I've used Bresnan for 6 years, and it's gone down once. I can't complain.

Aphostile

It's too bad every service isn't as good as Cablevision's Optimum Online. Once I was spoiled with that, nothing else seems good in comparison.

Optimum Online takes a nosedive several times a week here, and always at the moment the Farktography contest goes green. The only thing I hate more than Cablevision is Nextel.

Nice headline, submitter.

Upon moving to a new home last year, one of my imperatives was to have a Comcast-free-household.

My gripes against comcrap were:

Unless you purchase an HD subscription, the service absolutely, positively SUCKS EGGS! HD service is over twice the cost of basic service. I guess their rationale is to make you realize just how lame the 'basic' service is, and upgrade. Pfft.

Internet service could not have been worse. Literally. If anybody knows about this or works for comcast...maybe you could tell me why, because comcrap support certainly couldn't! Each and every link in a webpage had to be clicked twice, as the first time it invariably timed out! At first I thought this to be a poor attempt load balancing, but ultimately chalked it up to a crappy deployment by comcast. Anybody else experience this? Every local comcast internet customer I've talked to in town has the same experience. Couldn't take it anymore.

Now happily subscribed to DirecTV and Verizon dsl. The DirecTV service rarely dies, and the basic service is terrific! DSL thru verizon is so-so, but generally works well.

what was that line again? 160000 repetitions equals one truth?

I dunno. I've had a Comcast cablemodem (originally @Home) since 2002, and I've only had 1 problem that required me to call their phone monkeys. Their phone firewall was in India, sure, but I could understand them and they could understand me. The problem took them 10 days to fix, though, and during those 10 days, I had no Net at home. The root cause was that my next-door neighbor moved and canceled his service, and the Comcast tech disconnected my cable instead of his. Sigh.

Other than that, I've had barely any problems with Comcast's net connections. Hell, over the last 3 months, I've had more problems with the ISP-managed "business class" router+several T1s combo at work than I've had with my cablemodem. YMMV though.

Comcast can die in a pit of flame, the stupid bastards. My internet/phone (and tv when I had it) had a tendancy to drop for 15-60 minutes at least once a day, every day for almost a year. Took 40 some techs, 5 line techs, and shouting my way to the division VP to get the shiat fixed.

I've had cable internet as long as its been available in my area. First it was @home. I don't know how good their phone support was, because I never had to call it. Then it was bought out by AT&T Broadband. Good phone service, prompt and friendly technician came out and replaced my cable modem after it threw some sparks and smoke. Then Comcast bought it, and it's been nothing but trouble. Bills are wrong, service alternates speed between 8mbps and 56kbps for no apparant reason, surly and filthy technicians, unhelpful and annoying phone support people, apathetic supervisors, etc.

Too bad it's my only option for cable internet out here.
/sigh
//submitter

GibbyTheMole:

I used Mediacom for a little bit last year. Their TV service is good, but the internet service they provide is useless. That damn service went down more often than a hooker in Vegas in a field full of rich men.

I shot off a rather angry email to their tech support which did nothing. Recently, my mom had told me that my dad was getting very pissed off about the service so they finally sent someone out to fix the issue. As to whether or not it got fixed, I have no clue. But, since I moved out of that household, I have no way of knowing if it actually fixed the problem.

Mediacom can suck a big one.

Charter, on the other hand, is good near St. Louis MO since their headquarters is out there. In the Communist sh*thole of Virginia, however, they are absolutely horrible.

/hates VA. Also uses Verizon DSL right now, though occasionally the connection drops for some unknown reason. No other complaints about the service though

J.D. Power will say anything they get PAID to say...

/Load 'o crap
//Try consumer reports or something like that

Two or three months ago there was a news article that noted JD Power and Associates is nothing but a PR firm. It pointed out that all of the awards they hand out were actually sold to the auto producers for hugh prices.

JD Power and Associates sells its services and is a profit driven company. There is no reliability in any of the results that they "find" when conducting their research.

From Wikipedia: "Critics of both JD Power and non-profit groups like Consumer Reports point out that their opinion surveys do not screen the people filling out the surveys properly. For instance, no VIN number or vehicle specific information is asked from the subscribers or survey fillers, but supporters argue that it is not necessary."

Unlike Consumer Reports they never release findings that cast a product or service in an unfavorable light... because it is paid big money to make positive findings.

