 Review by jhacker 
UPDATED: 171 days ago
member for 7.9 years, 1458 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Peoria,Peoria,IL
 $25 per month
 "Great upload speed, inconsistent download and surfing speeds"
 "It's less painful to get a root canal than to negotiate competitive pricing from Comcast"
 "Not bad, but not perfect. It would be difficult, but I'll go back to DSL if Comcast doesn't keep competitive pricing."
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(ratings match consensus)
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6/2/09:
Life with Comcast Internet has been like a small roller coaster ride. For a few months, download and surfing speeds have ranged from great to poor. Lately, they've been great. Part of the reason is probably because I recently reloaded the OS on this computer. It went back to Windows XP, and I optimized the speed using Dr. TCP. I can only remember three times that our service was down. Two times the outages were due to ice storms in our area. Service was down one or two days in each instance. The other time was at 6am, and was probably due to upgrades. No big deal there. I am very happy with my upload speed. I manage some websites, and it's definitely nice having the 3-4 mbps upload that Comcast gives us.
I have nearly cancelled Comcast due to their billing practices. I despise their practice of only giving promotions for six months. You really need to hone your negotiating skills to get them to give you new promo prices. In a recent instance, a manager at our local office left me a voicemail saying that she had placed new promotional pricing on our account. When I got the next bill, it was double what was expected and I blew my stack!! I called the office, showed up in person, and e-mailed the office. I received no response whatsoever. I was ready to cancel everything (TV, broadband, phone)!! I gave it one more shot, and finally reached a rep that was actually able to do something for me. Heck, I was ready to ask them to PAY ME for all the footwork I had to do to get my bill corrected.
In the midst of all this difficulty, I called AT&T to see what it would take to go back to DSL. I'm honestly glad I was able to work things out with Comcast, because I'd find it very difficult to go back to 1500/384 or 3000/512 service.
9/29/08:
It has been a few months since the conversion to Comcast. I can't remember ever experiencing a cable outage. That's impressive!! However, the web-surfing speeds definitely slow down during peak times. Even during those slowdowns, our Vonage works flawlessly. My son notices lag during XBOX 360 online gaming though. Even though our download speed has decreased overall, the upload speed has increased since the conversion from Insight. In real world situations, I'll achieve just over 200 kb/s for upload, even without Powerboost. This is at least 4x the speed we experienced with DSL.
I'm not worried about about the new clear 250GB cap. I doubt that we ever use near that in bandwidth. I am a little miffed about Comcast discontinuing newsgroups. However, I think these have become outdated and I seldom use them these days.
Overall I've been pretty satisfied with Comcast HSI. I know that some people in our area have not though. I believe that we're nearing the end of the special price of $30 on our account. If that expires, I might challenge Comcast to see if they can offer a lower speed tier for lower cost. I seriously doubt that I'll switch back to DSL though.
2/28/08:
It has now been a full week since Insight turned over the network to our new cable company, Comcast. The transition was a little rough for a few days, but I experienced a pretty seamless switch to the Comcast service. In fact, I didn't know I had a Comcast IP until I read other posts on DSLR and thought to check it. We never had to reboot the modem due to loss of connectivity either. OTOH, speeds are definitely more likely to vary throughout the day than with Insight. Ping times do as well. I can detect Powerboost on my SB5120 during some of the downloads and uploads but it seems to last only for a few seconds. I definitely wouldn't pay extra for it. At this time we still haven't received the invitation to change over the e-mail address, but it's happened anyway. Understandably some techies don't care about content, as they only use their broadband connection for transport. I do think comcast.net has neat content like Fancast though. I'll be sure to add some updates as time goes on.
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