Comcast, VZ-DSL, Galaxy; and service differences/problems

[Jim Gasek]

I switched recently from Comcast (resold Galaxy)
Data only, and voice, to VZ (Galaxy resold) data
and voice.   

For those who don't know, the telecommunications act
(I think) made the established players open up the 
"last mile" to competition. Galaxy was one of the 
competitors who jumped in.

When you buy direct from Comcast, you typically MUST 
buy broadcast TV in a bundle.  With Galaxy, they let
you unbundle the TV portion, while still having access
to the cable in your house (usually unfiltered*, but now
all the channels are migrating to digital in any case).

When Galaxy resells Comcast or VZ, they take responsibility
for a good portion of the service calls, and administer
their own (email/dns/...) servers.  Not exactly sure
of the model, but the major carriers seek to offload
the burden, while they're still essentially carrying the 
traffic on their pipes, and core routers.

I am fantastically happy with the resold VZ/Galaxy voice
and data for around $25/30 month combined.

They do provide 2 boxes, a DSL modem, and a separate 
VOIP box. They say it give them more flexibility, and
works better overall. One port off the dsl modem goes
to the VOIP box, and another goes to the wireless router.

While the Galaxy voice was awful a few years ago over
Comcast, it is nearly perfect now over DSL.

I can count on one hand the number of reboots required
in the past year. The majority of the problems seem to
be dhcp and dns related, cleared by a reboot. Could
be partially my $15 SMC wireless router to blame.

The voice portion is RNKTel which either finally got their 
act together, or else the comcast/cable modem was weak
in the past. RNKTel uses asterisk VOIP solution, which 
had it's share of problems, I hear.

VZ can only supply a certain speed, depending on your 
distance (and the copper quality) between you and the 
closest CO (termination point).  I think I was cheap and 
purchased the slowest, but it has seemed OK for me.

The only downside now is that we need to get TV off-air,
which is fine by me although less fine with other members 
of the family. Dish is another alternative. C omcast 
TV is just too pricey for me.

Useful tip for Comcast service calls:  They always want to 
blame your router, or your "internal wiring".  To remove
these from consideration, set up your cable modem with a 
laptop right in the front yard or on the street where the
cable is still "theirs".   They're going to measure from
there in any case on their handheld signal generators/analyzers.

Run a continuous ping with large packet size, and let it run 
for a day or so, and ping will return packet stats when you
break out.   If your're getting missing packets, try another
(known good) cable modem to remove that as a cause. 

Thanks,
Jim Gasek

* Often, filters at the street are called "band pass" filters.
They block certain frequencies for services not purchased.
Since data/phone requires multiple frequencies (the "return"
low frequencies, plus the "forward" high ones), band-pass
filters would block the middle, the broadcast TV bandwidth.
These filters often caused problems,attenuating in areas 
where they were not designed to do so.