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

arstechnica.com

191–194 of 194 posts

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

#191
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 35b profile with active DSLAMs in neighborhood cabinets "may" reach 300mbps with a fully vectored network (but just a couple of loops not being vectored greatly reduces speeds [1]). It still requires lots of infrastructure upgrades, replacing the old passive cabinets with bigger active ones containing DSLAMs, laying lots of fiber around etc. I still think its a dead end and countries like Greece that only now are…

I wonder about that. Obviously the future of internet connections is wireless. Why are we still bothering to hook up individual houses. Apartment blocks, perhaps. Houses ... why ?

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite easy to believe a company has much higher quality standards for things it can blame on some other actor that it nominally doesn't control. Outsourcing blame is fairly common.

I've literally never heard of anyone impressed with the quality standard on a single service Comcast provides soooo...gonna call bullshit on this, too.

their business service is somewhat responsive and pretty reliable. That said, the installer they sent was totally unprofessional and also, yes, a contractor.

How can you screw up just connecting a cable modem to a coax outlet?

Run two lengths of cable connected by a four port adapter, and staple the adapter to the wall a foot above the baseboard because why not, this is only in the middle of someone's dining room.

As soon as he left I disconnected the whole mess and ran a single length of cable along the baseboard, with a right angle connector to keep it flush.

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

#193
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the UK, the vast, vast majority of cable infrastructure is owned by openreach (BT) because it used to be a government run service. While it's not a general requirement, it is one for them, which in effect means it is general.

Does BT have cable, or just DSL and fiber?

I was using "cable" to mean lines in general (not very clear, my bad) - it's almost all ADSL over phone lines, with FTTC in a lot of places now. The only other big network of physical cable is Virgin who run their own cable network.

Cable for TV was never a huge thing in the UK like it is in the states - satellite TV (Sky) was the bigger thing.

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

#194
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…

Hmmm yea maybe time to start recording all conversations with internet technicians from now on?
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