Comcast as an ISP - your experiences

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shadowwyvern

Gawd
Joined
Sep 22, 2005
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I am considering switching from 1.5Mbps dsl to a Comcast service, most likely 8Mb. I have always felt sorry for people on cable, because practically every single person (even in my remote area) has had problems with connection speed, stability of speed, stability of connection, etc. Is this mainly an area-specific phenomenon? Is it universal to cable in general? My current ISP (TDS) does not seem to oversell thier backbone too much, and though 1.5 Mbps is somewhat slow, I have never gotten actual throughput anything less than that. For years I have been telling people to stay away from cable, but was that really right? I do know a few people who live in even more remote areas, and they love cable because of the massive throughput. I always assumed that noboy in any populated area would ever get anything close to what was offered during peak hours, but would like to find out your experiences with the service.

Thanks
 
I think problems with Cable are area specific. For instance when I lived in a more remote area, I got 7Mb/s, with an advertised 6Mb/s. Here in my more congested town, its up and down all the time, and I rarely get my advertised speed. This is with TWC RoadRunner.

My father has Comcast in the Ft Myers FL area, and has the same problem. Once again, I think its area specific.

But in anycase, 3-4Mb/s, is better than 1.5 right? Even if you are paying for 6? Maybe thats how they get away with it, it still beats the competions offer. I guess thats up to you, and the price diference.
 
I live in downtown Denver... not exactly a remote area, and I love Comcast. It's been stable and reliable, fast and um.... fast.

I'm stuck on satellite or dsl at work, depending on the location, and my connection at home is much better. I have heard many of the same things you said about cable, but I have never experienced any of them, and I've been using Comcast for over three years.
 
well depands on where you live. I live in a populated area and the cable sucks, big time. but then again its not comcast where the servers maybe better :confused:

I use my local company because my local company has kept comcast from coming in this area. :mad: As I pay for 8mb/s and only get 6.5mb/s on a good day and 4.4mb/s to 5.3mb/s on a bad day. I hate it.
Again, depands on the area and the population.
 
Area dependent I think. I live south of Sacramento, and I have had minor issues with comcast. I did have a problem recently, but it turned out some homeowner thought he'd be clever about his cable service. Unfortunately, his work ( illegal work, I might add ) was crappy, and caused my service to drop.

The techs came out and fixed it right up. Haven't had an issue since.
 
I live an a very sparely populated (but geographically large) town that for some reason is well covered by DSL, so I guess I should get decent speeds. What about their transfer cap. Is it around 200GB/month, or closer to 500GB a month. There are times when I do transfer a lot of data, plus just the principle of having to even think about "conserving" my available bandwidth annoys me. Odds are they might not even care in my area though :)
 
Love 'em. I was bridged DSL for years, had a business DSL package at the house.

Finally decided to give cable a shot...as Comcast seemed to do pretty well in my area from my experience of working on others PCs.

Bought my own Motorola 5120 modem...the date I was supposed to be turned on...called them up, said "I have my own modem", I read them the MAC, a few minutes later he provisioned it....BAM, online.

Powerboost came out....WOW.

Several months ago upgraded to their phone/HD TV/Internet triple play package. Motorola modem replaced with the Arris. Still nice 'n fast.

Whenever I've called their support for someone else...very quick, get the job done fairly easily.
 
My house came from Netzero Dialup about 6 years ago, and we have been happy. We are supposed to get 6mb, but we get about 4mb, although it is a bit hard to measure in this situation.

I wouldn't hesitate to go with Comcast when I move out.
 
Pittsburgh, PA:
I have been on Comcast's 4Mbit service for three years now at three different apartments, which all were in the same neighborhood. I have had some trouble with it, but overall I am satisfied with their service.

edit: for a short time I used their 8Mbit/ 7xxkbit package and saw 600+ KiB/s downloads and 80KiB/s uploads. It was rather expensive though.
 
Comcast is great. Your IP address will rarely change, so I've been running a mail/web/ftp server for the past few years.
 
I've got the 6mb..........usually at around 5. I only had an issue when I was getting a new IP every month - happened for a few months, and then stabilized. Speeds are consistent (my city has about 90 - 100,000 people in it, and Comcast is the monopoly here). They give you the Mcafee suite free, and I find the newest version is a big improvement. My gripe is the pricing. I'm thinking about Verizon DSL.........the whole area is going fiber-optic, and Verizon is about $13 cheaper a month.

