[BBLISA] comcast ... again

[David Allan]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2010, Daniel Hagerty wrote:

> Brian O'Neill <oneill at oinc.net> writes:
>
>> I believe you ARE permitted to provide your own DOCSIS modem, and there
>> are several off-the-shelf models that combine the router and modem that
>> can do more than the Comcast-provided one does.
>
>    Uh, yeah.  Unless what comcast does has changed drastically, run,
> do not walk to your nearest big box electronics store and buy your own
> cable modem.
>
>    Renting your cable modem from comcast has similar economics to
> renting your phone from AT&T, back when you could do that.  It's a
> very high margin service.

I'm more than a little embarrassed to admit that I hadn't ever gotten off 
the couch and gotten my own modem, but this thread motivated me to do so. 
It was very, very easy.  Plug it in, call Comcast, give them the serial #, 
vendor/model & MAC & re-activate the Comcast service.  The only gotcha for 
me was that their activation site won't let you use a UN*X browser, so I 
had to call them back and have them do it.  I should have remembered 
that...  Less than half an hour even with having to call twice.

Maybe I'm the last to know, but I discovered a bit of Comcast network 
behavior because I also bought a new access point.  After I got it 
configured, I scanned it, expecting to see everything filtered, but 
instead I got 7 Microsoft related ports closed and everything else 
filtered, which was puzzling and disturbing.  After confirming that I was 
indeed scanning myself and not some innocent bystander, a few minutes of 
Googling taught me that the MS ports are exploited by worms so Comcast 
blocks them.

Dave