I’ve been with Comcast for about a year and a half. At no point during my term was I happy with the price or speed. I pay $56.18/month (including $5/month for Cable modem rental) which gives me 3Mbit down and 384Kbit up. This equates to

3121/357 wired, or

1545/359 wireless (across the house).

It happens to be pretty consistent with what they say it should be, unless of course I’m on a throttled protocol, like FTP, SSH or Bittorrent.

So I decided to try out an alternative, and the only other option in my area seems to be Qwest. I signed up for their “Premium” package, which boasts 7Mbit/896Kbit for $46.99/month. I set it up, popped in the CD and let it auto configure. On the control panel, it says “CONNECTED 1568 / 512 Kbps”… bandwidth tests suggest roughly that advertised speed, not the boasted speed.

1261/416 wired, or

1280/415 wireless.

Uploaded some pics to Flickr, played a game of CoD4, both felt about the same. So worst case I get $10/month cheaper for the same service — or at least that’s the idea. We’ll see when the bill actually comes.

It’s effectively the same as Comcast! Bleh… why can’t FiOS come to my area already? I can’t believe I actually considered using my [free] tethered cell phone internet plan for my house’s internet, that would be a HUGE hassle.

So I guess I hold onto this and wait. I’ll probably switch back to Comcast once either my Qwest price goes up, my Qwest service level goes down, or Comcast runs a sweet deal for which I’m eligible.

Edit: Called customer support, apparently I had the phone filter on the cable modem uplink.

Removed it and reconnected, now it at least connects at the advertised speed, “7168 / 896 Kbps”. Bandwidth tests don’t indicate that entirely.

3716/590 wired, or

1607/586 wireless.

This makes me wonder if I have only 10mbit connection on wireless.

Oh well, I’m satisfied for now.