Nathan's Occasional Blog

I just called Comcast support to get them to undo a filter that was placed on our home Internet connection a couple years ago.  We used to use a program that sent a challenge email to each spam message we got to give the sender a chance to prove they’re human.  🙂  We’re not using that anymore, rather our home email is filtered by Postini before it even gets to our server mailbox.

I got a tech on the phone after a couple minutes of waiting – not too bad really.  I explained to Neil that we were being blocked from sending email, and how I know WHY we were getting blocked and that we’ve stopped using that tool.  I also mentioned that having SMTP (email sending) traffic blocked made difficult to my job at times, since it’s hard to test email if I can’t send an email.  🙂

He said he’d take the filter off, but it would take a reboot of our cable modem, which runs our Comcast phone line, so he’d call us back in a few minutes.  He did, and then he gave me a present.  He said that he increased my upload bandwidth 4X to over 2Mbps!  WOOHOO!

This is Comcast’s new “Blast” service, and Neil told me they just started the beta of the program here in the Seattle market a few days ago.  Blast is an enhancement to the top-tier of cable modem service that gives you constant faster bandwidth, not just short bursts.  They’re slowly rolling it out around the country, and I had heard a while back from my good friend that it was coming here this summer.

So much for the wait!  🙂  2.7Mb uploads instead of the previous 500-700Kb.  OH YEAH!

Thanks Neil!!!