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Comment by Adachi91 | Hacker News Reader

Comcast Business by itself is not DIA. You are still on the same CMTS as residential users. So you share the same resource pool. I have had Comcast Business for ~14 years and still fight with normal residential problems.

Such as over-subscription and having to contact the BBB to finally get a non-"Let me look at my book, ah yes! it's your modem" response. I finally was contacted by the Technical Operations Manager to affirm "Yes [name] is correct, bandwidth demand exceeds the capacity of the system in their area. We are working on a permanent solution to allocate more bandwidth"

That was 9 years ago, and I'm back again. I pay for the catchy "UP TO" 35 MBit/s upstream and can barely hold 2 MBit/s during peak and about ~25 outside peak.

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Not all Comcast Business, no. There are different tiers of product for sure. I have "normal" Comcast Business in my house, where I have basic Comcast coax service for a little more money with some better service guarantees and a little less nonsense. (The biggest upgrade is being able to email an account manager. The biggest downgrade is no bundling with TV because Business won't install it in a house, so if someone in your house wants Xfinity TV you get two unbundled bills.)

At work we deal with the sort of folks in this blog, where adding a link between a couple sites requires four or five months, multiple teams boring new fiber runs, etc.

I’m just on residential Comcast and the slow upload speeds are such a pain in the butt. I understand most of the users in this area use the Internet to consume from, but some of us want to serve stuff too!

My measured upload was 26.2Mbps. They offered me an upgraded upload speed package, I accepted it and am paying for it. It is still 26.2Mbps. I rebooted the CPE, waited months. Nothing changed.

Why not Starlink?

Starlink shared bandwidth amidst their network makes Comcast look generous.

Between fighting for bandwidth amidst everyone else going to the same base station, random assigned IP addresses that occasionally end up with accusations of pirating you had no partaking in, and storms messing with your signal quality, I would heavily advocate against any reliance on it for business related operations.

Starlink also does not offer static IP addresses.

> Starlink also does not offer static IP addresses.

They do, albeit I don't know the exact details as to pricing and everything. My company uses Starlink as a backup WAN connection at one of our sites, and it has a static IP.

From their official site:

> Although truly static IPs are not available, a reservation system retains the public IPv4 address and IPv6 prefix even when the system is off or rebooted.

You have a potentially stable address, but not a truly static one.

TCP can get confused by satellite handovers

https://blog.apnic.net/2024/05/17/a-transport-protocols-view...

Starlink is competitive with rural lines which tend to be DSL over unmaintained copper. If you have cable you will probably do better with that. If you are in a dense ish area just about anything will do better.

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