Comcast

Comcast is the primary cable Internet Service Provider in Blacksburg. In the past, students have had far less complaints about Comcast's service in contrast to their main competitor, NTC. Comcast offers both residential and "business-class" connections to the vast majority of Blacksburg, and may also offer metro Ethernet in some areas. Their basic business-class plan costs about $70/month for 12 Mbps down/2 Mbps up, including modem rental fees. Blacksburg users have not noticed any support for IPv6 and have resorted to using a tunnel from w:Hurricane Electric.

Controversies

Comcast employs packet shaping on both residential and "business-class" customers, which has led to an FCC investigation. Comcast's packet shaping results in the customers using the most traffic being given the least priority. Some users have reported average ping times to Google on the order of 1800 ms as a result, which have partially been alleviated by QoS scripts on their routers.