TV service just keeps getting more and more obnoxious. I only got it because it came with 2 years of free HBO and was cheaper than Internet alone at the tier I wanted. There's hardly any reason to watch cable TV any more. (I know, sports. Not really my thing, but I get that a lot of people want to watch live sports)
I could get Sonic Fusion FTTN but that's just rebranded AT&T, and peaks at 28mbits. I get better LTE speeds than that.
I tried to bring in MonkeyBrains but the building administration refused, saying they would have to drill into load-bearing columns. Just an excuse.
I only pay for internet access, I don't use their cable TV or telephone offerings. Internet alone is about $80/month. I just ran a speed test and I get 14.1Mbps down & 8.6Mbps up. I forget which speed tier I'm paying for, but I know I'm paying for much more than that! Ugh...
AT&T DSL sucks no matter where you are though.
Still, Comcast shares their internet between customers in your area. If you're the only customer in your area, you can certainly get what you're paying for. If you're not, the best you can hope for is 1/4 of your promised connection speed during peak hours. It is something that Comcast has been doing for years, but it allows them to advertise higher speeds for lower prices than AT&T and people believe them because not everyone is familiar with the fine print.
- I can usually get directly to someone clued on the phone, who doesn't make me jump through hoops or silly scripts to debug a problem; they realize I've already done everything possible on my end already before calling (spent years working for ISPs).
- No blocked ports, I host my own server and do my own email, web hosting, etc. Comcast even provides reverse dns for my five static IPs.
- No data caps. In fact, they don't even measure usage for business accounts.
Other than when I had a physical problem (short in the line from the pole to my house), I've always gotten the speeds that I pay for - in this case 50Mbps down, 10Mbps up.
Disadvantages to business class:
- I pay $150/month for 50/10 and five statics.
- It's Comcast.
I was an ATT UVerse customer (standard, not business) before switching to Comcast Business about 4-5 years ago, but their max speed offering was only around 18Mbps down, and their "business class" service required the same craptastic 2Wire gateway and static IPs required 1-to-1 NAT through that gateway... No thanks.
- Don't care about blocked ports. I don't personally host anything, our company also has a separate hosting service. - I'm sorry, but... data caps? Is this a joke? In this day and age of services like Netflix and digital content distribution like Steam there's a place for data caps?
- $150/month is a ridiculous cost to put on a guaranteed 50/10 line. Don't care about the static IPs personally as I don't host anything. - Comcast, right.... you hit it on the nail there, it looks like. My experience with their customer service so far has been horrible. I'm usually empathetic when talking with technical support as I used to do the same job myself, but there's empathy and then there's people trying to intentionally annoy. So far I've felt like bashing my head against the wall after just three sentences from Comcast tech support. And they claim they spend millions on customer satisfaction? Please.
I was an UVerse customer too. I had only one issue with them for the two years I was their customer and I'm seriously considering going back. Better have a slower connection I can rely on than having a 'blazing fast' connection that craps out every 5 minutes.
I wont ever use Comcast again... I had to get the local govt involved to get them to stop billing me for a place I hadnt lived in for 6 months. ( yes there is an agency here to deal with them they are that shitty )
The smaller speed with usable internet speeds and decent customer service is worth it.
It kind of tends to hurt not just me, but a fair bit of other people in the process when I, as a raid leader for our guild, cannot maintain a stable connection and get dropped several times over a 2-hour period. Never had those issues on my ATT connection and I've only had a single issue where a tree had fallen and severed a cable during 2 years of being their customer.
I wanted to start streaming our raids which was also the main reason to try the switch, but if it comes at the cost of being unable to take part in them, I might as well not bother.
It's a tough call: go 1/4 speed at 1/2 the price, reliably, or try to go 4 times faster at "only" twice the price (appx), but gamble from day to day :-(
Unfortunately they don't even reach JP, so I'm stuck with Comcast.
If low Earth orbit broadband internet ever happens, that could potentially be an excellent choice. But with the current offerings, it's always going to be the absolute last resort.
