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I am going to be moving shortly from a Cablevision (Optimum Online) to a Comcast area.

I am wondering if Comcast has improved their Internet service, although I don't think they will ever be able to touch OOL.

Any thoughts, personal experience w/Comcast recently?

I wish the damn government would step in and break up the monopolies that cable companies hold in certain areas of the country. I live in NJ, and in my county, I believe Cablevision is onlyin 3 or 4 towns, the rest of the county is Comcast (used to be Cablevision, Adelphia, & Comcast, but Comcast snatched Adelphia up when they went belly up). You can't get any cable service you want, it depends on where you live. If the feds can bust up Ma Bell, why don't they bust up the cable co. monopolies?

I guess these companies are too deep into the pockets of the politicians for them to do anything about this.

Wow, I just turned a cable Internet service question into a rant about monopolistic cable cos. Sorry about that.

Well, if you want an answer to the Internet access competition right now, your only other option is to use a DSL provider. See if you can get Verizon Online DSL at your new residence, it's the only other way to compete with cable companies. Oh, eventually the feds will step in and break up cable companies like Comcast if they continue to grow. It's just a matter of time.

As for your inquiry, I know that Comcast has increased their upstream speeds a bit. They are at either 256Kbps or 384Kbps, I forget which. Then again, Verizon has increased their upload speeds as well, from 128Kbps to 384Kbps. Personally, I'd still be using Verizon, but I recently moved as well and my new residence is too far from the CO for DSL access. So, I had to use the local cable company instead. I'm in NJ too, and my cable company is neither Comcast nor Cablevision. I bet you are scratching your head wondering who it is.

Bottom line, Comcast's service and speed has improved, from what I hear. Then again, Verizon's speed has increased too, and I never had a problem with their service. If I were you, I'd compare the two very closely. The big advantage of going with Verizon is money. You save about $15/month compared to cable modem service.

TheWizard wrote:I'm in NJ too, and my cable company is neither Comcast nor Cablevision. I bet you are scratching your head wondering who it is.

Time Warner? I know they are in New Jersey.

I've had great experience with Comcast. Far better than some other cable providers...

TheWizard wrote:You save about $15/month compared to cable modem service.

Comcast is $30 per month more than DSL where I live. But I guess that is because I don't subscribe to cable TV. Comcast gives people who don't also subscribe to their TV sewer pipe the full-blown royal monopolistic shafting. The actual data pipe, though, has been pretty decent quality. There were a few problems with sporadic outages when I first signed up several years ago, but it has been mostly solid (knock wood) the last year.

As for Verizon, three times they have told me that my house was eligible for DSL. Each time I said to myself "It's about frickin' time." I live in a nominally hi-tech, non-boonie, semi-urban area. And then each time I actualy signed up, they said "Oops. Sorry. False alarm. You actualy can't get DSL." The last time they had James Earl Jones call me up and leave a congratulatory announcement on my answering machine, and even went so far as to send me the modem and installation kit. Then the night before the switchover was supposed to occur they left another "Oh so sorry, no can do" message. Morons.

Of course, they then had the nerve to demand that I send back the equipment or be charged a $100 fee. Nevermind that: a) the equipment only consts them $50 or less b) I didn't cancel the stupid service, they did. Still, it didn't bother me that they wanted the equipment back. After all, I had no use for it. What annoyed me is that they threatened to bill me the outrageous fee and made me go to the trouble of packing it up and taking a trip to the post office to send it back. Their fault, they cancelled, they can't even keep track of what they are servicing where, so why don't they send someone around in one of their trucks to pick it up from my house at my convenience?

There may theoretically be competition in local phone service, but in practice I'd say Verizon is still a monster monopoly right up there with the best of them.

Okay, rant over. I feel better now.

cfitz

aviationwiz wrote:Time Warner? I know they are in New Jersey.

I'm not using Time Warner either. Time Warner has a very small percentage of the market in NJ. The two big names in the state are Comcast and Cablevision.

cfitz wrote:There may theoretically be competition in local phone service, but in practice I'd say Verizon is still a monster monopoly right up there with the best of them.

This is true, and companies like Verizon thrive on this notion. Yes, in theory, consumers can buy telephone service from competing companies, but not many people actually do. You can get local service from another provider, but Verizon still has a huge share of the market. They pumped enough money into the states that they service, they aren't about to let them slip away to competitors.

i deal with comcast internet pretty often. not too many problems, but i have had a lot of routers recently have trouble to DHCP release with their service. Not sure why but it has been happening.

I have Comcast here in Michigan. It's not cheap, at $59 a month (includes bare-bones minimum cable), but it's 3Mbps down/256Mbps up, more than what a lot of people get. You get 7 e-mail accounts I think, and if you have a friend or relative who needs e-mail, they can be used from a dial-up if you set their mail client to do SMTP authentication in addition to POP3 login, which is cool. I've only needed to contact customer service once recently, and since it wasn't an outage, I did it online through their 24/7 chat support, which worked well. Outages are exceedingly rare, I had one in the past 2 years due to an ice storm that knocked out power, and two in the year and a half before that (once due to Excite@Home becoming ATT Broadband, and one other that was fixed within 48 hours). Throughput is good.

smartin4 wrote:I am going to be moving shortly from a Cablevision (Optimum Online) to a Comcast area.

If you're getting Comcast make sure you get the "home networking" package, its 4mbps down and 360kbps up. You don't need all the hardware but it is something like a $10/mo upgrade over your existing service for alot faster download and upload.

I regularly pull my multi-gig downloads from my colo in dallas at 500kb/sec.

Comcast works great for me. Down time is a rarity, from my experience.

I'm stuck with Comcast since Qwest decided to "upgrade" to 1 Mbit and I lost that service due to low quality signal. 3Mbit down is nice, 256k up is not so nice.

Biggest issue is that whenever they decide to take the network down for a day or so for whatever reason, you are screwed because there's no dialup option. DSL at least offers a dial up backup. Comcast "support" is not local, so they have no idea what is happening locally and are useless when there's an outage.

No ISP should take their service down for a day "for whatever reason." I like Time Warner Road Runner's guarantee: if the service is down for more than 24 hours, they will refund your money. The mere fact that they have this guarantee in place means they maintain a very good uptime. If they didn't and this guarantee existed, they would be refunding a lot of money. In my experience, I liked Road Runner. But, this isn't a Time Warner thread, so I digress.

Have had good experience with advertised Comcast throughput and very little outage time.

Got my Internet and digital cable for the price of 59.99 a month together. Each bill is about $65 after taxes.

Can't complain.

I've had great luck with Comcast. Though, I pay $15 more per month because I got rid of Comcast cable about 2 years and switched to Directv instead. I paid $29.99 for the first 6 months since I started my subscription from Best Buy, then paid $39.99 for the next 3 months. I have been paying $57.95 the past couple of months.

I have not had any speed issues with my Comcast internet connection. The customer service has been great also.