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"Comcast is essentially deploying against their own customers techniques more typically used by malicious hackers (this is doubtless how Comcast would characterize other parties that forged traffic to make it appear that it came from Comcast). In this sense Comcast is behaving worse than if they dropped a proportion of packets under congested circumstances in order to throttle bandwidth usage, or even if they blocked certain ports on their network.
[...]
"Comcast's conduct also threatens innovation by undermining the end-to-end principle. The Internet has enabled a cascade of innovations precisely because any programmer -- whether employed by a huge corporation, a startup, or tinkering at home for fun -- has been able to create new protocols and applications that operate over TCP/IP, without having to obtain permission from anyone. Comcast's recent moves threaten to create a situation in which innovators may need to obtain permission and assistance from an ISP in order to guarantee that their protocols will operate correctly. By arbitrarily using RST packets in a manner at odds with TCP/IP standards, Comcast threatens to Balkanize the open standards that are the foundation of the Internet."
-- Peter Eckersley, Fred von Lohmann and Seth Schoen, "Packet Forgery By ISPs: A Report on the Comcast Affair", Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 2007
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mebbe they serve Bowie/Washington DC?
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It's line-of-sight, so to blanket DC, with the height limit on buildings, a provider would probably have to use towers outside of city limits (or make a deal to put antennas on the National Cathedral, which overlooks most of the city -- since I doubt they could get permission to use the Washinton Monument). But maybe the height limits would wind up being an advantage because of the lack of tall buildings to cast shadows in the coverage from antennas around the border?
There are problems with wireless, to be sure (including things like blank spots due to shadows, and just the whole startup-momentum thing with building infrastructure from scratch and then getting enough customer "mindshare" when cable, DSL, and FIOS have several years head start, but unlike any other approaches for latecomers to the broadband game in any given city, the "last mile problem" is rather neatly avoided. (The only other player I can see entering the market easily is IP-over-power-lines, and it'll be the power companies, not some startup, trying to make money off of that if it's shown not to cause interference for emergency radio services.)
Since Believe Wireless is still small-ish, everyone there seems to be a techie so far -- when I call, I get someone who knows the technology (and uses Linux at home) instead of first-level customer support working from a script. I'm pretty sure that will have to change once they hit a certain size, but I'm enjoying it for now.
I've got the cheapest package they offer -- 1M down, 256K up, and I'm seeing FTP times mostly consistent with the advertised speeds, sometimes faster. I haven't tried really huge transfers or BitTorrent yet, but FTPing a 300MB file works okay. And they don't have any rules against running servers, which Comcast (and I think, but I'm not sure, Verizon) explicitly prohibit on residential accounts.
The big advantage over Verizon -- this is about the company, not the technology -- is response time to repair calls. Instead of "three to five business days unless our contractors are too busy", which I always got from Verizon for service to POTS lines when I had a landline, Believe Wireless gets a truck out to my house the day I call. That too may change when they get bigger, but I hope not. (And once they beefed up the bolts on the antenna to account for my having the most windy rooftop of all their customers so far, I haven't needed to call them anyhow.)
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