Verizon DSL vs Comcast Cable

[mgorse at mgorse.dhs.org (Mike Gorse)]

I was using rcn until a few months ago when a couple other people moved in
and I wanted to make changes to the service and thought comcast would be
cheaper based on talking to them, but it has turned out not to be.  There
are a lot of hidden charges that the salesperson didn't tell me about, and
I didn't think to ask.  Anyway, I got somewhat annoyed with rcn when some
Windows worm came out and they started blocking outgoing connections on
port 25 and didn't tell their customers what they were doing.  My mail
stop going through and I finally figured out by process of elimination
that they were blocking the connections and called them and their tech
confirmed that they were.  I wrote their tech support to suggest that they
notify their customers about things like this in the future but didn't get
a response.  I tend to assume that if I'm on the Internet then I'll be
able to open connections to other computers unless I'm told otherwise.  
Other than that, rcn worked fine for me most of the time, although for a
while I was having issues with packet loss and dropped connections that
switching network cards seemed to solve; I still have no idea what was
going on.  When I switched to Comcast I had to run their Windows program
to activate the connection, but things have been working fine since then.  
I had my ip address change several times when I rebooted my computer, but
I think that this had to do with the gentoo init script sending -z to
dhcpcd, which causes it to send dhcpRelease.  I modified the script to
instead send SIGHUP to it, and I haven't had my ip address change since
that I can remember (that was a little over a month ago).

-- Michael Gorse / AIM:linvortex / http://mgorse.home.dhs.org --
A better world is possible! http://www.kucinich.us