As per usual, the views below reflect my own personal opinions and not that of my employer.

Since moving to the Bay Area, I’ve relied on Sonic.net for internet. Sonic, a small local ISP,  has the most intelligent and competent Customer Support team I’ve ever worked with. Seriously. The best.

Unfortunately, Sonic.net provides DSL service that rides over AT&T’s crappy lines. When I first signed up for their service, I didn’t mind as I was paying their “introductory price” (about $55/mo) for the service. At that price point, it was affordable and I didn’t mind the slow spees. Recently, my “introductory pricing” was up and I started paying ~$80/mo for service, once you factor in the money I’m paying AT&T for basic phone service. Not so affordable, that.

I decided a couple weeks ago that if I was going to be paying ~$70/mo for internet, it’s going to be fast so I started the process of getting Comcast High Speed Internet. Here’s what I’ve experienced so far.

The Good:

Speedy.

See that? That’s FAST. Mind you, I was coming from 6/epicslow DSL so the speediness may be old hat to you, dear readers. I bought my own modem (more on that later) so that I could get the DOCSIS 3.0 speeds that are available in San Jose. DOCSIS is the standard for passing data over cable lines and DOCSIS 3.0 adds some sort of magic (I know not the magic, you can look it up if you care) that makes things go fast. I like speed. I taught Ricky Bobby how to go fast. True story.

The Bad:

The process of getting  Comcast HIS was not easy. First, this is not something you can install yourself if you don’t have Comcast cable.  An installer has to come and connect up things outside then make sure the connection is working inside. I called to have the installer come on a Saturday between 9am and 11am. He showed up at 11:45am.  Not cool.

Customer service is crap. Seriously. One guy I talked to sounded like he was sitting at home answering my call and would not stop trying to upsell me. To the CSAs out there? No means no.

The Ugly:

So the Ugly? Really. Fricking. Ugly. First of all, I figured with my newly discovered speed, I would hop on Halo and perform some quick pwnage. Pwnage did not reveal itself as I suffered all kinds of crazy lag during gameplay. I spent a solid 15 minutes trying to figure out what was going on until it dawned on me;  traffic shaping. The cost of doing business with a giant ISP is that they do all kinds of dumb shit.  Like traffic shaping. Support Net Neutrality folks. What was odd about this is that I was able to download a >1GB iso (mythbuntu) from usenet pretty fricking quickly.

Still ugly on par with traffic shaping but something that didn’t personally affect me is that Comcast rents its cable modems. Mind you, plenty of ISPs do this but that doesn’t make it any less dirty. Even more offensive is that Comcast is raising the rental rates for their modems. Yes, $60/yr for renting what is probably a used and outdated modem. Yes, the same $60/yr that you could spend to buy a brand new Comcast approved cable modem and have money left over. Do you see Comcast advertising that option to folks? No you sure don’t. Never fear, dear readers, I am here to save you from being screwed by Comcast and their rental fees. Below you will find some Comcast approved cable modems available for purchase from Amazon. For the sake of transparency, you should know that I will get some paltry sum of money if you purchase using the links found here. Don’t worry, it won’t make me rich. People viewing this in a feed reader may need to use this link to see the modems (assuming you cared).

So that’s it readers. I’m now Comcastic or however you want to call it. I still have my Sonic.net DSL turned on for the time being (I’ll turn it off right before I’m supposed to get the next bill) and am trying to think of clever things to do with that connection. I’m thinking I’ll put an open wireless network on it and redirect all traffic to this blog, unless you all have other ideas.

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