As some of you know, I've been living with 56k for the last few years. My dad has recently started using the internet and has learned the pains of dialup. We're now looking into other options.
Given the location of our house, it seems we have exactly two options: Satellite or Cable.
Satellite would cost 3.5 times as much and give us a max speed roughly 5 times the speed we have now. We've ruled that out.
Cable would cost roughly 2.5 times as much as our current service, and claims to give a max download speed of 3-4 megs a second (about 60 times what we have now).
The only cable company in our area is Comcast. Reviews on the net have been mixed. Some people are really happy with it, some most definitely not.
Many agree that their customer service and/or tech support stinks (at best). Earthlink support, of course, has been outsourced. I've tried several times, and found that the few people who actually speak english know practically nothing about the software. So, whatever Comcast has, I'm pretty sure it won't be a step down.
Earthlink is nice in that it provides software that's generally easy to use, works fairly well (except when upgrades are released too early and end up breaking things...), and has a good number of extras included (spam filters, spyware blocker, scam warning, pop-up blocker, download accelerator, and firewall).
One of the nice things is that we'd be able to get a home networking package while we were at it. So, we could share the connection between the comps in the house, and might even be able to go wireless.
I'd like more info about cable service in general, and Comcast in particular. I've already checked CNet (which had very little info) and Epinions (which had 211 very mixed user reviews).
Have any of you had experience with cable internet? Anyone use or used Comcast? Anyone have any ideas of where else I can check for reviews?
Mostly, I'm looking for info about speed (How fast is it? How variable is it?), reliability (Does the connection drop? Is it prone to technical problems?), software (How good is it? What does it do? How often does it tend to crash?), and security, but any useful info would be appreciated.
Others with similar queries, feel free to add your questions, too.
Thanks.
Paul
