It's official: Outages are only the second-worst thing about Comcast

No complaints

Back in the '00s I was in the Seattle area with AT&T Broadband, then Comcast bought that(?) and I became a Comcast customer at that point. I used 1Mbps DSL for many years(with 8 static IPs), but the ISPs kept getting bought and sold, at one point my DSL ISP said they were changing my IPs so I said screw it, I cancelled DSL and put in Comcast. I put my servers(email+web+DNS+etc) in a local colo.

Was a Comcast customer for 2-3-4 years, really had no issues. Small outage here and there, my bill was not cheap being that I had a ton of premium channels.

Anyway, in 2011 I moved to the bay area, and got a local cable company(served the city I was in only). Cost and service was comparable (for all of those folks saying cities should invest in municipal services for TV/internet) to Comcast. My only real complaint was I wanted faster upload speed(fastest was about 3Mbps, my download speeds were ~20-30Mbps though they had faster download plans).

Moved to the central valley in California a year ago, back to Comcast territory. Again costs were about the same but internet speed up by 10X (download now ~200Mbps and upload now ~20Mbps). I have had more outages out here, maybe I have noticed 3 or 4 brief outages in the past year (nothing more than a few hours tops??). Since my job is managing remote servers I need internet access, so in the event comcast goes down I use the hotspot on my phone.

Comcast really did screw up the installation of services at my current home. Took their contractors at least 3 or 4 trips. Apparently nobody in this city of 200k people uses Tivo and they lacked the hardware and kept sending people on site without cable cards. They also sold me on a triple play package(only for cost, didn't need the phone) and I told them I wanted to buy my own modem, they told me the website to find compatible modems and turns out the modem I bought wasn't compatible with any voice service. So they ended up having to re-do my order on the fly to a double play (for the same price, originally double play costed more for some reason).

Took more troubleshooting on my old Tivo Series 3 it didn't get several hundred channels, they came on site(and charged me that fee), no resolution. Eventually I learned that those channels were encoded with MPEG4 and Tivo series 3 doesn't support that so the channel remains black (even though the signal strength is very strong, and shows no errors). Annoyed that the series 3 is not as useful as it once was, but it still gets some channels. Series 4 works fine with MPEG4.

I think costs wise people blame comcast because that's who they pay. They don't see the costs of the content(Disney, and other content providers always pushing for more $$) driving the costs up. Other than the occasional big dispute between a cable/satellite and a content provider where they put banners on the channels saying the content may get cut off if they don't come to agreement by some date. I know that's not the whole picture but I bet it's a decent chunk of it. People argue for being able to subscribe to individual channels(no bundling) but many don't realize that will drive the cost even higher in many cases.

I caved in a few months ago and decided to cancel most of my premium channels, I hadn't watched much premium tv in more than a decade. Still have showtime as that is part of my "package". (and no I don't stream media either).

I have no doubt broadband etc costs are more expensive in the U.S. than in many other places (as is several other aspects of life here). And have no doubt that comcast probably does screw up regularly given the size of their customer base.