Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business • Hacker News Board

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#171

Post by jaclaz » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:05 AM UTC

pwerner2 wrote: post #7

Former Comcast cable technician here. I was an in-house tech, and corporate has ludicrous quality standards and nitpicky, white-glove QC's after an in-house tech leaves a job. However, the company obviously employs a TON of _independent contractors_. Some of these contractors are excellent at their jobs, but a lot of them aren't, and as they're not subject to any real oversight by the corporation, you really don't kn…

> instead of malicious action on the part of Comcast.

Incompetence (by me, by you, etc.) may be just incompetence.

Incompetence by a Corporation is malicious action.

Possibly not the specific case, but the ludicrous quality standard is in itself malicious action.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#172

Post by luca_ing » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:16 AM UTC

TillE wrote: post #124

rayiner wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the big European countries (Germany, the U.K., Spain, France, and Italy) require unbundling cable lines: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf . Unbundling of POTS in the US was not much of a boon, because DSL was a dead-end technology even then. What Europe does isn't really a good benchmark for how to structure a telecom market, because all the big European countries have slower broadband than in the US…

VDSL is certainly not a "dead end". 50Mbit is available in most of Germany, with 100Mbit slowly rolling out. A lot of people will opt for the cheaper standard DSL though (<16Mbit), which I suspect is what brings down the average. In the US you have little choice but to pay obscene prices for a very fast cable line, usually with a monthly cap.

> VDSL is certainly not a "dead end". 50Mbit is available in most of Germany, with 100Mbit slowly rolling out.

Using increasingly involved techniques to get more speed out of a century-old technology is pretty much a dead end.

100Mbit is decent, but it comes at the price of * the wires needing to be very short by telco standards * the use of DSL vectoring, which creates mini-monopolies in the DSLAM and allows one provider (usually Telekom) to hold all users on that DSLAM hostage

And keep in mind that if we had fiber, we could probably get a Gbit.

Make no mistake, the strong position of DSL in Germany is the result of politics, not common sense.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#173

Post by ubernostrum » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:20 AM UTC

ndespres wrote: post #119

I don't doubt that the linked story is true, but I know that individually this can happen all the time inadvertently. I worked for an ISP which provided "dry loop DSL" (DSL without dialtone service on the phone line) in the mid-2000s and as a consequence of having internet service from a 3rd party over telco pairs with no phone numbers attached, the local phone companies would regularly re-use our customers' lines fo…

Old joke: an interview program has a standard question they ask everyone, "If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and could only bring one thing with you, what would it be?"

One day they're interviewing a network engineer, who says "I'd bring a piece of fiber optic cable. I'll bury it in the sand, wait a bit, and then when the bulldozer comes along and breaks it, I'll ask the man in the bulldozer how to get off the island."

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#174

Post by toomanybeersies » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:59 AM UTC

jamiepenney wrote: post #148

ethbro wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Comcast tech (who was out as a preliminary to getting a run buried to my then-unserved house) cut my ATT DSL line because he "assumed it wasn't being used." (Even though he wasn't installing anything that day) Since then, I watch Comcast techs work, tell them exactly where to term and where to stop, and then to get the hell off my property.

I live in New Zealand and had Vodafone do the same thing when they installed the cable internet for the previous owners. They cut both the phone line and the satellite lines leading into the house. No bloody reason for that to happen, the Chorus tech that came out to fix it said he found the same problem at a bunch of other houses in the area.

Vodafone Cable/FiberX is all sorts of terrible.

Thank god we have a common installer for fibre, makes life a lot easier having only Chorus/whoever doing the fibre installs.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#175

Post by dsparkman » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 11:22 AM UTC

kodt wrote: post #4

This does not surprise me, in fact a Comcast technician told me they do this (on a much smaller scale) by disconnecting or cutting competitors' cable runs to buildings they are working on (and also sometimes their own). I lived in a multi-unit apartment building and one day noticed my internet was down (I was a Comcast subscriber). I was suspicious because a Comcast technician was just out earlier in the day installi…

Yeah, they do this all the time. When I was having Comcast install the internet at my home the technician cut the satellite cables running into my home. I ended up having to have Dish come out and fix what the Comcast tech had done. The Comcast tech was like "sorry, but we always 'disconnect' old runs"

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#176

Post by ransom1538 » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 12:06 PM UTC

kodt wrote: post #4

This does not surprise me, in fact a Comcast technician told me they do this (on a much smaller scale) by disconnecting or cutting competitors' cable runs to buildings they are working on (and also sometimes their own). I lived in a multi-unit apartment building and one day noticed my internet was down (I was a Comcast subscriber). I was suspicious because a Comcast technician was just out earlier in the day installi…

offtopic: I always wondered why people don't do more internet sharing these days and screw over comcast? If you live in a multi-unit apartment and you get 100mps down and your neighbor does too - why on earth is everyone paying $60 permonth just for internet? In college (as a broke person) we all shared internet. But now in multi-unit apartment's everyone removes guest wifis and pays $60 each for internet. Sure you might be the %1 that does hardcore gaming, and you shouldn't share with other hulu types, but the old lady down the hallway who uses AOL mail doesn't need 500mps down -- and you both should cut costs --- and fuck over comcast.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#177

