Thanks for Jeff Liebermann for suggesting the Costco cable modem!

[Ralph Mowery]

It would take a good diagram to explaine that. I doubt I can explain it in words.

Try to picture a radio wave comming toward the antenna like a flat line. If only a single antenna element the line would mostly pass the antenna and only a small portion would be received. Now picture the antenna with many elements and the line comming toward the antenna. As it hits the first element, it bends like a rubber band, the more elements it passes the more it bends. By the time it gets to the driven element (the one that actually picks up the signal) the signal is bent into a long cigar type shape and more of it will hit the driven element.

The length and the spacing of the elements are related to the frequency you want to receive or transmitt.

There are several software programs that let you do computer modleing of the antennas. Here is a link to one that has a free demo program that allows for simple antenas.

Most all of them are based on the same basic software program.

[dold]

I think that's far better than Motorola being purchased by Arris.

Shudder... 2-wire was so much fun when AT&T rolled DSL into Lake County. They brought guys over from Santa Rosa to do some of the installs, and I think they cleared out the Santa Rosa dumpsters of all the old 2-wire boxes. (but we've chatted about that already.)

I had phone service from Mediacom for a while. Now that portability works so well, you can change VoIP telco providers as easily as gas stations. I thought the CableCo voice was a "good thing" because it used a separate channel, just like the XfinityWiFi. No impact on your modem speed, no collisions, better voice.

If they reuse returned modems, that might take a long time. Mediacom didn't even rebox the modems. They'd give you one in a plastic bag.

IPv6 was a real headache for my son's new XBoxOne. You couldn't disable IPv6 in the TG862G, but it didn't work well, or XBox didn't, or something. On Ubuntu, I see that connections to some of the major sites are IPv6.

[Jeff Liebermann]

True, but Motorola is far from perfect. Every time they buy a modem company, the first thing that happens is the pipeline is crammed full of rejects, returns, refurbished, and junk modems for about 3 months. I think the company they bought counted their backlog of repair jobs as shippable inventory when the company was appraised, and Motorola just shipped everything.

Yep. I saw the dumpster crammed full of failed and rejected 2-wire power supplies delivered from the local AT&T yard. Why AT&T kept so many dead power supplies around their yard will remain a mystery.

Well, I lied a little. While the Arris TM722G and TM822G telephony modems are not listed as "retail" on the Comcast web site, Comcast will activate them if you scream or complain loudly. They can be had for $30 to $70 on eBay.

Comcast really wants to be a phone provider (without all the telco common carrier restrictions) and is doing their best to become the carrier of choice. Of course, that doesn't include remembering to supply backup batteries for the modems and gateways, but I'll forgive them for trying to gouge and extra $35 from those that complain. If they keep up such practices, they may achieve their goal of emulating all the bad parts of AT&T.

The cable telephony modem, which uses a separate channel is the better way to do phone for the reasons you indicate. Another advantage is that the jitter on the telephone RF channel is quite good, while the jitter on the Comcast data channel is variable, apparently depending mostly on channel loading. I'm on Comcast but using Future-Nine for VoIP on the data channel. There are plenty of dropouts and garble but at $6.25/month, I won't complain (much).

I don't know what Comcast does with their returns.

Chuckle. I should have predicted what is happening. Comcast cranked up the speed for home users about 2 weeks ago. I'm seeing 90 Mbits/sec down and either 6 or 12 Mbits/sec up for both IPv4 and IPv6. Both are obviously rate limited. However, that was 2 weeks ago. Now, I'm seeing the same 90 Mbits/sec for IPv4, while IPv6 has dropped to about 40 Mbit/sec. What seems to be happening is that the new Windoze

10 machines favor IPv6 if it's available. Comcast seems to have some kind of IPv6 to IPv4 gateway for those web sites and servers that only terminate with IPv4. The Windoze 10 machine favors IPv6 for everything, so the gateway is probably getting swamped by the Windoze 10 traffic. I've again had to turn off IPv6 in some customers routers to maintain performance as the congestions seems to produce some dropped packets.

Tomorrow, I do a service call for a dialup customer. I wonder if I even remember how to setup and use dialup internet?

[dold]

I usually retest URLs that I post, just to make sure they are still live (Jeff had a discussion with someone else who needed to take a little time out on that issue, recently.)

I discovered that my home IPv6 wasn't IPv6-ing. I used my set of URLs:

(look at the "api" tab)

hmmm... Oh, right! Someone suggested that IPv6 has no stateful filters, and it would be impossible to block inbound attacks. Is that true? I left "Enable Router Advertisement" turned off, which killed my external IPv6 while I investigated, and I guess I never finished investigating.