Don't believe anything that you hear from that profit driven PR firm.

Dunno, I have had fantastic service from Cox Cable in Phoenix. I can count the number of times my connection has went down over the last 3-4 years on my fingers.

Thier 1mb/9mb connection has been pretty damn reliable, and I have gotten the speeds advertised...

G

/Infomerical
//No seriously, its been great.

Going to join the Comcast hate. The one year I had their cable internet, the internet went out at least once a day. The straw that broke the camel's back was when for two full weeks, the internet would go down every night for several hours at a time. This wasn't a problem on my end, either, as I made it a point to call Comcast each time to biatch--always got a recorded message saying that there were "technical difficulties" in the area.

I switched to Verizon DSL and haven't had a single problem in the year that I've used it. Sadly, my DSL connection is about as fast as my old Comcrap cable connection, which makes me seriously wonder what the hell is wrong with Comcast's network in my area.

The people who seem to know any/every time their internet goes down for 10 seconds need to get a life.

vonster
The people who seem to know any/every time their internet goes down for 10 seconds need to get a life.

When you work from home, those 15-60 minutes a day can really cause you some problems. Especially when it kills your phone as well.

Are you Major Thomb in disguise, simply coming in to call all the posters stupid?

/rather surprised he hasn't shown up yet.

The people who seem to know any/every time their internet goes down for 10 seconds need to get a life.

A 10 second outage makes all the difference when you're working on a vpn from home. Ass.

Browsing Fark at the library? Watch our for this guy:

Hey Cox Cable people, did your region get purchased by that weird bastard company SuddenLink too? Does anybody know anything about it? Considering the history of where it came from, I expect my formerly stellar Cox Service to take a dive

/ My Cox is sick
// :(

One thing I hate about the cable business is that they have a monopoly in our area. There's just Comcast. The satellite dish companies provide some small amount of competition, but it's not enough to make customer service important to Comcast.

Obviously, JD Power didn't ask Adelphia customers.

/..hate... Adelphia... so... much...

I've use Comcast internet for 5+ years now. Originally I had issues with line noise, but they eventually fixed this after a number of line and splitter replacements. Once that happened, my service was perfect, and has been ever since. I'm now getting over 6000/512 connection speed... so I'm happy. For 43 bucks a month with the basic cable package (not Digital), its a pretty decent deal. Of course with Verizon FIOS around... its not looking that great anymore.

Cable companies don't get many complaints because people are so used to the crappy service they don't even bother anymore...

We've basically gotten used to the constant fuzzy snow when we watch... Its weird going to someone else's house and seeing a real crisp picture...

Personally, I have Rogers (southern ontario) for my Cable, Internet (5Mbps) & cell phone.

My *only* complaint, was that 3 years ago they gave me a horrible c332 motorola cell phone that the battery would die the moment you took it off the charger. 18 months later, they gave me a free v551 instead, and I am a completely happy customer.

Bell, well, sucks balls, but I don't pay them a dime anyway.

As for the article, I would imagine more people are happy with their cable phone service than not.

And just as a personal note, from my experience doing verizon dsl tech support (dont laugh). anyone with dsl that has problems with their internet, 95% percent of the time, its a PEBCAK error.

/Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard
//That's right, I said it
///slashie
///

I work for Time Warner Cable and most problems faced by the farkers here are due to RF issues. Just call your cable company and report the problem. Sometimes the hold times are long, and we cant fix it if we you bastards dont tell us.

I decided to build my own DVR. Installed a Hauppage PVR-150 and MythTV over CentOS 4. Install worked fine, recording and scheduling is good...except I didn't opt for an IR blaster so I couldn't actually change channels on the set-top box.

So I call up Cox to find out if the serial port on the back of their set-top box is enabled so I can use that. I just start out by telling them I got a tivo for my birthday, and none of them--NONE of them--have any farking clue what I'm talking about.

I started thinking of leaving when I had one yokel try to explain to me that tivo was for "downloading satellite TV into the cable" and that it was unnecessary because "We have HD now."

I finally got ahold of one of their engineers and he explained that the port was enabled, but was configured so that only the Cox DVR could use it for anything. So I transferred to Customer Prevention and cancelled it.

This was early June. They just sent me a bill for July with almost $100 in late fees on it.

Mr.Sharpy
COX did sell off some of it's smaller markets. Don't know if you are in a small town though and I think it was in the Eastern US.