How the Raspberry Pi Can Automatically Tweet Complaints About Your Slow Internet (ibtimes.co.uk) 154
An anonymous reader writes: Contacting your internet provider to complain about slow browsing speeds is a tiresome chore which none of us enjoy, but one man has found a solution. He has configured a Raspberry Pi computer to automatically tweet a complaint to Comcast when his internet falls below 50Mbps, well below the 150Mbps he pays for. Wouldn't it be nice if ISPs wrote a rebate check each month to reflect the percentage of their promised throughput that was actually available?
Unbelievable! (Score:5, Funny)
This Raspberry Pi device has to have something really special inside! I am shocked.
Well, to be fair... (Score:4, Interesting)
Certainly there's nothing special about a Raspberry Pi for such purposes, but they are common and inexpensive. I just wish that Pi Zeros were actually available. I've got some old webcams I'd love to turn into security cameras...
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Your wife has more than 15 GB email routinely enough that you built a cron job for it? That is pretty extreme email usage.
It's for a business. (Score:2)
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In that case, you might want to consider Amazon Webmail, $4/user/month, and gives you 50GB of storage for email.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/a... [amazon.com]
I am testing it for a @lastname.email domain that I might resell to my extended paternal family.
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Inside the chip, where the magic genie lives, obviously!
Also, this sounds like something *I* could do with a Pi and a few hours. If *I* can do it, it's not really impressive. I haven't done it, so I guess it's impressive that they did. It's not a great tech feat, it's a great feat in being less lazy than I - which is no great feat in and of itself. I do wonder how much bandwidth this is actually wasting - as in how often it is being tested and, also important, does it account for errors at the other end or
Yeah, automated tweeting to PR mouthpiece... (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't it be nice if ISPs wrote a rebate check each month to reflect the percentage of their promised throughput that was actually available?
I'd like a pony, too.
#stupidstory #shouldstayinfirehose #thankstimmy
Re:Yeah, automated tweeting to PR mouthpiece... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure I would use a Raspberry Pi to do this myself tbh - when I was using one as a DLNA server, ethernet throughput was horrific even on a 100MBit switch, so much so that I moved the whole set to something else. Wasnt that specific board or OS either.
Can't trust the results when you can't trust the device producing the results imho.
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I'm not sure I would use a Raspberry Pi to do this myself tbh - when I was using one as a DLNA server, ethernet throughput was horrific even on a 100MBit switch, so much so that I moved the whole set to something else.
If I remember right all of the ports on the Raspi (except for the GPIO pins) go through USB 2 connections, and even then I get the impression it doesn't come anywhere near the usual throughput for USB 2. This is why people regularly recommend against using the Pi for things like a home-made NAS: it's not just that you can't connect a HDD directly through SATA, even if you connect through USB file transfer speeds are poor.
Re:Yeah, automated tweeting to PR mouthpiece... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, and there are better tools for the job. If you're doing something network intensive, the beaglebone black has capabilities similar to the pi, but an ethernet interface that doesn't go through USB and which can max out 100Mbps for about the same price as the pi. (It's also more open, but the pi is better for graphics-intensive applications. Pick the right tool for the job.)
Re:Yeah, automated tweeting to PR mouthpiece... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yeah, automated tweeting to PR mouthpiece... (Score:4, Interesting)
Would be great to have a Raspberry Pi monitoring the WiFi and wired connections and performance, logging the results.
Attach an ESP-01 to the Raspberry Pi. Write all your WiFi test code on the ESP. Access it through the serial interface. The stock firmware might actually suffice, since it does WiFi stuff with AT commands. The ESP is $2.
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Why?
Just use the ESP-01 with NodeMCU and let it do the whole job on it's own. no need for anything else attached to it except power Works great for a tiny $7.00 (with power supply) wifi canary.
When the public wifi goes offline or has a problem getting out, it then connects to the private lan and then issues the email to tech support.
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Why?
Just use the ESP-01 with NodeMCU and let it do the whole job on it's own.
Because you need both wired and wireless interfaces in order to be able to report a failure on one using the other interface.
You could probably hook up one of the little Arduino ethernet interfaces to the ESP. It wouldn't save you much, though.
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No you dont.
