 Review by Morac 
UPDATED: 57 days ago
member for 7.3 years, 2742 visits, last login: 1 days ago
 Riverside,Burlington,NJ
 $43 per month (24 month contract)
 about 1 days
 "Always On, Faster than dial up and DSL."
 "More expensive than DSL and FIOS. Problems can take a long time to fix."
 "It's great when it works, but if something goes wrong you're screwed."
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Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Update (11/10/08): Service has now been working fairly well since I last updated. There haven't been many problems, but when a problem does occur it can take a long time to fix. My contract is up in a little under a year at which point, Comcast will jack the price way up (close to $60 more a month). I'm not sure what I'll do at that point.
Update (5/05/08): I now have Triple-Play which means I have TV, phone and Internet. When it works, it works well, but lately I've been getting hit by bouts of packet loss that last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. So far Comcast has been unable to fix it.
Update (8/05/06): Powerboost is enabled in my area which means the first 10 seconds of my downloads are at speeds of about 16 mbps. It then drops back down to 6 mbps. But it does decrease the amount of time to download large files. It also helps with streaming video.
Update (12/22/05): I figured it was time to update this again. Currently speeds are at 6000/384 and most time I exceeed that (at least for the download speed). TV has switched to 100% digital through the cable box which is both good and bad. It's good because there is no snow or fuzzies on channels any more. It's bad because they seem to have issues with their analog to digital conversions. The 2 annoying ones are G4 breaking up on occasion and a number of channels have a vertical interlace problem (see »Vertical Interlacing? ). Comcast refuses to acknowledge or fix either of those 2 problem. Other than that things are okay, but FIOS is drawing ever near....
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Update (2/06/05): Time for the nearly yearly update. Speeds have been upgraded to 4000/384 and for the most part I'm getting that. The TV signals had gotten better, but then got worse. I was told that a local construction crew had nicked the main feed to my development and that the line couldn't be replaced until the Spring. Fortunately it seems to have gotten better lately which I attribute to the colder temperatures (colder temps = stronger signal). I've read that all channels will be digital by years end so that should take care of my problems. Overall I'm pleased, but I really wish they'd lower prices instead of raising them every year.
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Update (3/25/04): DSL is available in my area now, but I'm sticking with Comcast since they are around 4 times as fast. If DSL improves though I might be tempted to switch to Satellite for TV and DSL for broadband. Especially since my TV picture quality is less than stellar and I'm told there is no way to fix it.
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Update (12/18/03): Got my new speeds yesterday. Testing currently at 3100 kbps download. Not bad, not bad 
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Ok since I moved to a new town I figured it was time to update my review.
Comcast is the fastest broadband provider in my area with speeds currently at 1800 (3300 in Dec 2003) kbps down and 256 kbps up. It is also the only broadband I can receive since I can't get DSL.
Comcast has gotten much better since they first broke off from @Home. In December I'll get downloads speeds close to what I got with @Home. Upload speeds will remain about 1/4 of what they were though.
Currently I can't really complain. The connection is up a large majority of the time and the speeds are constantly greater than 1.6 Mbps.
Comcast completely revamped their webmail, webspace and account maintenance services (now called Portal). I must say I'm impressed. Each user account (7 per household) gives you a whopping 25 mb of web space and 10 mb of email storage. The web space supports Frontpage and lots of other nifty features. It's easy to maintain either through Comcast's website or via FTP. Their email system is powered by Brightmail, a powerful spam blocking system. Indeed I very rarely get spam anymore at my Comcast email address. All email settings (spam filter, forwarding, etc) and web page settings can be modified using the account maintenance page on the Comcast Portal.
Their tech support has gotten a lot better than it used to be and I can usually talk to a human within a minute of calling. They still recommend truck rolls for almost every possible problem, but they do seem more knowledgable now.
Overall, if you has asked me about Comcast a year ago I would have said they sucked, but now I will actually recommend them. Comcast is still expensive compared to DSL (especially with the recent DSL price drops), but Comcast is faster and more readily available. If you don't need the faster speeds and you can get it I'd say go with DSL, otherwise Comcast is your best bet.
You can read my old @Home installation horror story at:
»groups.google.com/groups?selm=fb···ogle.com , »groups.google.com/groups?selm=fb···ogle.com and »groups.google.com/groups?selm=fb···ogle.com
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