Comcast Proxies Back Up

[Noevo]

Comcast has seemingly turned back on the proxie servers that caused so many problems in Michigan when we transitioned Dec. 29th. My speed has dropped from a fairly constant 1200 to speeds ranging from 500 to 900 today with many times of it going even slower. Seems like it spikes constantly. One click a page opens slow, the next click (same page uncached) it's faster. At least I haven't run across a site I can't get to this time, yet. But the speeds are awful.

This is the site I used to test if I was behind a proxie (thanks DSLR). http://www.lagado.com/proxy-test

I sure wish Comcast would have let me known ahead of time I was going to be a beta tester :mad:

[tHE_0ne]

jeez, what the hell are they doing?

many some weed

[Vesuvius]

Test shows me I am not behind a proxy at all. I know last night here in SE, MI my conn was crawling around too, but it's cleared up a bit latley.

[Cable_Dood]

I hate the fact that Comcast designed a stupid freakin proxy into all their new RDCs. Unfortunately I wasn't consulted on the network design. :)

I can tell you that the proxy shouldn't have any effect on your throughput.....but maybe your page load times if it's having probs.

I have been tracking a problem that presented itself a couple of nights ago in our market.....the proxy was choking big time. Major timeouts.....you could ping an ip at about 30ms, but if you tried to load a page it would just sit there for 10-30seconds.

This problem mysteriously disappeared. If anyone else on CHSI observes this, please post about it and what system you're in so I can look into it.

Thanks.

[Kip Patterson]

No, but you're between a rock and a hard place!

I have this idea. Can't even call it a theory. How about a guess?

My guess is that Comcast let their techies get a little out of hand. In this case, it looks like they sized the circuits to their tier one providers using some expectation that traffic would be reduced by the use of proxies. Nothing wrong with proxies if they work every time, but the reality is that they don't. So, they turned them off and the next thing that happened was that several of their circuits were overloaded. Now they are trying once again to make the proxies work.

Management needs to keep an eye on all of decisions made by us technical types to see that what we are doing truly supports the objectives of the company. In this case, the techs goofed, because every unreached site is apt to generate a phone call. Now, if a good company makes 10% before taxes, then Comcast looks forward to netting $4-5 dollars per month from each subscriber. A tier 1 person costs something like $20 per hour by the time you add in the fringe benefits, taxes, equipment, phone, and supervision. So, in round numbers, each phone call eliminates all the profit for that customer that month. Won't be long until some cost accounting types will be revisiting these issue, in my opinion.

The other issue is abuse. What are sites such as Speedguide to do when we see a user abusing us? Block his IP? WE try very hard not to block IP's that might be shared, but if we were being clobbered, we would have little choice until it stopped. Will Comcast work with other sites to help us identify abusers? Are they in a position to tell anyone, let's say the FBI, if someone behind a proxy is dealing in child porn?

Kip

[Noevo]

Must have reigned there techs back in :D

no proxy detected today and pages are loading MUCH faster than usual.

[illestdynasty]

Test shows I'm not behind a proxy either.