Two wireless networks work perfectly, and 99% of the places that needs that kind of monitoring has 2 networks. hell I have 2 wireless networks at my house. Plus it could always use my wifi tether on my phone that is always active.
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For a simple speed test the Raspberry Pi might well suffice. I'd be interested in this Internet monitor if it could perform a few more checks. We offer WiFi in a few of our rental properties, and it's frustrating when the tenants complain about intermittent connectivity issues or slowness: by the time I get to the property, the problems have of course magically disappeared. Besides I don't want to get up at all hours to go and check the equipment. Would be great to have a Raspberry Pi monitoring the WiFi and wired connections and performance, logging the results.
I think you could make nagios do that.
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For the issue you speak of, I would look into possible other microwave sources, such as the microwave. It is possible that the shielding on the microwave is failing, or that you may need to move the AP in relation to the kitchen or any other microwave source.
Re:Yeah, automated tweeting to PR mouthpiece... (Score:4, Informative)
I've noticed that some ISPs sometimes cheat on these tests anyway. For example, my connection sometimes benchmarks at 150Mb/sec down, but actually there is massive packet loss on some protocols (e.g. VPN, seems basically anything UDP related is screwed except for DNS) and downloads never get anywhere near.
I'm sure my ISP would call it traffic management, and it just so happens that speedtest.net servers are heavily optimized for throughput and low ping times.
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Sounds reasonable to me. I'm supposed to get 150Mb, but end up with barely 20Mb many evenings. There is a 20Mb package they offer for a fraction of what I'm paying. Seems fair that if that's all they can deliver that's all I'm paying.
When I pay someone to wash my car and wax it, if they run out of wax I'm not paying for the waxing. If they don't think it's worth keeping so much wax around then okay, but they can't charge me for it when they run out.
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No, your ISP only promised you *up to* that speed.
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As it happens, the UK regulator is considering my suggestion. Their system would require that the customer is getting consistently low speeds, and is mainly aimed at people who are suffering from low ADSL sync rates rather than network congestion.
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Sounds reasonable to me. I'm supposed to get 150Mb, but end up with barely 20Mb many evenings. There is a 20Mb package they offer for a fraction of what I'm paying. Seems fair that if that's all they can deliver that's all I'm paying.
When I pay someone to wash my car and wax it, if they run out of wax I'm not paying for the waxing. If they don't think it's worth keeping so much wax around then okay, but they can't charge me for it when they run out.
Look harder. The typical ISP business model is built around the words "up" and "to", as in "...up to 150Mbps..." The don't sell a guaranteed service level to their low-end customers, and residential customers are all low-end. Want to end this "injustice"? Elect representatives who will look out for your interests, not those of the telecom industry, by enacting real regulation.
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How so? Even if you got the maximum throughput that doesn't mean anything with respect to data caps n
Oblig (Score:1)
Wouldn't it be nice if ISPs wrote a rebate check each month to reflect the percentage of their promised throughput that was actually available?
You must be new here....
Re:Oblig (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be new here....
Doesn't this miss the point? ISP's will carry on with this sort of behaviour if everyone just lies down and takes it.
The regulators should of course be doing more, but this sounds like a very useful way to at least increase the hassle the ISP must go through to provide less than a third of their advertised speed.
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Except ISPs only advertise an *up to* speed. Nowhere does any ISP so you can get maximum bandwidth 24/7.
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Except ISPs only advertise an *up to* speed. Nowhere does any ISP so you can get maximum bandwidth 24/7.
This is not true. Many do sell services with a CIR (committed information rate). Of course, you pay more, but it's available.
Even if it's a low 1500 kbps CIR, that may be far better than a 50 Mbps line that's really 0-50 Mbps if you need to run consistent services.
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Yup. We used to have a contract with our ISP. They provided minimal speeds as per our agreement and repaired uptime per our agreement. Failure for them to actually maintain the minimal speed and uptime meant they got penalties. Some of those penalties were actually significantly more than we actually paid them. Assuming a reasonably optimal physical location, you can get a whole bunch of different contracts or even have a lawyer write one for you.
An outage of any significant duration would have cost us quit
Re: Oblig (Score:5, Interesting)
My advertised speed is 50 and I get 150 (and yeah, it's Comcast).
