FW: fios vs comcast

Mon Jul 8 10:31:45 CDT 2013

"Under the power is the old copper phone lines, then cable coax and now
fiber optic."

Alex, are you lucky.  FIOS (a.k.a. VERIZON) brought their contractor into
our neighborhood, complete with appeared to be the Hispanic population that
resides around the 7 - 11 store in Herndon, and destroyed yards and
driveways while ignoring the correct right of way.  I went outside while
they were digging what appeared to be two graves in my front yard and showed
them the right of way on the builders plat and they basically told me to get
f - - ked.  They then quickly buried the corpse (in this case fiber) and
skedaddled.   It appears as though VERIZON inherited the Old AT&T gene that
produced an 800 pound gorilla.  Oh, I forgot to mention neighbors started
finding hypodermic needles and other druggie things on the ground in the
neighborhood while the workers were busily doing their thing.  They haven't
found any since the job was done.

At least you had telephone poles where we had none.  Let's hope their wind
load calculations were correct when it comes to the telephone poles and
severe weather.  Oh well, maybe that will be PEPCO's fault.

  _____  

From: tacos-bounces+bfenn=cox.net at amrad.org
[mailto:tacos-bounces+bfenn=cox.net at amrad.org] On Behalf Of Alex Fraser
Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 10:48 AM
To: AMRAD Reflector
Subject: Re: fios vs comcast

Thanks guys, Robert in particular,

    It will take me a while to digest this. I will try to find time to read
up on it.  
All the wires hung from dead trees all over the hood!  You can almost see
the poles bending with the weight.  IN front of my house the top wires
are 19,500 volt, then a couple of feeders to houses, the occasional
transformer.  Under the power is the old copper phone lines, then cable coax
and now fiber optic.  The birds are happy as are the squirrels, well I guess
they are anyway, I've seen no data...

Telcos vs. cable, eminent domain, prices and the technology of course is in
there somewhere.   Layered on top of this is the programming.  I wonder if
there is a market place somewhere that people go to buy programs?  The line
up of channels is the big issue for many, technology is taken for granted by
most, except when it is noticeably slower.  

On 7/7/2013 1:49 PM, Robert Seastrom wrote: 

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-mezzan
ine/ ) 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

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