Comcast - The Speed Test
April 23, 2008
I’ve been hearing a lot of rumblings lately about Comcast, slow speeds and traffic shaping. Whether it’s Chris Pirillo, Leo Laporte or one of their community members, I’ve never really shared their experiences with slow speeds or traffic shaping. Now, I’ve been a Comcast customer since moving to the Seattle metro area back in 2002 and have only had a few issues with outages, but nothing more. Our household is a heavy user of bandwidth as we have a VOIP (Vonage) telephone and at least 3 computers connected to the Internet 24 hours per day. During the daytime there are usually several streams getting pulled down from UStream.tv or Leo’s site over at Twit.tv on top of the usual web browsing, FTP’ing and remote office connections about 10 hours a day.
Now the Speedtest.net image I’ve displayed in this post shows one of our better connection speeds; we typically attain speeds varying between 22 megs down and a pretty steady 1.2 to 1.5 megs up.
Much of the complaints I’ve heard all seem to have a common theme - Bittorrents and their supposed value to download Linux distros. I don’t use bittorrents. Why? Because with my current connection speed, downloading files via FTP or HTTP work just as fast, if not faster.
So, are these guys really worried about using bittorrent and it getting blocked or throttled at Comcast? I think a better reason for the complaints centers around the simple fact that they (nor do I) want anything or anyone limiting Internet connections speeds. Herein lies the problem with the focus of their complaints - the simple fact is Comcast limits/adjusts bandwidth because their networks get bogged down with people downloading less than legal software and movies. I think you will agree, the main reason people use bittorrent is to download pirated (illegal) software and movies with little chance of getting caught. If they stopped the “I can’t download my Linux” schpiel, their argument would a much more validity with me.
Hey, what do I know? It’s just my two cents on the topic. What do you think? Let me know in the comment section below.
eBay, PayPal and the High Costs
March 19, 2008
Recently, I’ve been listing several of my parent’s antique items on eBay with a fair amount of success. Up until today, I never really paid attention to all the fees associated with selling on eBay and then taking payments via PayPal. I just finished listing and selling one of my father’s many antique brass musical instruments, a circa 1840 Prussian Soprano Cornet in B flat. When I finally got the invoice, I was shocked. This horn sold for $1,902.77 and $58.25 for shipping to Germany via US Postal Service Priority Mail International. The buyer used PayPal and I assumed used a credit card.
eBay Fee List:
- Featured Plus Fee $24.95
- Insertion Fee $4.00
- Picture Pack Fee $1.00
- Reserve Price Fee $16.98
-
Final Valuation Fee $49.85
Total: $96.78
+ PayPal Fees:
-
Payment Fee $76.78
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Grand Total: $173.56
Texting Scam - Thanks At&t, Verisign
January 27, 2008
I’m not sure how this happens but for the past three months I’ve been billed by my wireless provider, AT&T, for “m-Qube” internet services (Ringtones?) for $9.99 plus tax. I called AT&T each time and asked what this was and why I was being charged for something I never ordered; they could not give me an answer. Each time the customer service representative seemed to work through a process of removing me from this fraudulent service. They even initiated a stop purchase service where each line on the account is prevented from downloading any type of content without first entering a special PIN number. Well, guess what? None of it worked. After explaining all this to the latest customer service rep tonight at AT&T, I opted to change the telephone number.
I strongly suggest that you review your next wireless bill and look for any reference to m-Qube. Regardless of whom your cell provider is, m-Qube can and will attack and bill you. If you see m-Qube on your bill, treat it like a CANCER! Cancel your account if you have to, or at a minimum, change your number. Anything less will not work.
Bux.to a Scam? If if smells like poop…
January 27, 2008
Money for free for the masses from Bux.to? My guess = no. This just gives me a bad feeling. I first learned of this while watching a live session of the Chris Pirillo show at live.pirillo.com. Chris was talking about Bux.to and how he was excited and felt pretty good about its legitimacy. Now even though I trust Chris and have no reason to doubt him, I still have serious doubts about Bux.to and their system. Chris decided to sign up for an account (I think he signed up for a premium account and spent about $500). After a short period of doing this and announcing it online live on his show, he had already made just under a hundred dollars in the first twelve hours.
A basic account is free and from what I understand, the system works by paying a small amount (1 cent) to a member for viewing paid advertising (all seem to be get rich quick ads) on their site for a period of time (30 seconds) – the more ads you review, the more money you make. On the backside of this, Bux.to figures than can generate enough people viewing advertiser’s links that some will eventually make a purchase from that advertiser.
If you don’t want to do all the viewing and clicking yourself, you can always purchase your own referrals instead of getting your own for free. This, in theory, increases your view rate and should bring in more money. This, I suspect, is where Bux.to is making their monies. It’s a numbers game - You spend $459.00 to purchase referrals and they do the ad viewing for you. The more referrers you have under you actually viewing ads is what is supposed to bring in the funds. That is, if they spend as much time as you’d like viewing these ads…30 seconds each? Sounds like the fun would wear outta this pretty quick.
Here’s what I’ve found on Bux.to:
· Their paypal Id is: FreelancerMarketing.com. A website with absolutely nothing on it but some worthless links. A simple email address, no address, nada, zip, zilch. Wouldn’t you want people to know more about your consultancy business?
· Bux.to name registration is private and the site hosting goes out to somewhere in Germany.
· Their forums are at abux.info
· There are over 700 Youtube.com videos on Bux.to mostly by younger males wanting you to become their referral. Many use the maximum payout example while talking about it as an enticement to get you to sign up under them.
· They sell you ads for anywhere from .019 cents per view down to .015 if you spend $16,000.00 with them
Bottom line, I’m keeping my money in the bank. I don’t have the numbers as far as referrals that Chris does, so a dollar a day isn’t enough to get me interested. As of this writing, I haven’t heard if Chris actually got his initial $500 back.
If you have success with bux.to, I’d like to hear about it. Please drop me a line and I’ll share it.