My advertised speed is 6, but my WISP was giving me about 1 and about 10% packet loss for over a week, and arguing with me about it. Using ye olde ping command I could see clearly that the problem was in their network (probably in the first radio shack, there are 4 microwave hops before their actual uplink) and they STILL argued with me about it extensively.
It's nice that you're not having problems, but why don't you smeg off and let the people who are have a discussion?
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Your argument is we should be happy because it could be worse? I say we should be angry because it could be better.
Promises, promises (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be nice if ISPs wrote a rebate check each month to reflect the percentage of their promised throughput that was actually available?
I'm sure what they promise in the fine print is to do their best to try and deliver you atleast some fraction of the advertised bandwidth some of the time.
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I'm sure what they promise in the fine print is to do their best to try and deliver you atleast some fraction of the advertised bandwidth some of the time.
For the most part yep. There may be a minimum required speed in some places, but overall there isn't anything in law that actually says that they "have to" unlike the old dial-up days, where phone lines had to maintain a minimum of 2400 baud, then 9600 baud and later 14.4k. The law is way behind on this stuff, then again the law was way behind roughly 12 years in the case of dial-up when the minimum requirements were introduced into either law/consumer protection codes/industry requirement codes/etc. Giv
Re: Promises, promises (Score:2)
There was never a law that modems had to work. More or less min speeds. Where'd you get that from?
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There was never a law that modems had to work. More or less min speeds. Where'd you get that from?
Here in Canada, the CRTC and Industry Canada required a minimum of 9600 baud on telephone lines from all of the providers of POTS. There was also a few states(I remember Indiana had a law on the books), that also required 9600 baud to be a minimum attainable speed. In the case for Canada, it was because the government had moved a lot of stuff over to dial-up services for their service offices. I'd have to dig up the actual regulations and laws though, I haven't looked at them in over 20 years.
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I'm surprised I've not seen anyone mention that this is the reason they are capping accounts, they can manage high speed transfers but have to many subscribers to be able to maintain the traffic. In order to create a smoke screen for their failure to provide the product they already sold you they start capping accounts hoping not everyone will try to use it all at once.
How does it know? (Score:2)
How does the raspberry Pi know it's not just the servers being slow.
And if it works, can I have a windows version for my VPN provider PrivateVPN, who suck when it comes to slow downs and strangling torrent uploads.
Advertised Speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Not too sure about the rest of the world, but in South Africa the adverts in fine print say "UP TO (x)Mbps".
So if your service is slower, it still falls into their accepted limits ...
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If you are sick of hearing people bitch about Comcast, it seems the problem is at your end, not theirs.
Comcast is notorious for slowing connections down, but you have a different experience. This does not invalidate all of the complaints people have about them, you just have a different experience. One data point does not disprove a problem.
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Interesting opportunity. (Score:2)
2) send compliant letter to ISP asking for refund.
3) ???
4) Profit!
Promised throughput (Score:4, Insightful)
They do if you want to negotiate a SLA that guarantees it, but that tends to be kinda expensive for the average residential customer. Otherwise you get best-effort.
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Still, care should be taken that best effort does not start to mean promise 100mbps and deliver 1mbps. At least the speed should be theoretically possible. An ISP here was providing 25mbps contracts, but the used wireless modem only had 10mbps ethernet interface(!!). This is not a home wifi router, the actual internet was delivered over a wireless link with an antenna on your roof.
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When you're the only game in town, people will take what you give them regardless of what they demand because they have 0 alternatives.
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negotiate a SLA == Consumer Protection Laws.
However, the telecom industry has done a bang-up job of bribing your negotiating team. So, good luck, America!
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It's like when I got FiOS; 5 years ago I could actually get the 500/300 package if I wanted to give them $325/month for it. But as more people in my neighborhood got connected to my node; the 500/500 option went away and the max I can get is now 300/300.
They may also reduce everyone's speeds across the board to make up for it. Nothing says "screw you" like getting a notice from the cable company saying your s
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I have FiOS; even my download speeds aren't guaranteed; though Verizon, if you go through the proper channels, will make attemp
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primetime TV went blocky and unwatchable.
