 Review by banditws6 
UPDATED: 132 days ago
member for 6.7 years, 3460 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Naples,Collier,FL
 $55 per month
 about 7 days
 "Consistent speeds, infrequent outages, pretty good reliability."
 "Phone support pretty useless, but outages are corrected quickly. Upload speed stagnant at 384k."
 "A pretty good broadband solution for southwest FL, although we're due for a speed bump IMO."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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1/5/2008 UPDATE:
The near-daily quirks I experienced throughout 2006 seem to have disappeared for the most part; the worst that happens to my connection these days is that it will occasionally freeze up for a few seconds. About 6 months ago I changed to a Scientific Atlanta Webstar modem (traded in my old COM21 Doxport 1110), so that may have had an effect as the Doxport was a very outdated modem. Pretty happy with the connection stability again now.
Comcast cable TV services are another story entirely -- try getting them to install CableCARDs correctly for you -- but that's not the focus of this review. 
7/3/2006 UPDATE:
(The text of my original Comcast review is preserved at the end of this update for background. Much of what I stated there is still true, but there have been some changes over time.)
Comcast HSI speeds are now in the 6000/384 range on the standard tier, and I am seeing almost all of it (usually speed tests report around 5200/384). However, while speeds are consistently very good, some Comcast customers in Naples -- including myself and three personal acquaintances -- have begun experiencing frequent and repeated connection "pauses." As many as 6-10 times per day, my connection will come to a complete standstill, although the modem will not disconnect or in any other way appear to be offline. The "pause" will persist until the modem is manually power-cycled, which usually solves the problem. Typically the connection comes right back up after that, but occasionally the modem will need a few minutes to sync up.
On each of three separate calls to Comcast support, they report that "service is being done" in my area which would account for these problems. I somewhat doubt it, since the issue is ongoing, occurs almost daily, and has not changed after nearly four months.
This persistant issue, presuming it is widespread, has started to make Comcast HSI difficult to recommend. For the time being I'm enduring Comcast's flakiness, but with a watchful eye on alternatives as they may arise. DSL service in this area (provided by Sprint/Embarq) may become an attractive option if things get worse, although my experience with Sprint Local has been mostly poor.
TEXT OF ORIGINAL REVIEW:
When I first moved to Naples back in early 2000, the only broadband in my area was a hybrid cable downstream / 33.6k modem upstream service offered by what was then MediaOne RoadRunner. MediaOne was bought out by AT&T, who was then bought out by Comcast, who brought @Home two-way cable Internet to our town. Come Christmas 2001, at last, we were on a true cable connection!
Sadly, as you probably know, @Home bit the dust shortly thereafter, and Comcast spun off their own high-speed Internet service (named, aptly, Comcast High-Speed Internet). As an @Home user, I was migrated to Comcast HSI in late February of 2002.
While the Comcast transition was fraught with horror stories from around the country, in the southwest Florida area everything went smoothly from the beginning. There were no severe outages, only temporary slowdowns that were soon fixed. Now, in 2003, my Comcast connection is running quite smoothly, constantly bumping into the caps at 1500 k/sec down, 256 k/sec up. We just received an upgrade from 128k up to 256k up this weekend (2/21/2003), which is a great thing to have, especially for someone who updates a website often like I do.
As I mentioned, I always get good speeds with my service. Never any slowdowns that I can detect, no matter when I use it. Pings are pretty good, around 50 ms or so. Even tech support is great — anytime I've ever had a problem, they've sent somebody out to look at it within 24-48 hours, and regional outages have always been fixed within a few hours as well. A while back I bought some coax cable and it was apparently pretty crappy; created some signal issues for me on hot days. A Comcast tech came out right away to investigate the problem, saw it was my lame cable, and gave me a huge spool of high-quality stuff. The signal problem went away.
There's only a couple of bad things I can think of with Comcast HSI. First off, their e-mail servers suck. Any time I've ever tried to use them, I've had roughly a 50/50 success ratio. Either the servers are down, or mail is delayed severely in getting to or from my box. It seems that if you hold your e-mail in high importance, it's not wise to use Comcast's mail servers. I have a website hosted at my own domain, so I simply use the e-mail server there instead. Also, newsgroup support is pretty much nonexistant. Comcast gives all customers 1 free GB per month of bandwidth on Giganews, but if you're a heavy newsgroup user, this probably won't be sufficient. Comcast has no news servers of its own (i.e, news.comcast.net).
My only other (minor) gripe is that Comcast doesn't have a network status page on their website which you can refer to in case you suspect an outage or network problem.
In short, I have no problem recommending Comcast HSI to anyone living in southwest Florida. Comcast connections can be extremely problematic in other areas of the country, but down in this neck of the woods, they're top-notch.
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