So I got Comcast cable internet today, despite the fact that I have a month or two left with speaskeasy. Comcast is about 4 times faster, which is substantial. I can finally VNC home again, and moving music from home to work is no longer an over-night ordeal.
I got the free “set it up yourself” install, and the guy came, very nicely gave me a 3 way splitter for my cable, and didn’t balk at my obvious router setup. He handed me an envelope, said “here’s your software” and split.
I obviously didn’t install the software in my rh9 box, but I wasn’t getting on the Internet either. I called Nathan and he said they he had to use their windows software to register and activate the account. How sad.
So I ran through it in XP, and it said it couldn’t find the internet. I gave Comcast a call, and they noticed that the installer hadn’t closed the ticket yet, so she called him, he closed it, I ran it, and it worked.
The moral of the story? If you don’t have a windows box handy to register your account, you can’t use Comcast. But I did, and now I’m browsing fast.
So you finally made the leap to Comcast, eh? I had looked pretty closely at them back before I chose Speakeasy, whose name be praised.
The faster cable speeds through Comcast were attractive, but not enough to cancel out all the evils in the ToS. Do you know if they’ve improved the terms at all? Some of the problems I remember included prohibitions on running servers of any kind (yep, ssh and smtp included), prohibitions against bandwidth sharing, their lie of “unlimited use” and no static IP addresses.
When I was at home we had (and they still have) Comcast. I was wary, not really trusting the cable company. On the whole it worked just fine, but I agree with what Alan said about ToS terms. For me, when I was deciding what to get for my apartment out here in CA, it was a piece of mind thing. When I was on cable I would have to be conscious about what I was doing, worried about getting one of those “unlimited use” emails. With Speakeasy I don’t even think about my connection. It’s just there. I ssh into my box all the time, transfer large files, whatever. And not only do they not care, they’re explicit about allowing it.
I’ll grant you, though, that I don’t go around doing anything that requires bandwidth over a couple hundred K/sec. So maybe the higher d/l speed makes a difference for you.
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i have had comcast (formerly @home and attbi) since cable modem access first arrived in the area and i have *never* used windows to access it. ever.