Erich,

   It may surprise many that the U.S. is considered to be relatively behind
in terms of broadband penetration and market maturity( aka. affordability
).  In my view, this situation is due entirely to our current regulation
policy.

   http://www.freepress.net/docs/bbrc2-final.pdf

   "In Japan, symmetrical 100Mbps connections are available for less than
$35 per month"

   http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060913-7731.html

 -jmz


On 5/27/07, Erich Newell <erich.newell@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I wish I had a viable alternative...I'm sure we all do. I won't list the
> reasons, they are too numerous and really there's no point; they've got me
> by the short and curlys. After reading the previous thread about e-mail, I
> thought I might share some of my experience and what I've done to leverage
> things in my direction.
>
>
>    1. E-Mail - Currently I ONLY use COX as a smarthost for
>    smartmontools...other than when their mail server is down (somewhat common)
>    it has never blocked this traffic...and the occasional email to "Customer
>    Service"
>    2. Cox customer service Tier1 reps cannot do much, but they *CAN*
>    give you 1 day's service credit at their discretion
>    3. On any given day, at least one of the following services will be
>    unavailable for various reasons. (DNS, E-Mail, DHCP for the Cable Modem)
>    4. Unfortunately for COX, I work some pretty unusual hours (or at
>    least as far as they'll ever know)
>
> Knowing the above information, we type out a laundry list of complaint
> emails, interspersed with variables for date, time etc...With a little bit
> of monitoring magic, we watch our services 24/7 and at a random time every
> day we "summarize" (by we I mean crontab.hourly + bash + file containing
> next "complaint time") the various issues from the past day and politely
> request a credit for the past days service.
>
> For the first two years of living in my house, I think I paid ~$12/month
> for my cable modem.
>
> After my company started paying, I stopped caring and gave up the pursuit.
>
> Another item of interest: COX pushes a config to your modem via TFTP which
> will lower your throughput during business hours...I pay for the 9mbit/1mbit
> service. I have seen config caps as low as 512k/128k. I've read my EULA very
> closely, and nowhere in there does it say anything against keeping a copy of
> an "optimal" config and then pushing it to your modem every time another
> party makes a change...its their config after all. I'm not sure of the
> feasibility with newer modems, but on the older Surfboards its relatively
> trivial. A quick google of: surfboard tftp docsis should get you on your
> way.
>
> Cheers.
>
> --
> "A man is defined by the questions that he asks; and the way he goes about
> finding the answers to those questions is the way he goes through life."
>
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-- 
.0000. communication.
.0001. development.
.0010. strategy.
.0100. appeal.

JOSHUA M. ZEIDNER
IT Consultant

( 602 ) 490 8006
jjzeidner@gmail.com