If you are a big P2P or Torrent sharer, you will hate Comcast. They have a reputation of smacking big downloaders. Thier rules are very vague regarding what is "to much" bandwidth usage, and your stuck bowing down to them if your told to slow down, or they cut you off at the knees and kill your service.
 
shadowwyvern said:
I live an a very sparely populated (but geographically large) town that for some reason is well covered by DSL, so I guess I should get decent speeds. What about their transfer cap. Is it around 200GB/month, or closer to 500GB a month. There are times when I do transfer a lot of data, plus just the principle of having to even think about "conserving" my available bandwidth annoys me. Odds are they might not even care in my area though :)
Click to expand...

Your kidding me right? Thats ALOT of data, an unbeleiveable amount of data! If you use that much data you should have a buisness account, I would kick your ass too :p
 
Since they are the only real ISP in my city of 60000, I use Comcast cable. I get my advertised speeds all the time (4 Mbit down, a crappy 384 kbits up) so I can't complain. I rarely have to call customer service, but the people are generally really good if I have a question about the service or if there is an outage or something.

Uptime in my neck of the woods is very good. However, a mile away a friend of mine probably has a very heavily loaded branch of the network, since he frequently experiences slow speeds. Not a surprise though - I live in a very lightly populated part of the city, and he lives in a more densely populated area.

I never face any P2P capping or anything, but I never upload in the crazy amount of data other people do (can't really do that on 384 up anyway). However, FiOS has been deployed a mile from me in another city, so if they ever get around to me, I will jump ship without hesitation.
 
I live in a fairly large city, with a lot of users in my neighborhood, and I get pretty consistent service levels. Current test to my closest city is 15734kbps down/1142kbps up.

It's expensive, but it does work fairly well. Looking forward to FIOS again since I moved to a non-serviceable area.
 
Sounds like good things, the 200GB figure was mainly to attempt to draw out responses that were more detailed than " dont worry about it" I certainly wish I could get FIOS, but alas 10 miles from nowhere it will probably never be available...
 
Well, you always have to consider that people with issues state them, and those who are happy rarely say anything...

That said, I don't hear a lot of praise for Comcast, but I hear a lot of complaints.

One of the best resources for research on this is http://www.broadbandreports.com/. You can drill down to not only the provider, but in most cases the exact AREA where service is being considered.

Also, if you are a newsgroup junky (as I am), you may not like Comcast. It is my understanding that they quit supporting/providing any newsgroup service some time ago.

Look to see if Verizon FIOS is available in your area. It' spreading really fast, and generally gets very good reports, and during the push-out phase, I believe most of the installs are free.

FIOS just came to my area. I can get it for about the same cost as cable. My problem is, I'm happy with my Cable service now. 2 years ago, before the switch to 100% digital, I would have jumped ship in a heartbeat.

I pay for a 15mbit/2mbit service. I actually get around a 27mbit/2.1mbit service. I don't know why, but I'm not complaining. I have Cox cable in NoVa.

I just ran a test at SpeakEasy, and the results were:

Last Result:
Download Speed: 26717 kbps (3339.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 2209 kbps (276.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

That is with a VNC tunnel running, as well as being connected to a clients machine via VNC.

It's hard to switch when it's that good :)
 
I can't complain about PowerBoost. :D

powerboost2.JPG
 
Alias2 said:
Your kidding me right? Thats ALOT of data, an unbeleiveable amount of data! If you use that much data you should have a buisness account, I would kick your ass too :p
Click to expand...
Thats not very much. I had 400 GB last month alone. I know alot of people that use all their bandwidth all the time 24/7. Cool thing about Charter cable and Fios is you will never be capped based on how much you download. All I can say is i get my 29.99 out of Charter and then some.
 
Comcast just took over TimeWarner here. (memphis, tn) And since then, service has went way down. I do not use them at home for personal use but one of our 10mb pipes here at work is with them. We had an issue with our BGP connection the other week which caused us to lose that connection. The people at the "help desk" listed the issue as latency. Yeah... Latency my ass. 4hours later we finally get ahold of one of the tech's a co-worker knows and get the issue resolved. No help from the "help desk". Fyi, I work for a local hospital who is a pretty large customer of Comcast's and you see the type of service we recieved.
 
