I had a similar problem with comcast for about a year, and would call them on it. Eventually, one tech did something, and moved me to a different node in the neighborhood. It was awesome because he also messed up the config for it, and while people were typically getting 6 (or 10 with an upgrade) Mbps, I was getting 54Mbps... which I think was the full speed of the node at the time. They eventually caught it and fixed it about a year later when they were rolling out the newer speeds in the area though.

Haven't dealt much with cable tech support much, have you? They couldn't figure out what is wrong with a line if you handed them a cable cut in half. They'd first ask you to try and reboot the computer to make sure it wasn't that.

Because it knows how it was connected. The same way when you hook up your computer, you won't get the xfinity login screen first, nor will you on your wifi, but a guest accessing it would.

Yeah, or you buy a car, and it comes with an onstar radio built-in? That'll be the day.

A honeypot would be designed to just pass the credentials you provide on to the real one, so it would know if the credentials are invalid or not.

A special login program for...everything? Yeah, that's not going to work.

These modems also typically have the capability of having more than 1 IP address, and assigning them dynamically. 1 of which likely isn't going to be a public address and NATed, just like the cellular networks do.

There aren't any additionally used frequencies.

Most home cable modems support being assigned multiple IPs, and have for the past 10-15 years. Some cable companies (comcast included) allow or did allow people to have more than 1 IP assigned to them, usually set up to assign 1 IP per machine.

I agree. Passwords are insecure, so I've compiled a custom version of linux that just asks your username and lets you in. Saves me from fielding all those pesky "I forgot my password" calls. Works great.

So you are getting 80/20 for about $66.

I'm paying $76 for 50/10. Not quite a good, but close enough I suppose. They also offer 3/? for $30, 6/? for $50, 20/4 for $66, 100/something for $99 (I believe it's $99, they don't list it on their website -- a year ago it was $199, but I think they halved it recently).

If I wanted to limit my usage to 5 gigs a month, I could save $78 a month by dropping comcast completely, and just using my cellular provider.

The only difference would be that minimum wage would be 1/64 of a goat per hour. Or perhaps we'd all be paid in bitcoins because last I checked, that wasn't government regulated and seems to be doing fairly well.

I think the problem is that people think of the antitrust ruling as being a punishment for Microsoft including IE into Windows and stifling choice. However, today we have iOS and ChromeOS which not only include their own browsers, but they make it impossible to replace them with another browser at all, which is actually much worse than what most people think the antitrust ruling against Microsoft was for. Yet, people throw around "convicted Monopolist" around, when in reality, their perceived transgressions were either much milder than their current competition, and/or were nothing more than just being ahead of the curve.

That said, the antitrust ruling had very very little to do with IE, and more with start screens and marketing/advertising campaigns.

VP9 is *almost* as good as h.264, not h.265. h.265 is much much better than both. You need to recheck your facts.