Television "channels" are provided over RF. If they went blocky and unwatchable, that meant there was as serious connection issue somewhere. Just because 500 people come home and turn the TV on at the same time; it does not affect one-way RF transmissions. Even multi-cast IPTV shouldn't be affected.
Turning a device on does not draw any more "power" from the cable signal; the signal is lost once it's gone through the splitter.
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There mere fact is, his trolling is doing nothing but wasting time. Does Comcast care? No. As long as he keeps paying for his 150mbps service, they don't care how much he complains about it.
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"Best effort" is just a CYA term for "you'll get what we give you."
Not Routing (Score:2)
Oh, my, it's not even routing. The script just tries a speedtest service without concern for whatever else might be competing with the Pi for transfer.
The usefulness and appropriateness of complaining like this can be debated, but when he connects to a big torrent and his Pi starts complaining that Comcast is being slow - well, that's just an asshole move.
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Oh, my, it's not even routing. The script just tries a speedtest service without concern for whatever else might be competing with the Pi for transfer.
The usefulness and appropriateness of complaining like this can be debated, but when he connects to a big torrent and his Pi starts complaining that Comcast is being slow - well, that's just an asshole move.
Yeah, it seems pretty pointless/lame. Using a speed test at all for this is kinda sketchy. A better implementation would watch for signs of network congestion (retransmits, etc) and look at the bandwidth consumption at that time, preferably checking that there are multiple congested destinations. (To try to avoid blaming the ISP for a problem on the remote side.)
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In the original article he specifically indicated he doesn't download anything large, or torrent.
Then why on earth does he feel he needs a 150 Meg Internet link? I mean, he's certainly welcome to buy whatever service he wants and use it however he chooses, but it really seems like he's looking for something to get upset about.
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Next, the ISPs will develop a Raspberry PI device that can automatically do nothing in response to the flood of these automated tweets...and the cycle continues...
ISP's already have something that does this. It's called Customer Service.
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Hah! Take that fairness you jerks! (Score:2)
Not Buzzfeed (Score:2)
Unscientific Measurement (Score:2)
Complaing to Comcast... (Score:2)
You should use some simple RF science to figure out why you'll never get those speeds on a reliable basis. Last I looked; they weren't even giving more than 200mbps total on each node
Maybe that's changed; but the real problem is you're on
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DOCSIS 3.1 supports up to 10Gbps/1Gbps....and I'm sure they're not using that.
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Cable is a total waste of bandwidth. You're already cramming 4 or 5 HD channels in a 6MHZ QAM channel; every On-Demand stream eats up QAM...the more they crap they add, the smaller the pipe becomes.
If more people realized that; they'd stop buying Comcast's BS.
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DOCSIS 3.0 on 4 channels is pretty standard. That's why 150Mbps per node. Even if it is serviced by fiber, it's limited to 150Mbps without more channels dedicated.
Cable is trying to get around bandwidth limitations by moving to switched digital video [wikipedia.org]. That way, you've only got one channel per tuner sent across the wire. And if two neighbors are watching the same channel, that only requires one stream. That leaves a LOT of open channels to add into a DOCSIS 3.0 configuration.
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with an entire neighborhood using the same DOCSIS frequencies
And the important thing to note here is that because of how the bandwidth is shared in a neighborhood, by constantly hitting the speed test servers this whiner is slowing things down for his neighbors.
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Wouldn't it be nice if... (Score:2)
The only thing guaranteed is the connection speed between your router and the cable company head office - buying a 150 Mb/sec data plan from your cable company doesn't guarantee you'll get data from a remote server anywhere near 150 Mb/sec. The actual speed of a connection to a remote web server depends on the v
How does he tell if the problem is his or Comcast' (Score:2)
Having had two consumer WiFi routers crap out in the last 4 years (start dropping packets like crazy), I wonder how he differentiates with issues on his network or on Comcast's when running this speed test. Even something as simple as the cat yanking on the network cable could affect the results.
Any OpenWRT or similar FOSS router OS can do this. (Score:2)
Not that I'd recommend participating in such pestering campaigns, mostly due to a lot of ISPs having some form of "no speed guarantee" clause in their contract.
(The article is really more about selling the Raspberry Pi than it is about ISP accountability, and it uses the most (actionable) emotional hook that people have about technology, access speeds.)