Post by Klathmon » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 12:53 PM UTC

ransom1538 wrote: post #176

kodt wrote: post #4

This does not surprise me, in fact a Comcast technician told me they do this (on a much smaller scale) by disconnecting or cutting competitors' cable runs to buildings they are working on (and also sometimes their own). I lived in a multi-unit apartment building and one day noticed my internet was down (I was a Comcast subscriber). I was suspicious because a Comcast technician was just out earlier in the day installi…

offtopic: I always wondered why people don't do more internet sharing these days and screw over comcast? If you live in a multi-unit apartment and you get 100mps down and your neighbor does too - why on earth is everyone paying $60 permonth just for internet? In college (as a broke person) we all shared internet. But now in multi-unit apartment's everyone removes guest wifis and pays $60 each for internet. Sure you m…

I know the reason I don't, because if my ISP were to find out (or even suspect this) and ban my account, I'd need to move.

At my location the only other option besides my current ISP is sat based internet with crazy high ping times, and I work from home. If my ISP drops my service, I'm fucked.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#178

Post by dfox » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 12:55 PM UTC

milankragujevic wrote: post #158

MertsA wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as easy as it sounds. We're talking about the MAC address of the modem itself. In any current DOCSIS network you're going to need to use BPI+ which encrypts everything between the modem and the CMTS as well as authenticates the modem itself. Basically there's a cert on the modem that's signed by the manufacturer and the manufacturers cert is added to the CMTS. In short you can't just impersonate a modem and…

I'm not an expert by any means, but for VDSL2, I think you only need to get the DSL login data (username and password) and then your modem will work. I used a friend's login details when I bought a different modem and my provider didn't give me my DSL login. But it's all linked to the physical port on the DSLAM so that you cannot get faster speeds or anything like that.

The authentication in DSL is essentially an backward compatibility hack. Original motivation for that was compatibility with Radius/Diameter based AAA systems of ISPs (and to lesser extent the fact that the link the looks from both sides like faster dialup connection). Today it is used mostly because it is default. In many cases ISP (or even the underlying telco) either uses one login/password for all customers or simply accepts anything.

All DSL lines have same L2 interface as ATM and thus there is no authentication. How the authentication works is that PPP gets tunelled through this, either by running PPP directly on AAL5 (PPPoA), or more commonly and somewhat nonsensically by tuneling by wrapping PPP in ethernet frames that are then transfered inside AAL5 channel (PPPoE, or more correctly PPPoEoA). Interestingly this is usually used only on the first virtual channel (ie. the "Internet" one) and not on the additional channels that you typically get today (IPTV, VoIP, free hotspots...), these additional channels are usually straight Ethernet over AAL5 with the modem behaving like simple L2 bridge (often these channels form relatively large broadcast domains that are typically NATed to the Internet).

[Edit:] In contrast, DOCSIS variants for Internet over CaTV are derived directly from IEEE 802 family of technologies and there are no telco-style ATM/X.25/whatever protocols in between. Good first approximation is that the DOCSIS segment handled by one CMTS behaves like one big ethernet switch. But beacuse of the nature of shared medium, data on the coaxial cable is encrypted as otherwise it would be trivial to eavesdrop on anyone else on the same segment. The encryption even involves PKI to mutually authenticate modem and CMTS.

On DSL there is clear physical interface on the network side, that can be turned on or off, shaped and metered which is everything that the ISP cares about from the charging and authentication PoV. CaTV does not have anything like that and thus there has to be relative complex authentication and confidentiality mechanism (that is, somewhat paradoxically, usually completely invisible to the end user).

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#179

Post by jajern » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 1:51 PM UTC

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #49

jajern wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically all that is in those boxes is a coupler. A guy I used to know still had service running to his line. He was actually stealing it though. He just kept hooking it back up after they would come remove it.

Does that still work on the day and age of encrypted cable boxes and modems that require 802.whatever certs?

This was before full-digital so probably not.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#180

Post by dangjc » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 2:17 PM UTC

doctorshady wrote: post #82

dangjc wrote: post #54

The regulators need to crack down on this. If Comcast controls the regulators, they need to be broken up. No one company should have that much political power.

Have you not been paying attention to what the FCC has been up to recently?

You mean Ajit Pai's FCC or Tom Wheeler's FCC? Because under Pai, they seem to be rolling back all the regulations meant to control the industry and seem to be very much under their influence.