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. Many individuals use "business-class" connections for themselves due to static IP support, less restrictive contracts, and potential exemptions from new "six-strikes" policies. Comcast's 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 Hurricane Electric.
Controversies
Comcast employs packet shaping on both residential and "business-class" customers, which previously led to an FCC investigation.[1] In 2010, Comcast published an RFC on their new packet shaping practices, which results in the customers using the most traffic being given the least priority.[2] This is extremely problematic, as users must limit their downstream bandwidth, which is extremely difficult. 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.
