 Review by espaeth 
UPDATED: 186 days ago
member for 7.7 years, 1530 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Minneapolis,Hennepin,MN
 $150 per month (month by month)
 about 5 days
 "Reasonably good latency, speeds delivered as promised, reliable!"
 "It's still the cable company, so when it breaks -- good luck!"
 "Cheaper than DSL in my market and offers better performance"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
|
Update 7/2008: The 50mbps package was made available to MN users as we're a DOCSIS3 test market, so I took the plunge and signed up. Overall I'm pleased with the service -- it continues to deliver performance that meets my needs.
1. --08:01:17-- »cluster/500mb.bin
2. Resolving cluster...
3. Connecting to cluster|:80... connected.
4. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
5. Length: 524288000 (500M) [application/octet-stream]
6. Saving to: `500mb.bin'
7.
8. 100%[===========================================================>] 524,288,000 6.10M/s in 93s
9.
10. 08:02:50 (5.39 MB/s) - `500mb.bin' saved [524288000/524288000]
Update 9/2007: After 4 years of service I figure it's time to update this review. Comcast in this area continues to be a strong and stable broadband provider. Crazy to look back on 4m/384k service when I started as being the top tier and now it's 8m/768k for the same price. With power boost I usually see a full 27mbit down for my 40MB of burst and I get the full 2mbit up for ~16MB of upstream transfer. Compared to DSL in this area Comcast continues to have an extremely high value for the dollar. I consider myself to be a reasonably heavy users and I have no concerns about bandwidth usage -- I don't intentionally police my usage (I download what I want when I want) and here's what my stats look like:
month rx | tx | total
------------------------+---------------+---------------
Oct '06 37,329 MB | 9,163 MB | 46,493 MB
Nov '06 51,430 MB | 9,400 MB | 60,831 MB
Dec '06 36,757 MB | 9,779 MB | 46,536 MB
Jan '07 27,704 MB | 4,233 MB | 31,937 MB
Feb '07 30,140 MB | 2,253 MB | 32,393 MB
Mar '07 44,707 MB | 2,835 MB | 47,542 MB
Apr '07 46,153 MB | 2,784 MB | 48,938 MB
May '07 32,640 MB | 2,822 MB | 35,463 MB
Jun '07 43,321 MB | 2,749 MB | 46,071 MB
Jul '07 20,218 MB | 2,148 MB | 22,366 MB
Aug '07 28,295 MB | 2,311 MB | 30,607 MB
Sep '07 5,377 MB | 534.86 MB | 5,912 MB
------------------------+---------------+---------------
estimated 21,040 MB | 2,089 MB | 23,129 MB
Original review:
Now that I've had service for over a year I figured it was time to write a review. I signed up for Comcast mostly because they were the only choice when I moved into my house; my CO was not yet live for DSL in 2003 (way to go Sprint!). I picked up a Mot SB5100 modem at Circuit City the day after I closed on my house, and scheduled an "install" for the following day. Not sure why an install was required, because the guy just showed up, noticed I had everything cabled up already and made a phone call to provide the MAC address of my cable modem. He was at my place for all of 15 minutes.
I had some initial instability with the service, but that was due to sub-par wiring by the previous homeowner. I got those issues corrected within the first 2 weeks, and since then I have only recorded a single service outage at 3am back in July. I have a Linux box that runs a cron job every 10 minutes to check the status of my connection, so that is what I am basing the uptime stats from. That same box updates my dynamic DNS name, but that doesn't seem to be an issue since my IP address rarely changes. (I think the last change was 4 months ago)
In the last couple weeks I have upgraded to the 4meg/384k speed tier service, and I seem to be getting pretty darn close to those limits in speed tests. I am also using Vonage, and latency seems to be consistent enough to deliver toll-quality phone service.
I should note that I am only using Comcast for IP connectivity to the 'net -- my e-mail and newsgroup service still comes from my old ISP.
My cost is going to be $65+ after the 4meg upgrade, but compared to inverse-mux ATM service at that speed it's a bargain.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Comcast |
|
Comcast
(266)
(170)
·
·