I was a "happy" Comcast customer for years. I was in a condo where the choices were Comcast or Verizon DSL. Maybe. I called Verizon to see what they had to offer and they didn't know if I could get their DSL service or not. The best they could do was to place an order and see if it worked. Really!
Even if I could get service from them, their offer was 1.5Mbps for something like $50/month. Completely ridiculous.
It was like this when I moved out about three years ago, and as far as I know it's still like that today.
-Comcast (up to 100MB/s)
-Century Link DSL (up to 10MB/s)
-3G/4G modem (up to like 3MB/s)
Then 10 minutes south of where I live, that county has deals with a local ISP who behaves exactly like Comcast, but with terrible pricing and lower caps. Also no realistic alternatives.
While I could stomach the speeds of DSL (with some effort), I can't stomach the price. I'd end up paying just as much as comcast for much lower speeds. I really don't have a choice.
edit MB, not mb
It is a real shame that anything over 5-7mbps is considered "fast enough" by the vast majority of consumers.
And where there are competitors, they're most likely AT&T or Time-Warner, which have similar shitty practices.
Not that I like ATT, but when (coming in the next 6 months) they roll out faster service, I will be happy to switch.
So, that would be 3 bad choices.
How weird is it that the equipment is still so slow? I mean, in 2005 I was grumpy about how slow cable TV gear is. Now it's 2015 and seems like it's exactly the same, whenever I see it.
What is so hard about using processors with clock speeds measured in megahertz and not kilohertz nowadays? I swear, Comcast is probably paying extra to some supplier holding the last supply of their specialized MegaSlowz chips with the SuperProprietaryFeature that you Can't Reimplement Anywhere Else.
What's funny (maybe not ha-ha funny, but anyway) is that the provided equipment is usually energy in-efficient as well. Even while "off".
I'm not paying for cable now, and don't plan to in the future either. There's too much crap I don't want to watch, and I don't want to be stuck with their idea of a DVR either. And its too expensive.
I came close to ordering a Ceton CableCard tuner card several times so I could stick a small form factor PC in the entertainment system and get the nice setup I used to have before they killed off all of the unencrypted digital QAM channels. Unfortunately, the standard is so encumbered that hardly any software can support CableCard (one popular option was the now-deprecated Windows Media Center).
Back when QAM still came through unencrypted, I could pay for cable and hook it up to my cheapo Hauppauge card and use WMC as a great program guide and DVR setup. Even back in the Win Vista days it was vastly superior to anything on a cable box. Then they moved everything to encrypted and my tuner got repurposed for watching OTA stuff on my PC.
Now I just pay for cable/internet but watch everything streaming on legit sites or torrents. Yeah, I know...but it works better and I'm still paying for it so even if it's not legal, I don't feel that it's immoral.
The only reason I still have it is for basketball, but there are an increasing number of services (legal or otherwise) by which I can get all of that streaming online, so I may end up cancelling even sooner if given an excuse to do so (like if service goes down or they decide to jack prices again).
After 3 months those offers expired, I'd get a high dollar bill in the mail, so I'd call again... Wash rinse, repeat. I know multiple other people who did the same thing.
Now I only have data with TWC and receive letters 2-3 times a month from to tell me all about the great TV plans they are offering.
Maybe another 4 hours of work got me a little web application that shows the TV guide information pulled from an API, and is hooked in with the VLC web interface to switch channels with a click.
I'd argue that government regulations have done nothing in this space but reinforce coercive monopolies. I think you're taking the wrong approach, we need to deregulate this space and allow real competition to thrive.
I'd love to see massive consoldiation of the reserved-for-government portion of the EM spectrum so we could reasonably do this wirelessly.
They actually have some comcast lab product where you can play games using your smartphone as the controller. I think it's beta but it wasn't that bad when I tried NBA Jam.
Source: comcast is my only internet option so I bundle.
Or if you don't have $100 to spare, you can always connect your laptop to your tv.
Hulu is pretty good about getting new shows up pretty quickly, usually the day after. I'm usually able to live with not seeing a show the minute it airs.