Same thing in my big town -- Chicago. Some parts of Chicago you get RCN competing, which is amazing. They have 100mb plans for $40 a month. But for most people, myself included, you pay $80/mo for "50mb" internet that really runs at about 20mb 80% of the time, 2-3mb 15% of the time, and totally not working at all 5% of the time.

Fellow Chicagoan here: In the suburbs the options are fewer, but the functional speeds are better - at least for Comcast delivered over coax. I get an average of about 120/15 for $80/mo at home and about the same speed at our suburban office for roughly double that price (business class).

AT&T DSL sucks no matter where you are though.

Also in Chicago, RCN was amazing. Now stuck in Comcast hell since they're not over in Logan Square. And the service starts shitting out every night around 7:30pm. Assuming they don't have enough cards in the box on the block.

In my different area of that small town, I pay $40 for 75 mbit, that actually gives me 95mbit (even at 7:00pm). And is rock solid. I don't mean to sound like a shill but I think "most people" is an incredible stretch.

Yeah, you're totally right. I just went to Comcast's website and it seems like we're basically just getting shafted. I wonder if they adjusted their prices now that RCN is selling 105mbps internet for ~$40-50/mo

Get their business plan. I always get exactly my paid for rate, and they claim business plan speeds are the same everywhere they provide service. you save money on land living in a small town, spend some of the savings on bandwidth... Or expense it to your company. Cheaper than office space in florida. Or try calling them, maybe there is a configuration issue with the router. What is the advertised rate ? You should be getting that speed.

You're a bit naive there. Business plans are not magical in any way. In fact, the past week we seem to be having a lot more issues with our business plan on Comcast than I am with my personal plan at home which seems to drop the connection roughly every other hour.

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.

Advantages of the business plan:

- 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.

While I have no direct experience with the business side of Comcast business customer support, I noted that when we reported an issue yesterday at work, it took them over 6 hours to fix it at which point they might as well not have bothered. The operating hours were over.

- 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.

My post meant that the business class service has no data caps or measuring of use, versus the "consumer" level Comcast service.

ATT business plan here... I have no issues only 20Mbit down and 2Mbit up but when I call customer service I have someone on site to fix things in 3 hrs or less

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.

Yeah, I'm definitely reconsidering ATT. I have coworkers that swear by Comcast and how great they are but my experience has been flaky at best. I work from home regularly, so I need my connection to be stable. I also do a fair bit of online gaming which also requires a stable connection.

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.

Similar experience: our older house had AT&T - only 7.5 Mbit/s or so, but it pretty much never went down; our newer house has Comcast - supposed to be 30 Mbit/s, but often goes wonky or out.

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 :-(

Good to have another data point. I have not had issues in a year. I routinely download at 10 megabytes per second reading ct scans. If I wasnt getting what I was paying for, I would cancel the service and drive into work to read my cases. I am in a residential non techy area, I don't know if that helps.

I'm sorry, that sounds brutal. I live in Brooklyn and thankfully there is competition from TWC, RCN and Fios here. I have TWC cable at 300 megs down and about 50 up for about $60 a month. The cable television is still horrible and an enormous rip off.

God, I pay that much for a 20/5 from TWC...

I live in a large town (Boston) and the situation is not much different.

If you're in Boston proper, you can get NetBlazr: http://netblazr.com/ (wireless mesh network)

Unfortunately they don't even reach JP, so I'm stuck with Comcast.

What are your options for satellite internet? The pricing these days seems very competitive, and although latency is (much) higher it should be ideal for the vast majority of use cases.

Latency is pretty important for browsing the web. No matter how much bandwidth you have, making every request take two round-trips to geosync is going to make the connection feel very slow.

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.

It looks like they charge the same price for ~1/10 the speed and 1/20 the transfer (Does Comcast still have a 300 GB limit? That compares favorably to 10.)