I've almost had it with Comcast

[draggar]

Seriously. My first week and a half with them (about a month ago) I was losing my service almost every day ranging form 15 minutes to several hours. I called Comcast and someone was going to come out. Of course, they never came because they didn't use the contact number I gave them (they used our land line that we had disconnected). After I called them I had to wait several more days for someone to come out. They said it was a loose connection (odd that the TV never had a problem during this time, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt).

The next day, service went out. They said the main node for my area was out. Sure enough, my service was out for over 6 hours. He said that what can happen is that people come home and all start to use the internet which could cause the outage (very possible, but you'd think a company would plan for that?). I asked if that was oging to be normal, he didn't answer me.

Luckily, the daily outages stopped but now but a week later, another outage. TV and internet. Sure enough, the node was out, again.

I get home last night and I noticed that one of my programs (that sends and received information over the internet in 1 minute intervals) stopped sending or receiving around 1:30. I called Comcast again. They said that lightning hit the node and they had no ETA. I went to bed at 11pm and the service (TV and internet) had not been restored. Luckily when I woke up this morning, it was back up.

Anyone else in my area (Broward county0 have this many problems with Comcast? We dumped AT&T (landline phone and DSL) due to many reasons (mainly them taking 3 weeks to process our payment but in the mean time suspending our service then charging us a $30 reconnect fee).

I've actually considered getting a wireless air card (cell service) and a router for it (you plug the card into it and it turns it into a wireless router. Of course it would be slower but at least it would be consistent.

What made me laugh is that I don't know how much the guy knew about networks. I know what a node is (I support 3 similar sites with my company) but hearing the "technicians" explain it is rather funny sometimes. The guy referred to it as "a place where a bunch of computers are connected to the different internets". (I thought only GW referred to it as "the internets, but this guy thinks there are several!). I did give him my torubleshooting steps (repair network connections, reset the modem, reset the router, check the router config, etc, heck, I could have walked him though programming a switch though the terminal port).

[Warrior]

I remember the day when I was with Time Warner cable, oh how I miss those outages 3-4 times a week, I called them out 3 times and these guys did everthing, They ran a new cable from the pole, changed the lines in the home, changed the modem, the outages were not as frequent but they never stopped, I was still getting them and they couldn't figure out why. Me patience fianally ran out and I dumped cable and moved to high speed DSL, I get the same speed with DSL and I was getting with broadband, and it's been working flawlessly for 3 years now.
Cable TV has it's problems as well, If you have a big screen TV like I do, the distortion in the picture is amplified, The picture is just "Horrible", every cable guy I had out said it's as good as it will get, Well, sorry guys, when my antenna gives a better picture than cable, it's time to try something else!. I ended up subscribing to the Dish and WOW!, what a great picture!, Crisp and clear, I'll NEVER go back to cable, EVER!!!.