Jul 11
I need internet and comcast is the only provider where I live in indianapolis. They have three different levels or speeds, economy and then two above that that are more expensive. They claim that the lowest speed or economy as they call it is faster than DSL. Anybody have any comments about the economy speed at Comcast? Is it fast enough?
It depends on what you are doing online.
If you mostly just browse the web, send the odd email, keep in touch with friends on Facebook or twitter, then the economy tier is probably fine.
If you like watching streaming videos on hulu or youtube a lot, you might want to stick with their mainstream 6 Mbps service. Also, if you upload a lot of files like pictures or videos, or download a lot of software, then you’ll also benefit from the faster service.
I’d recommend their highest and fastest tier only if you are uploading and downloading lots of large files (like high resolution pictures, movies, videos, documents) or if you routinely connect to your office from home over a VPN and need to access lots of files over your corporate network.
One last consideration is if you are sharing your internet connection between several computers in your home. If lots of people in your house log on and use the internet all at the same time, then you’ll probably want to get a faster tier that will accommodate everyone all at once. If, on the other hand, it’s just for you and one computer, then the slower tier is probably fine.
Two things to note:
1) Comcast is in the middle of upgrading their internet service to DOCSIS 3. This means that customers on the 6 Mbps and 8 Mbps service will have their speeds increased for no extra charge. Customer on the economy tier won’t. So if you are currently on the 6 Mbps tier, you will start getting more for your money shortly (probably within a year or so if you haven’t already)
2) If your main concern in online gaming (like World of Warcraft or similar games), be aware that increasing your bandwidth will have very little effect on the performance of the game. Game performance is far more dependent on a completely different metric called "latency", which is unaffected by the tier you subscribe to.
I discovered recently Skydur.com – a little proxy, unfortunatelly not free. I wish it is free but it’s not so expensive neither – just about $5 bucks per month. I can now access all web sites again from China – youtube, twitter, facebook and hulu. Skydur is very fast and works on Windows, Mac and Linux – check it out here – Skydur.com – you won’t be disappointed. Believe me I tried dozens of free proxy programs and noone worked as advertised.
Comcast is the only broadband provider for where I live. I have the 12mbit package which was upgraded for free from the 6mbit package I was paying for. Install is usually quick and painless if you have cable hookups at the place already. The only black eye with Comcast is that they do DNS redirection which sends you to an ad page when you mistype URLs. Fortunately they also make it easy to opt out of this “service” if it bothers you. – Kate
This is just great!!! Thankyou for posting this!
comcast is not a informing company neither is their service as far as answering your call I tried all day to get my question answered. When they gave me moden at office no one advised me of acc.nu. to use for setup as disk required maybe I should have guessed its same as my cable acc. the hold time for getting through to them was 20 min but first you have to go through a florida office then to another set of questions then hold some more and after listening to their loud music I really has a headache when I told rep. I was frustraded he said sorry if i wanted the info and I was telling him what i needed he told me to stop and listen to him. whoo!!!