Comcast Sucks

We recently replaced AT&T and DirecTV with Comcast, mainly because AT&T would not allow existing customers to take advantage of the AT&T/DirecTV reduced priced bundle to renew their service, and Comcast offered a decently priced package deal. With Anu recently being laid off, reducing our overall Internet/Phone/TV costs seemed like a very good proposition.

Holy crap does Comcast suck!

Since we had Comcast previously in El Cerrito, which is less than five miles from our current place, we figured we'd be happy with them. This is not the case.

I have a class that is conducted via Skype. Today my connection was dropped more than 20 times during the 3 hour class. Not since the days of dial-up have I had so many connection failures in such a short amount of time. Sometimes the connection failure lasted over five minutes. And it was total failure -- I couldn't connect to any Internet service at all. And since Comcast is now also our telephone carrier, I had no phone service either. Not even 911 service.

This has been going on since the day of the Comcast installation. A classmate in the online class said he had a similar problem during his last Skype class, and Comcast was so unresponsive that he could only solve the problem by switching to AT&T. We're far away from any central office, and I know we probably won't get perfect service. We also had some connectivity problems with AT&T, but not even close to as bad as with Comcast -- I did four other Skype classes with the AT&T link with no big problems. This is so frustrating that I'm already considering switching back -- after less than a week with Comcast.