I suppose I should have said something about their "service". Whereas I have been very happy with my connection... their service does kind of suck. I have had to call twice, once because my modem died, and another because the line to my house was damaged.. and both times they went out of their way to try and blame my equipment... That really pisses me off, but it is also somewhat expected, so.. Other than that, I'm still happy overall, it is better than DSL or satellite, in my experience at least..
 
digital_exhaust said:
I suppose I should have said something about their "service". Whereas I have been very happy with my connection... their service does kind of suck. I have had to call twice, once because my modem died, and another because the line to my house was damaged.. and both times they went out of their way to try and blame my equipment... That really pisses me off, but it is also somewhat expected, so.. Other than that, I'm still happy overall, it is better than DSL or satellite, in my experience at least..
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Same experience as me, connection is good, customer service is bad.
 
Up and down more often than a drunk on a bar stool. Constantly having to call and report outages, then wait 2-6 hours. Rinse and repeat 4-5 times a month.
 
I had comcast cable for about 8 months. After 6 months... well, Have you seen the Qwest commercial which looks like a game show, that says "Lets Play... Jack my prices up!"? $56.00/mo for 4mb/384k cable internet. It was around december or january, that they introduced that powerboost crap. Initially, it was nice... Nice to download 5 solaris .ISOs within a half hour. Later on it only seemed to work for about 1 minute on downloads before it slowly throttled back to 4mb.

The upload speed was awful, and the service costs more than what Qwest's 7mb/968k DSL does. Comcasts DNS servers went down a bit too often for my liking, occasionaly they would assign me an IP like 0.0.0.255. Other than that, the service was adequate. 50-60 ms pings to most sites in the US, almost no packet loss.

As far as customer service goes, Comcast is the way to go if your looking for a compay which beleives all issues, such as DNS servers not responding to ping (could ping my website in arizona) can be resolved by power cycling the modem several times in a row. My modem could have caught on fire, I think they would still ask me to power cycle it 2 or 3 times.

Unfortunatley for me, in an area with 500,000+ residents, comcast is the only "broadband" isp avalible aside from satellite. Im now using peoplepc dialup, and "enjoying" 15-20kbs (Kilo-bits per second).
 
bob said:
I had comcast cable for about 8 months. After 6 months... well, Have you seen the Qwest commercial which looks like a game show, that says "Lets Play... Jack my prices up!"? $56.00/mo for 4mb/384k cable internet. It was around december or january, that they introduced that powerboost crap. Initially, it was nice... Nice to download 5 solaris .ISOs within a half hour. Later on it only seemed to work for about 1 minute on downloads before it slowly throttled back to 4mb.

The upload speed was awful, and the service costs more than what Qwest's 7mb/968k DSL does. Comcasts DNS servers went down a bit too often for my liking, occasionaly they would assign me an IP like 0.0.0.255. Other than that, the service was adequate. 50-60 ms pings to most sites in the US, almost no packet loss.

As far as customer service goes, Comcast is the way to go if your looking for a compay which beleives all issues, such as DNS servers not responding to ping (could ping my website in arizona) can be resolved by power cycling the modem several times in a row. My modem could have caught on fire, I think they would still ask me to power cycle it 2 or 3 times.

Unfortunatley for me, in an area with 500,000+ residents, comcast is the only "broadband" isp avalible aside from satellite. Im now using peoplepc dialup, and "enjoying" 15-20kbs (Kilo-bits per second).
Click to expand...

Their DNS service have not gone down in over a year and a half, unless you use a different server.
 
It's been pretty good for me for the six months or so I've had it. Downtime has been very minimal. I always get the advertised 384 Kbps upload and at least the advertised 6 Mbps download. Later in the night... and not that late... after, say, 8:00pm, the download speeds are very good. I just used speedtest.net and it came back with about an 18 Mbps download. I think that paying more for their 8 Mbps service would be a complete waste. The biggest downside to Comcast is dealing with their customer service. I've dealt with a lot of their people and don't have a single positive thing to say.
 
I have to say Comcast has the worst support that I have ever encountered. I've delt with a lot of tech companies over the years and have had some good and bad experiences. These people take the cake though. I have been helping a family try and get their internet fixed. For four days now I have just trying to even make contact with with someone at comcast. Just make contact, thats it. They hired some company to take their over flow of calls. What that means to me is that there is no way to even get ahold of someone at comcast. Which means I have to help these user's find a new provider. I wll never recommend comcast to anyone. :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
 
I have had very few problems with Comcast in my area. Now I don't use their e-mail service, I don't use their DNS servers. I only use them for an Internet connection. My usage is for research, e-mail, web surfing, and gaming. I don't do bittorrent (unless I am getting a new Linux ISO), or newsgroups.

So for a connection is has been good. I typically don't have any issues getting to websites, downloads or what have you. Speeds seem fine to me. I think I am now up to 6Mb or 8Mb. I haven't tested since last year.
 
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