As far as I know, the standards were intentionally set very low. These standards were not meant to mimic business-class service levels. They were meant to provide some sort of floor, beneath which Comcast couldn't just shrug and say "Since you currently have sync (at this instant), you have no problem. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
That's just it. Mine is residential ADSL (and via SBC of all companies) and I would be screaming if I had to put up with a 25% connectivity downtime average and email outages of over an hour a day. Comcast's service in that area must set new standards for "horrid".
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