I’ve been having some issues with Comcast lately. First my bill seemed high and second they kept declining pay-per-views. Of course we were trying to watch pay-per-view movies on our family movie night (Saturday) and when I would call Comcast (based on the on-screen message) they’d say “you have some billing problem, we can’t access the billing system, call back during the week”. Of course they’d authorize access anyway (without actually saying so…sneaky customer service…but good!).
Anyway, I finally got around to calling them today to figure this all out. It turns out I was still paying for a “AT&T Broadband Pro” account. Gave me 3mbps down/300 up. But I was paying $79 a month. You can now get standard Comcast cable modem service in my area that delivers 6mbps down/768kbps up for around $50 a month! All I had to do was reset my modem.
And they fixed the pay-per-view problem.
I used to hate the cable company. I hated that I couldn’t get DSL where I live now. But now, I’m actually becoming a fan of Comcast. I really like my HD-DVR set top box…the MS DVR software it runs is a bit lacking, but overall it works very well. And their customer service is, well, good. Wow, I can’t believe I said that about the cable company.
I ran a speed test a www.broadbandreports.com before recycling my modem
download speed: 2984 kbps
upload speed: 302 kbps
After resetting the modem:
download speed: 5983 kbps
upload speed: 706 kbps
(I’ll attribute the slightly “below advertised” speeds to other activity on my network; Outlook is running on this machine talking to Microsoft corpnet, my wife is clacking away upstairs, and I’m sure a few aggregators are hitting my blog or people browsing my site).
This just rocks.
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I have a comcast DVR and it’s possibly the worst piece of consumer electronics ever mass produced. The interface is absolutely awful. It’s made by Atlanta Scientific (which should be called Atlantus Scientific). I have a couple of old Panasonic DVRs that I upgraded the hard disks on. The only problem is that these won’t do HD. So I’m stuck with the Comcast junk for now, but the second a better HD DVR comes out, you can be I’ll get rid of this one.