of all) the length of the encoder chain (i.e. number of times the picture has been transcoded or format-changed).

If you're interested in how video channels go together for transmission to your house over digital cable (or suffer from insomnia), you may enjoy reading http://www.cablelabs.com/specifications/CM-SP-EQAM-VSI-I01-081107.pdf

On a more practical note, if you want super high quality HD the folks to beat are DirecTV.  Word around the campfire is that they have gone way out of their way to get mezzanine feeds ( http://www.root6.com/blog/index.php/2012/04/whats-all-this-talk-about-mezzanine/ ) from the various content owners.  And it shows… but is not universal across all channels and it really accentuates how crummy some channels are.

> Really they set up a tent, like a carnival!

Shoulda done Oktoberfest!  :)

-r