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OK look, all you idiots hate Comcast, but this guy is clearly spamming. Spamming is bad, right? You people advocated the death sentence for spammers, and this guy is spamming. He's pure evil, right? Oh! He's spamming Comcast, so it's OK.
You're all hypocrites.
No, spam is unsolicited commercial communication. From the summary, this seems that the guy is not soliciting new business, and is providing feedback to a commercial services provider via a channel they themselves put into place for the purpose and are ostensibly monitoring. Not spamming at all.
Disclaimers: I don't have a Twitter account, nor do I live in a country where Comcast operates. Nor do I read TF articles.
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http://www.merriam-webster.com... [merriam-webster.com]
YOU don't get to redefine words. AC gave you the definition of spam, unsolicited commercial email. You don't get to claim it is something that it isn't just because you want to use the word where it doesn't belong.
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It is not spam when "you already have a business relationship with someone". Providers (ab)use this for telling us about new offers we don't care about. This guy simply goes the other way - and he even has legitimate complaints!
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448/96 kbit/s looks enviously in your direction ...
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If you were getting only 50Kb of that 500Kb, would you complain about failure to deliver what you are paying for?
Re: Mildly interesting but, (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't get the RasPi hate in this thread.
Because the neckbeards here have grown into conservative luddites. See also: Uber, systemd, any programming language that isn't C or Perl, etc, etc, etc....
Re: Mildly interesting but, (Score:2)
The Pine A64 just exceeded its kick starter funding. It sounds very promising for cheap 4k media boxes. https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... [kickstarter.com]
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The Pine A64 just exceeded its kick starter funding. It sounds very promising for cheap 4k media boxes. https://www.kickstarter.com/pr [kickstarter.com]...
Well, fairly promising anyway. It can only do 4k at 30 fps. That's fine for digital signage, where the base ($15) model should mop up. It's not as exciting for a media player. I backed the 2GB model, but I'm not planning to do 4k output, only 1920x1200 or less.
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Thank you for that, I will order a couple of those. These look like they might be useful for many different purposes.
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The Raspberry Pi sucks
For what? Your assertion is rubbish without describing your use case. If it sucks chances are you're not using it for the right use case and you're probably an idiot for buying into it.
Guaranteed? On what planet? (Score:2)
Consumer internet is never guaranteed a rate from cable providers. There's an advertised speed, and they give you whatever the fuck they feel like. And you'll like it, because in most places they operate you've got no other choice!
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Consumer internet is never guaranteed a rate from cable providers. There's an advertised speed, and they give you whatever the fuck they feel like. And you'll like it, because in most places they operate you've got no other choice!
And you can thank your local elected officials for that. Typically communities are 'bought off' by offerring free internet access to libraries, schools, and local government, along with a "community access channel" to air town meetings on in exchange for a monopoly over a given geographical region, so that the ISP can be assured of recouping their infrastructure investment. Many such deals were cut long ago when the technology involved was much more expensive, but renegotiating them is tough.
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in exchange for a monopoly over a given geographical region,
Example, please? I keep looking for these exclusive franchise agreements and I can't find them. Every one of them I've looked at, and been involved in, has been non-exclusive.
but renegotiating them is tough.
They are contracts between the cable provider and the municipality, and they don't get "renegotiated" until near the end of the existing contract. Renegotiating them happens on a regular basis, it just may be a ten year cycle.
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Comcast (ISP) only guarantees what it controls - the connection speed between your on-premises hardware (router) and their head-end equipment, they have no control over the speed Amazon streams content to your FireStick.
To measure performance Comcast could send tes
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Let's say there's 1000 people in your neighborhood; it's a bit of a remote area so you're happy to have cable. There's a node that sits just outside of your neighborhood that serves all 1000 people. LEt's be kind and say they have 8 channels of DOCSIS 3.0 available in the RF spectrum. Each DOCSIS 3 channel gives you about 38mbps of downstream; so that's 304mbps available.
Here's where
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Is procmail compatible with Twitter?
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The UK, with the exception of some rural areas, far surpasses us internet wise. It's cheaper, faster, and vastly more reliable. Granted, most of the infrastructure is owned by British Telecom and the ISP's merely lease from them; it's vastly different than the free-for-all ISP owned infrastruct