Comment by lwhalen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lwhalen | Hacker News Reader

In Seattle and surrounding areas, Comcast is more or less the only game in town (with Centurylink a distant, distant second) if you're not in one of a dozen high-rise apartment buildings. For all their marketing around 'extensive IPv6 rollout', I've found their deployment to be hideously broken and their support staff deeply ignorant. Been here 3 years, moved once, and it's just terrible. My latest foray into trying to get delegation to work was this past weekend, and I had a Comcast supervisor (in Business class!) tell me that "static anything is not a priority for the vast majority of their customers. You can either have static v4 addresses or v6 connectivity, but not both" after several hours of troubleshooting and 'automatically closed/resolved tickets' with their level 2 support folks. It's one of the more brazen "we dare you to stop being our customer" moves I've certainly been privvy to.

tl; dr - Comcast v6 works great on Business-class until you push a static v4 config, then it just stops responding to DHCPv6 and SLAAC requests. Ignorance and aggravation ensued from Comcast support, at all levels I was able to get ahold of. Being a monopoly is awesome.

In Seattle proper, almost 2/3rds of the city is covered by Centurylink with Gigabit fiber[1], but due to the way their cable franchise agreement is worded with the city, Centurylink has to wire the poorest neighborhoods first, and leave the richer areas as some of the last to get fiber from them.

Outside the Seattle area, upgrades happened much earlier so its a mix of VDSL2 down in Kent and surrounding areas, and ADSL to the north of Seattle proper (they got no upgrade munnies :c). Seattle has seen a ton of Capex over the past few years, and from what Clink employees tell me they are severely cutting back in Seattle this quarter, so as to wire the South end with VDSL2 and other cities with fiber. Portland also has near 100% fiber coverage by the way.

The crux of why Centurylink doesn't have a ton of customers on fiber comes down to a godawful prequal database, that they take offline starting anywhere from 3pm to 7pm and keep offline till well into the next morning. Techs will actually get orders put in for DSL, and when they go out to install it, see fiber on the pole and go "WTF?", but getting the prequal database amendment is near impossible.

Wrt static IPs on Comcast or worse yet Wave, just don't bother. A dynamic DNS entry will work just as well, while avoiding all the crazy stand on head networking antics both cable providers have to do to give you a static IP. Try portscanning the internal netblock your static IP is provisioned to, last time I did I found a (poorly protected) headend on a 10.x.x.x address.

1 - https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/SeattleIT/cabl...

In Seattle there is also CondoInternet - a fiber company in many of the newer development. But, I've seen an entire building on a NAT private network. It's included in your HOA.

FYI they are owned by Wave Broadband now, and Centurylink covers quite a bit of the city with fiber. Not that you'll know, cause their fiber prequal database is shut off in the afternoons/evenings/early morning cause screw you :(

My comment above gives a bunch more detail if you wanna give it a look.

Condointernet got acquired by Wave (branded Wave G); then they fired most of the condointernet staff it seems. Wave recently got acquired themselves so we'll see how much worse it gets.

Your other option is Frontier FIOS in some of the suburbs, where there is still no intention of rolling out v6.

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