 Review by jtl 
UPDATED: 39 days ago
member for 6.4 years, 194 visits, last login: 7 days ago
 Arlington Heights,Cook,IL
 $45 per month
 "Generally reliable"
 "More expensive as time goes on"
 "Fast and generally reliable, but getting more expensive"
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(ratings match consensus)
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I've been a customer of Comcast and its predecessor networks since the summer of 1999. My original review and experiences with this network appear below.
I moved to my current address in April 2007, and in general the transition went smoothly. My account information was transferred, and I was up and running on the day we moved in. My new home is also in Arlington Heights, exactly two miles away from my previous address.
The only snag was that the technician, a Comcast subcontractor, spent two hours trying to get the cable modem to sync on the network: the problem was that the house was connected to the WideOpenWest (WOW) network, not Comcast's. I looked at the TV channels we were receiving and I suggested he check the wiring at the pole.
In June of 2007 I signed up for the combination television-telephone-internet package. In general, the services have all been very solid. We only had one outage which lasted about 3 hours in the first year of service. The cost has been acceptable, but since this was based on introductory pricing I knew that I would be weighing my options when the one-year mark rolled around.
As I write this in May 2008, I am about to make the switch from Comcast to WideOpenWest (WOW) at my home in Arlington Heights, Illinois. The same services that I have from Comcast will come to me from WOW for about $30 less than they would if I stayed with Comcast after the promotional pricing ran out.
If I were to rate Comcast for the time they've owned the network, I would put them at an 7 out of 10 for service and price-to-value.
--- Historical Review Below ---
In October of 2000, I signed up for @home in Elk Grove Village. I had it in Arlington Heights (5 miles away) for the previous year, and while it worked wonderfully when it *did* work, it was very unreliable. I was on the end of my block, so the signal was not as stable or strong as it should have been.
They would not reissue me the same user ID at my new address. This is not a big deal, as I never used that e-mail address anyway. I just thought it would make things smoother.
I was getting digital cable at the same time, so AT&T sent out two guys the day of the installation. The digital cable guy showed up first with all the equipment and the @home guy was delayed at his previous stop. It was getting late in the day, and I could tell these guys wanted to get the installations over with, so by the time the second guy showed up I had already hooked the cable modem up to my computer and it was syncing up.
The @home guy made a phone call to provision the modem and within a few minutes everything worked just fine.
About a month later, I installed a Netgear RT311 router and with the exception of a couple of minor outages, I had a year of almost-flawless service.
Then we had the @home debacle of December, 2001. It took about a week before I was up on ATTBI's new network, and everything seemed fine again. The downstream bandwidth was now capped at 1500 kbps, but that was fine with me. I did notice that my upload speeds were not reaching the 128 kbps they were advertising (I was more in the 40-50 kpbs range)-- plus, when I tried to upload digital photos to costco.com or ofoto.com the connections would time out and the transfers were painfully long.
Despite these issues, I figured things were still okay.
In February of 2002, I bought a 3Com cable modem on a closeout deal at Amazon. I plugged it in and was able to surf, but very slowly. I went to the Member Services page of attbi.com and had a live chat with one of their first-level techs. He sent me to the regional SAS site (sas.r5.attbi.com) to provision the modem, and within minutes I was up and running at the same downstream speeds as my ATTBI-owned Motorola 4100. Uploads, however, were still getting slower.
I returned the modem and it took two billing cycles to get them to remove the modem rental from my bills. An annoyance, more than anything else. At least they credited me for the month they missed.
In June 2002, ATTBI supposedly kicked the upstream speeds to 256kbps. I had another live chat with another ATTBI person, who sent me back to the SAS site for a reset/reboot/re-whatever. That improved nothing, at least not right away. I was able to test out at 160 kbps *once*, but for the most part I was in the 20-50 kbps range upstream.
Then, in late June 2002, ATTBI announced that the discount for customers who own their own equipment would go from $10 per month to $3 per month. Okay, another annoyance-- the price is going up again.
Enter SBC Ameritech and a $29.95/month/12 month/free modem/free self-install/768-128 DSL special. The timing was right.
I signed up and I evaluated it for 30 days. You can read my review of SBC-Ameritech for the details, but I wound up going back to ATTBI because of some special pricing they offered and some other annoyances with SBC-Ameritech.
In late July 2002, I started having problems with the line going down during the day. For a period of about two weeks I came home from work and there was no network connection; the modem was synced on the network, but I couldn't surf unless I reset the router.
ATTBI must have been working on the lines during this time, because after this phase had passed, my upload speeds consistently hit the mid- to upper-100s.
The bottom line, as I write this in August 2002: I can't say that I've been unhappy with ATTBI; the service has been fair to good. My biggest complaint is that what's *not* right with the service, mainly the price, just keeps creeping up. In all, though, it's been pretty good.
Update: In November, 2002, I moved to a condo in the Mallard Cove complex in Arlington Heights (60005). I established ATTBI service at my new address and in general it was almost as solid as it was in Elk Grove. Upon installation, ATTBI were able to recover my old account and login IDs for the new location, unlike my move from Arlington Heights to Elk Grove Village in '00.
In the 5 years I lived there, I had several weather-related outages, which told me they had some infrastructure issues that needed to be repaired. This would happen sporadically during my entire time at this address. The only other equipment failure I had was in mid-2004 when my Motorola Surfboard cable modem blew out and had to be replaced.
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Comcast Formerly ATT Broadband
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