comcast cable internet

[genocide roach]

anyone have it? what speeds? any problem running xbox live games because of a slow connection?
~gR~

 

[Zephyrus]

I have it at my winter house down in Boston. It's pretty fast but I'm not sure about specs.

 

[cookiecutter]

I had it before we got Verizon FiOs. Both were equally fast. I've never run XBox live but I never had a problem with the speed

 

[Perdition's Light]

I have it at my winter house down in Boston. It's pretty fast but I'm not sure about specs.

Winter house? Are you rich?

 

[MetalAges]

I had it but left for Verizon DSL. Comcast can be great, but if you run into line troubles it's a major pain to get tech help out to your place. I (and my neighbor) went through 3 months and countless phone calls / re-explanations until giving up and going to Verizon.

 

[King Richard]

Comcast sucks ass. I had nothing but trouble with them, then I switched to Bright house.

 

[Thanatopsis123]

Isn't Comcast the one I've been reading articles about lately about how they have been shutting off peoples connections because they're downloading too much? Which is of course pissing people off because they've paid for "unlimited" access.

 

[supseudonymous]

Comcast has a horrible reputation as a company. They're deceptive, cheap, and unfriendly.

 

[Zephyrus]

Winter house? Are you rich?

Well it used to be my year-round house before I moved to Maine, where I live at our former vacation house. We bought the land when it was cheap.

 

[CAIRATH]

If you're a big bittorrent (or other p2p protocol) user I would pretty much avoid them. Comcast is notorious for throttling and otherwise interfering with p2p traffic. Actually given that, I would avoid them just on principle.

Here's some links:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...-comcast-is-targeting-bittorrent-traffic.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...ven-more-apps-groupware-clients-affected.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...e-foot-with-traffic-shaping-explanations.html

 

[audiophileguy]

Other than price I have no problem with them. When I first got cable in 00(From TimeWarner) my download speed was about 180 KB or so, well that's how fast my upload is now. My download max is about 1 meg unless I'm getting that speedboost which sometimes takes it to for 4megs for a limited time. I rarely use torrents/ p2p so that's not an issue for me. I use Comcast a lot for gaming and that's the main reason why I keep it. I live in california and servers from chi to dallas are playable. If you game, and fios isn't an option, than you need cable.

edit: oh, u mentioned xbox live :O

 

[genocide roach]

it looks like i may not have a choice. comcast seems to be the only provider for fast cable internet in town. how gay is that
~gR~

 

[Matt]

I have AT@T cable internet. It's great.

 

[supseudonymous]

it looks like i may not have a choice. comcast seems to be the only provider for fast cable internet in town. how gay is that
~gR~

Have you looked into options like fiber optic or satellite?

 

[genocide roach]

i'll be in an apartment. they may not allow dishes. does dish network offter broadband internet?

anyone used qwest?
~gR~

 

[CAIRATH]

If you're an online gamer you can forget about doing that successfully on a satellite link because the network latency on those connections is gigantic. And your upstream bandwidth will also be tiny since that would go via a normal old fashioned dial-up connection. The actual bandwidth those satellite connections can handle is decent, but they are just extremely unresponsive compared to a cable or DSL connection.

So you said Comcast is the only cable provider in the area, are there no DSL providers or anything either? Unless you have a specific reason why you'd want cable...

 

[genocide roach]

i want cable for xbox live. even with my cable on base, my connection on xbox live is slow. i need somthing much faster
~gR~

 

[CAIRATH]

Speed has no bearing on whether you get DSL or cable though. Both are broadband connections that can have either fairly low or very high speeds. It all depends on the ISPs available in your area and the assortment of services they are offering.

If there are no ISPs that offer DSL connections available for your area then I guess you're out of luck. I have no idea what the internet market is like in the US really, but in the Netherlands you have the choice between cable and DSL pretty much wherever you live unless it is an area that is too remote or too sparsely populated.

 

[The Ozzman]

Only things faster than cable that I know of are T1 and T3. Those can be really expensive though.

 

[CAIRATH]

Okay so I randomly talked to one of my American friends earlier and mentioned this topic, and apparently DSL is a lot less common and a lot slower in America than I figured it would be. That is weird. In northern Europe DSL is incredibly prevalent and just as fast (if not faster) than cable connections. I guess the US broadband market is not as diverse and competitive.

And yeah T1 and T3 lines are super fancy but leasing those costs a ton of money (it's usually something done by businesses) and also complete overkill if all you want to do is play games on your X-box. Online gaming really does not use much bandwidth at all. You don't need a crazy high bandwidth connection for it. The main thing that is important is low latency which in the case of cable would be somewhat dependant on how many people on the same node use their connections (and TVs) intensively and how much your ISP overbooks the line capacity.