Comcastic!

So I am (finally) switching my ISP.  And I'm going with Comcast, not ATT. The funny thing is that ATT keeps sending me flyers advertising that High Speed Internet is available in my area; however, my address is still not available to sign up for High Speed Internet on their website. Needless to say, I’m a bit jaded at that.

Now that I’m back in school (taking classes on campus and online), and attempting to publish more media to the web, I am in need of a faster internet connection.  Also, since I am sharing this connection with someone who watches entirely too much bachelor-themed shows than I can keep track of online, it helps to have more bandwidth available.

Monday morning Comcast came to install the internet.  Naturally, they were late :p.  However, Comcast offered me a $20 credit to my first bill.  As they showed up about 10 minutes after the latest scheduled time, it was more than sufficient a gesture.  Since I own my modem, and had used it before it was, I’m told, considered a re-connect to their network.  It was mentioned to my girlfriend that they don’t get credit for reconnects so they weren’t too happy about that.  Not that it’s my fault, I did tell them I owned my modem when I signed up.  Anyway, I have my desktop computer and my router in a corner of the living room by the balcony entrance.  There is a coax jack in that same corner; however, Comcast no longer uses those lines as they are ran through the outer wall, and they stopped using them last year.  Instead, the coax jack is across the room from the computer along the opposite wall.  So, for now, I have a white coaxial cable running across my living room.  At some point I’m going to get a longer cable and run it along the baseboard.  Until then, I have a nice reminder that I have a much faster connection to the internet.  :)

How much faster is it though?

Lets compare:


My previous ISP was Xanadoo, which is a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) in my city that uses, i believe, some of the previously released 700 mhz spectrum to deliver internet to cities in the Illinois, Oklahoma, and Texas areas.  I was using their prepaid plan which involves purchasing a wireless Xanadoo modem (which includes 14 days free) and then paying for service in advance.  The packages range from 7 days to 90 days.  Their rates can be found here.  I paid for the 30 day packages, and got 30 days free on my second purchase (so I paid for 30 and received 60 days of service), along with free speed boost, which increased the downstream to 1Mb/s (the default connection speed is 512Mb/s.  I never used that tier so I cannot comment on it.)  The good thing is that when it worked, it worked well.  I generally saw slightly over 1Mbs consistently.  The bad news is that it was prone to disconnect.  This was solved by power cycling the modem until it worked again :p.  Sometimes the outage would be a few seconds, and other times it could be a few hours.  0Also, this is not a connection that will allow you to play online games.  Especially not FPS’s.  The ping time is simply too high, and the connection too flaky.  A turn based game might be possible, but anything requiring real-time action is going to be at best a pain in the ass, and at worst un-playable.  Just a heads up to those wondering.  When reading forum posts and reviews, I noticed a lot of noise is made over a hard bandwidth limit of 10gb per month and then their connection being severed; however, I used more than that each month without repercussion.  It was easy to get started using the service and as far as prepaid plans go, they are worth consideration if you live close to a tower and are well within their service area.

The highest speedtest.net (download) result that I achieved was:



Also, I believe the highest upload result was .62Mb/s.

While I haven’t had nearly as much time to put Comcast’s line through it’s paces, so far it seems much more stable.  I was able to play through a campaign of Alien Swarm with my little brother with also using Google’s new VoIP feature in Gmail allowing you to call inside the US for free.  So far, customer service has been good, the reps were friendly.  I hope the level of service continues.  As far as speed goes, the fastest I’ve measured the connection was:



As you can see, it is much faster both in objective speed tests and in how fast it “feels”.  Browsing the web is a much more instant experience, and watching videos is much more gratifying.

In short, the transition went smoothly, and I couldn’t be happier.