It seems to be somewhat complicated... I used to live in Playa Del Rey, CA which was Comcast, however that market was switched to Time Warner Cable for some reason. Then I moved from Playa Del Rey to Lakewood, CA (just about 20 miles south), where Time Warner Cable has the local monopoly. At least they USED to have the monopoly, because it seems that they just switched ownership of this market (without informing their customers), from Time Warner to Comcast.

If you have ever tried to use T-Mobile hotspot internet access, or wireless in a hotel in the US, you have experienced essentially the same thing as Comcast pulled. They hijack all DNS requests and rediect them to their "Accept our Terms and Conditions or you get no internet access" form. Comcast did this, redirecting all my browser port 80 and 443 requests to their T&C page where I had to agree to it by clicking the "I agree" and putting in my zip code. However, since the market change hasn't been finalized / consummated / completed / whatever the lingo is, my zip code didn't actually register as being valid, so they wouldn't let me past that screen and forced me into a chat session with a customer service rep. That's where I found myself 800-and-some-odd in queue. Trying to do an end run around that and go directly to their technical support was no good since apparently 1,000s of other new comcast customer's were getting screwed in exactly the same way and flooding their call center.

I finally called Time Warner and asked their tech group what was up and they had me do a complete network shut down and reboot in order: you know the drill... unplug everything... plug in cable modem, wait 30 seconds, plug in router, wait 30 seconds, boot workstation, wait 30 seconds, boot Vonage box, wait 30 seconds. That seems to have resolved it. I imagine all I wound up doing was authorizing my cable modem with their network again.

I'm just figuring out now how to ensure my TiVo will work with Verizon's FiOS TV and I will be moving over to that. Fiber to the house man... can't beat it.