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In the Bay Area (Palo Alto) you can get 1 Gbps Comcast service and it works well, but getting it is hard because everything else about Comcast is bad. - It's h

In the Bay Area (Palo Alto) you can get 1 Gbps Comcast service and it works well, but getting it is hard because everything else about Comcast is bad. - It's hard to order the service because the price online is a stupidly high price no one should pay if it's listed at all. - When you call two thirds of the sales reps don't know what gigabit is and will tell you it's not in your area (even though it is) rather than finding out. I've had them tell me it requires a $300 installation fee (it doesn't) or that they'll email me when it's available (it was already available and they wouldn't have). You have to call until you get someone who can do their job. - The upload is capped to 35mbps - I was able to get 1gbps for $89/month, but it required a two year contract. It's also not listed on the bill as this, but as 'performance plus' with a gigabit add on which makes things confusing. - There's a 1 terabyte/month data cap and it's $10 per 50GB after that capped at a max cost of $200. You get two 'courtesy months' of this, but then you get charged. You can pay $50 to have 'unlimited'. After months of using 700GB or so per month suddenly my usage spiked to 2TB so now I have to pay this - it's very hard to determine why (nothing on my end appears to have changed and my ubiquity software shows no massive increase in usage). - Comcast also has a gigabit pro plan which is real fiber to the house (no modem/coax cable) - it's 2gbps up and down, but requires a $1000 installation since they're actually bringing fiber to your house and special hardware to make use of it (also good luck finding a rep that will let you actually buy it - none of them know about it, twitter is best option to find a good support person). While the service once set up is good (except for upload) everything else about interacting with them is terrible. After the two years runs out they'll drop my speed to 25mbps and double the price and I'll have to call and negotiate the plans with a rep all over again. Any interaction with the public website or billing is also pretty bad. All I want is to pay a reasonable price for faster service. I'd even pay more (potentially a lot) if I didn't have to deal with all of this. Even in a competitive market Comcast has problems.

kstrauser 7y ago
> There's a 1 terabyte/month data cap In other words, you're allowed to use your service for about three hours per month. I worked for an ISP and I completely understand the idea behind overprovisioning, because you build your network for average traffic and not the maximum theoretical capacity needed to serve 100% of customers using 100% of their connection 100% of the time. But here Comcast is overprovisioning by a factor of 240:1 -- that is, you can only use your connection at 1/240th of your theoretical capability. That's insane, and demonstrably unnecessary. I use Sonic.net which is a relatively much tinier ISP, but who offers uncapped gigabit for much less than Comcast's capped joke offering. Therefore, people who really want to use their connection heavily are much more likely to go to Sonic.net than Comcast, meaning that Sonic.net probably has a much higher average per-customer usage than Comcast does. And yet, they're still cheaper, still uncapped, and still growing. If Sonic.net can do it, Comcast is just being greedy.
- fossuser 7y ago
  Sonic.net's gigabit option is extremely limited - they only have DSL in most of the bay area. I think they also force a phone on you? I agree in general though, it's even more annoying when you try and find details about the cap and have to keep reading copy from Comcast about why "those who use more should pay more".

kstrauser 7y ago

> There's a 1 terabyte/month data cap In other words, you're allowed to use your service for about three hours per month. I worked for an ISP and I completely understand the idea behind overprovisioning, because you build your network for average traffic and not the maximum theoretical capacity needed to serve 100% of customers using 100% of their connection 100% of the time. But here Comcast is overprovisioning by a factor of 240:1 -- that is, you can only use your connection at 1/240th of your theoretical capability. That's insane, and demonstrably unnecessary. I use Sonic.net which is a relatively much tinier ISP, but who offers uncapped gigabit for much less than Comcast's capped joke offering. Therefore, people who really want to use their connection heavily are much more likely to go to Sonic.net than Comcast, meaning that Sonic.net probably has a much higher average per-customer usage than Comcast does. And yet, they're still cheaper, still uncapped, and still growing. If Sonic.net can do it, Comcast is just being greedy.

fossuser 7y ago
Sonic.net's gigabit option is extremely limited - they only have DSL in most of the bay area. I think they also force a phone on you? I agree in general though, it's even more annoying when you try and find details about the cap and have to keep reading copy from Comcast about why "those who use more should pay more".