Comcast High Speed Internet Review
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I’ve had Comcast High Speed Internet Access for a little over a year now, and I’m not exactly thrilled with the service; however, it’s much better than DSL and my old Time Warner connections.
Here’s my biggest problem: I live in a run-down city. The place is depressed and the city is nearly bankrupt. Since the area I live in is so run down, the infrastructure is almost non-existent. Of yeah, we have an infrastructure, the problem is that it tends to be pretty flaky: electricity will just cut out for days at a time with no word on what happened or when it will be fixed, cell phone towers are always at their maximum capacity, and cable goes in and out.
When service goes out around here, it goes out for a long period of time - upwards of three days - and Comcast does not reimburse us for the downtime. What’s worse is that these outages just suddenly and miraculously happen, out of the blue, and without warning. It is, quite frankly, annoying.
The service, when it is up and running, is fairly stable and fast. When I have had to call Comcast (which has been on a number of occasions) they’ve always been prompt and courteous (I believe they use one national call center, although I could be mistaken).
How are the speeds? Well, it’s pretty damn fast. Since I don’t live in a very densely populated area, I don’t have to worry about “peak bandwidth” times. I generally see speeds ranging upwards of 600kb/sec (depending on the server, of course).
Is SpeedBoost worth it? In a word: no. SpeedBoost is a bunch of marketing crap. Oh, on the right servers, I can hit top download speeds of almost 1Mbit/sec. The problem is that this lasts for all of 2 seconds, after which I fall back to my normal speeds. Large files, like disk images, still take forever to download. While SpeedBoost does benefit you on very small downloads, anything above 500kb and SpeedBoost really isn’t going to help you.
Overall, I’m mixed on Comcast’s High Speed Internet service. On one hand it kicks Time Warner and DSL’s butt. On the other hand, it’s the same Comcast people have come to know and expect: flaky outages, high prices, and marketing hype. Still, if it’s a toss up between DSL and Comcast, I’d go with Comcast high Speed.
Tags: comcast high speed
2 Comments
Comcast High Speed Internet Review ۞ - CALLCENTERING.COM - ۞
June 12th, 2007
at 5:37pm
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marc klink
June 12th, 2007
at 8:49pm
You speak of how this is better than DSL, yet you quote speeds that even the lowest bracket of DSL service easily surpasses. DSL can be had from several vendors for under $20/month, with 768/128 down/up, which is faster than what you say you have. DSL, because it is on phone lines, tends to be more reliable[note I said tends to be]. I used to have 768/128, and these were minimums, with speeds frequently higher [1122 down]. I have been in other peoples houses, working on their machines, and have achieved essentially the same. So why, I ask, do you think what you have beats DSL? [If I was paying over $10/month, and only getting 600 kbps down, I’d be really mad. Ads I’ve seen for cable tend to hover the price per month at about $40…]