 Review by elvey 
UPDATED: 1.8 years ago
member for 8.7 years, 649 visits, last login: 22 days ago
 San Francisco,San Francisco,CA
 $43 per month
 about 4 days
 "Occasionally fast."
 "Often slow. Hosts spammers."
 "Good temporary connection when switching DSL providers."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings below consensus)
|
Update (12/2007):
Well, the "comcast is impersonating customers in order to censor/block BitTorrent" fiasco makes me update the pre-sales info from a 3 to a 1. Outright lying to your customers like that is not acceptable. Tech support also goes from a 3 to a 2. They (reps and supervisors said they) didn't know what BitTorrent was, but one supervisor, after googling "comcast bittorrent" at my request did suggest I follow the instructions at the resulting link, even though he couldn't read what was on the resulting pages (or any of the other links - comcast's firewall was blocking him from all the resulting sites!) I let the supervisor know that there were several options presented:
1)Enable and force encryption. I couldn't do this w/o replacing my BitTorrent client, but this was my eventual solution. (Though I much preferred my old client.)
2)I mentioned that the site suggested: "One of the best options, if possible, is to switch to another ISP."
3)I mentioned that the site suggested a solution that I couldn't mention without getting in trouble ("Grab a hammer, visit the Comcast office...")
4)I mentioned that the site suggested "Reporting the issue to Technical Support" which is what I was doing. Anecdote: my general speed test speed had been great, but by BitTorrent upload and download speeds had been lousy and download speeds seemed to have improved dramatically during the call (but seeding remained impossible w/o encryption) and before I switched BitTorrent clients. I didn't have accurate records to confirm this, but it is worth trying, even though it was probably coincidental. (I was downloading a file from a stable seed making the file available 24/7 ; it was arriving at a fairly steady (and lousy!) 10KB/sec, and that went up to 100's of KB/sec.)
Original review (7/2006):
Easy install. Had to get modem replaced, and call a few times before I'd ever get close to the 6000/384 speeds advertised. Now, I generally get speeds close to (up and down) and more variable than my DSL line's - less than less than 3000 down, 350 up.
Support is consistently easier to reach and more clueful than ATT's. Billing dept is less sleazy, saving me lots of time.
Spam Support
They are almost as heavily spammer infested - see »www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.la···cast.net .
[edit but the infestations are VERY serious, e.g.:
71.194.0.0/21 is listed on the Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database as being assigned to, under the control of, or providing service to a known professional spam operation run by Brian Kramer / Expedite Media Group.
Spammer hosting (escalation)
1) Months of hosting known spammers.
2) Allowing spammed sites to stay hosted on network.
3) Moving spammers to avoid blocklisting.
4) Ignoring direct contact from the Spamhaus project on matter.
Comcast Business Communications, Inc => Spammer support
If you have email rejection problems, please contact:
OrgAbuseName: Network Abuse and Policy Observance
OrgAbusePhone: +1-856-317-7272
OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@comcast.net]
It'll be expensive - $43/month on top of cable TV after the $20/month 3-month intro. (Google comcast for the best deals.)
We'll probably switch to Sonic.net soon; that was the reason I got comcast in the first place. But due to reimbursement, cost isn't an issue, and the support is much better than ATT, and the bill isn't in my name.
Ratings explanations:
Too much small print.
Easy to order and activate; I didn't have to install their software.
Speed is unreliable (mainly lousy peering, I think), comcast's DHCP server sometimes gives out bogus IPs.
comcast.net content is decent, but nothing exciting.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Comcast |
|
Comcast
(334)
·