Be very wary of signing up for Comcast business service. They have an auto-renewal policy that renews your contract every year even though you thought you'd signed up for a single year (with the expectation of month-to-month). When you come to leave Comcast Business they will charge you 75% of the outstanding balance you have on the current year ($485 for 10 months in my case) and they'll fight tooth-and-nail to get that money. They don't apply this policy for residential customers because consumer protections don't apply for businesses.

During the four years that I had Comcast Service I found it to be very reliable and well run - well, except they wired the wrong apartment by mistake the first time they came out.

It took me about 2 months of fighting until they relented. There was a magic cocktail of proposed complaints involving the BBB, the PUC in my state, social media and others that finally liberated me from their contract.

I had a 50/10 Comcast Business account that was active in the south bay area from 2009 until last year.

The terms were an auto-renewing 1-year contract, but I could (and did) kill it at any time on 60 days' notice.

I don't recall doing any negotiation on this point when I signed up at all.

I don't get it, what would happen if you simply hadn't paid the $485?

They sell your debt to collection agencies who harass you until the end of time.

True, but they would also settle for a lot less than $485.

Wouldn't this hurt your credit score if it went all the way to settling with a collections agency?

Lawyers, I imagine.

Last week we try to install comcast business in our church. They would not give us a wireless router unless we accepted her installation of a publics hot spot too. This is against the church policy because it will allow someone watching porn in the sanctuary with no knowledge for us. They would not relent.

We end up putting our own wireless router. Speed is ok, but I didn't like that comcast pushed her policies to the clients disregarding the client policy. It felt like a bully.

Why not wrap their supplied router in aluminium foil? For a few dollars the problem is solved (although I agree with everyone else....people could just as easily use their data connection on a phone)

Ah, the juxtaposition of this could be delicious. They wonder why there are no connections at that public hotspot. When they come out to check it and nothing's wrong (just remove the foil before hand - it's not like they could access the building without your knowledge) . They leave, you wrap it back up and they come out again with the same results but this time they replace the equipment... and so on.

The only thing that could be better is if you gave them a window of time in which you will randomly show up at the facility to unlock the office or whatever and give them access. Say, between 8am and 11am. "No I'm not sure when I'll be there exactly. I have several appointments that morning. Is that an issue?"

Here is the kicker... the rep over the phone told me that his suggestion was for us to disconnect the hot spot after the tech leaves. But I had read the service contract before calling, and it say that we are obligated to follow all Comcast policies, and in the last paragraph it say that any modification to the contract must be in written and signed by a Senior VP from Comcast.

So I ask the tech to give me his suggestion in writing, and he refused, and gave me a different reason every time I ask for a printed copy of his suggestion. When after all that denial I mention the last paragraph in the contract, hid answer was:

- I'm sorry I cannot help you, but I don't think you will cancel the service because we provide the fastest access and that is what you care about

- I was voting against you during Church Council! I don't want you here, I was happy with ATT because they don't force their policies against their customers

- Sir, I don't know why they would do that. Do you want me to send our hot spot and your FREE wireless router?

- No, cancel the order of those, and I'll bring this to the Chairman. They will decide if they want to take your liability.

After that, someone donated a wifi router (wasn't me)

> This is against the church policy because it will allow someone watching porn in the sanctuary with no knowledge for us.

Sounds like a feature.

Couldn't someone just use a cellular network? Or a magazine?

Sure, but at least it's not on the church's own equipment.

It sounds like it'd be mostly on Comcast's equipment, in this case...

Still coming out the wire assigned to the church address, and that what the ip will be traced to, hence authorized by the church; as in "the church agreed to have this hot spot here"

Fair enough.

What if they used the church bathroom? Maybe consider getting rid of those or at least installing cameras in them so you can be sure no one is doing anything unholy. Hmm, actually then who could view the footage to monitor things? I suppose you could only permit someone that was totally trustworthy, like the pastor? But what if he/she secretly enjoyed that? Maybe have a two person team view all bathroom footage? Make sure they pray first (and maybe put a camera on them, just in case. Can't be too safe).

You're missing the point. If someone brings the internet with them into the church and does X, the church is not involved. If someone comes to the church, connects to their internet connection and does X, the church enabled it.

A sad thing is there used to be a YC Comcast Business deal which was pretty awesome, but somehow this got killed (it was done through a local office, but Comcast National apparently decided it didn't fuck the users enough to meet with normal Comcast standards.)

So a fair number of YC founders and offices have Comcast, and while you can relocate the service address, if you close the service, you can't get that deal again. And you can't upgrade it (I think I get 30/10?). Going from 30/10 with a static IP to the next tier of service (50/20) would basically 3-4x my cost.

This also prevents you from using your own modem and requiring you to lease one of theirs (not to mention requiring a year contract), doesn't it?

You can use your own modem with Comcast business service (I do) but it took about two weeks of calling all the tech support numbers I could find until I finally got a tech who was able to do it. Not because it's hard to do, but because most of the people I talked to were lying or incompetent.

The guy seemed a bit weirded out at how profusely I thanked him -- after all, all I'd done was tell him the model and MAC address of my generic Motorola modem.

Don't waste your time explaining to them why you want to use a real modem (I have my own router/firewall, their modem had NAT I could not disable) or that it's the same modem that works on the residential service (which is the same physical network). It won't help, just say "I bought a <VENDOR> <MODEL> modem, can you set it up on my account?" and hang up and try again if they act like your request is bizarre.

Not if you have a static IP. I talked to 5-6 reps to try and ended up returning the equipment to Amazon.

Thanks for this. I've been wondering, so tomorrow. I'm going to start the process.

It saddens me that I feel like every interaction with Comcast is a "process" at best and an outer circle of hell on average.

They have a list of approved modems for the both the residential and business services, with the business one being a small subset of the residential one. But I was able to get a modem approved only for the residential service on my business account by calling around. What worked for me after only a few tries was calling into the residential tech support and having them add it. It's apparently all the same infrastructure on the back end.

If you don't want a static IP, you can use anthing on their approved list:

http://mydeviceinfo.comcast.net/

(Which has all the usual SB* suspects).

If you want a static IP, AFAIK, you still have to use what they give you.

I am currently running on Comcast Business with 5 static IPs, and while I do have to use their modem to terminate the coax connection, I have my TomatoUSB'd Asus RT-66u router playing just fine with it. Their modem has some sort of weird 'automatic bridge mode'; I configured the external IPs on my Asus router and plugged the WAN port on the Asus into one of the four internal ports on their modem, everything works just fine.

Granted I still think Comcast is the scum of the universe for myriad and sundry reasons, but at least this aspect of their service was fairly easy to set up. I still miss the FiOS I had back in Boston though :-(

It requires at least a year long contract and a hefty set up fee ($200 for a one year contract and $100 for a 2 year if I remember correctly).

When I signed up for their business class service about a year ago, it was not required that I use their modem, but they did suggest it (noting that any failure of equipment would be taken care of on their end). It was the bosses dime and my time if a failure happened, so I just went with their leasing options.

Dunno. I've never tried any other modems besides the one they gave (leased?) me.