On 9/6/06, Stephen Sprunk <stephen@sprunk.org> wrote:
Telling half my family members they have to go get Gmail so they can email the other half of my family members is ridiculous. Too bad Comcast has a monopoly (or, where a duopoly, the competition is just as incompetent) so they have no incentive to fix it.
I'm tired of this duopoly fiction. Cable modem providers are usually de facto monopolies, though some of them may use PPPoE or other methods of supporting wholesale service, but DSL is only a monopoly at the copper layer, not at the DSLAM layer in more than half of the US or at the IP layer in almost all of the US. Beyond that, there are a number of service providers that will accept VPN tunnels of various sorts so you can get service access independent of your ISP's policies. That doesn't mean, of course, that it isn't too much hassle for your relatives to want to do that just to avoid the limitations of Comcast, but they've got lots of options if they want them.