Comcast – Smart Packets (Not so Smart)

Just a quick post for today as this one on the internet in general.

If you ever have trouble viewing a web site and get a Network Timeout, and you use Comcast as your ISP, give them a call to resolve. It seems they have a technology called Smart Packets that filters and blocks certain addresses based on an unknown filter (or at least the techs did not know why it was triggered).

We recently had 20+ sites blocked from our office location (although we could view in other locations, our clients could view them, we could see them on our mobile phones, and basically the whole world could see them, except us). After a quick call to Comcast, they disabled the Smart Packets and poof, we could see the sites again.

Argg….Comcast.

It seems like this filtering technology was triggered by us uploading FTP files to a few sites (or at least that is what we think). Odd, but true. However, it seems very big-brotherish for them to block other sites on the same IP-range. We could see some sites, but not others.

Anyways, the fix is to just give them a call.