Review by rmturner 
UPDATED: 1.6 years ago
member for 8.1 years, 3272 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Kennesaw,Cobb,GA
 $59 per month
 about 7 days
 "*Very* steady throughput, very reliable"
 "The people in sales don't always process you correctly"
 "I didn't expect to be impressed, but I am"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings above consensus)
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I had ordered a voip line back when I had DSL. No matter what I did, the call quality was "chattery", indicating a wildly vacillating connection. That made sense, as my DSL service had been kind of flaky ever since I moved to my new home. Comcast had a 6 mo for 22.95/mo special, so I figured I should at least try and see if I could get voip to work over it. I signed up for the 3000/256 connection and they installed it within a few days. A minor point, but my email/password didn't work for about the first 48 hours. I suspect a foul-up in Sales.
I tried my voip phone on the cable service and wow, what a difference! I kept watch over several months, running both cable and dsl and figuring I'd be very disappointed with Comcast down the road (i.e. how can a cable tv company run an ISP?). As it turned out, there were no bad surprises, just excellent connections with steady throughput. Any time I checked I was getting a traffic-shaped 3.3mpbs/256. My Vonage lines worked as good as a pots line over cable. After several months, I ported my old numbers over to Vonage and dropped my DSL subscription. It looked like Comcast was a keeper.
After the 6 month special, I upgraded to 4.3/384 service. Sales said I was good to go, but it turned out not to be the case. Calling support (and expecting none) I was very impressed with the help I got. A technician went through and registered me while I was online through their proxy service. Again, Sales had apparently dropped the ball, but Support came through perfectly. Recently they upgraded us, so I'm now getting 6.6/784. They don't have traffic shaping working yet on the new upgrades, but I hope it kicks in soon. Other than that, the connection is rock solid.
Update about 2 years later. Now I'm getting 8megs/768 and still impressed. My two voip lines are solid and when I downloaded a 61 meg Macromedia Dreamweaver trial a couple days ago, it took around 18 seconds. 650 meg linux .isos take around 11 minutes. After some recent upgrades I had a frequent disconnects problem. To their credit, they sent several truck rolls to my home and replaced the modem, wiring, tap, etc. but couldn't solve the problem. Troubleshooting on my own, I read that cable modems hate refrigerators (thanks to the faq at BBR). I had an old beverage refrigerator badly in need of defrosting sitting 2 feet from the cable modem. I defrosted it and moved it to the far end of the basement and my problems immediately ceased. Just goes to show.....
Update again. Yawn, ho-hom, nothing to complain about, just a steady, never-down connection. About a year ago I decided to switch my home phone from Bellsouth over to Comcast Digital Voice, since everything else was working so good. The installer showed up on time and finished porting my home number while he was there. He replaced my old modem with an Arris telecom modem. After he left, my 8/768 connection was even better. The Arris has built in QOS, leaving you with perfect phone calls. The overall throughput stability even made my two Vonage biz lines better (i.e. I can now fax over them). I used the CDV home phone to set up a Tivo successfully (you're not supposed to be able to set up a Tivo over a voip phone). I will say that the CDV personal website is not as good as my Vonage one.
Another update, July 2007. A truly hassle-free high speed connection. Lot's faster and steady than when I signed up. Don't think I'll ever change.
March, 2008. Yawn, ho hum again. My Comcast connection is so rock solid that there's nothing for me to do anymore. No network troubleshooting, no analyzing speed tests or packet loss. It's so fast that websites go by quicker than I can read the content. I hate to say it, but actually, the internet has become boring. In search for things to do, I'm finding yard work and books to read. Yawn, I think I'm ready for a nap; I feel so useless having nothing to fix anymore.
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