Anybody with a relatively stable Comcast connection trading through IB... can you tell me what router and modem you're using? Thanks.
I sometimes find it hard to believe that Comcast is a nation wide company. I've had problems with their service and their support, but I still use them as my primary source. But, this is only because of the lack of competition in the cable industry. Where I live, there are two cable providers, Comcast and TimeWarner. But, the bastards divide the area in half so you don't have the ability to select one over the other. Really pisses me off. One of these days I'm gonna see if dsl is better. As for modem, I suggest you purchase (one that doesn't get hot and lacks fault tolerance) you're own (a good one) and not use one provided by Comcast.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/internet/comcast_isp.html i give up on comcast year ago,when verizon offer fios in our area. imo-everything will work,as long as comcast have good,stable signal. check http://www.dslreports.com/ they have plenty of info about routers and modems. this one - http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1033095&Sku=D700-5136 works fine for me. routers-i tried netgear,linksys.belkin,dlink-they all works fine for home type of network without specific needs. if you want to use some P2P -that's will be a different story.
I've had sporadic problems with Cox Cable out here in Cali as well. Mostly at 2-3am in the morning, so I suspect it's just maintenance-related on their end. The thing with cable is that you get blazing fast max-speed throughputs on downloads. But you have to share that pipe with everyone else in your neighborhood. If everyone's on at once, like right after work, things will slow to a crawl. With DSL, you may not get as high of peak speeds, but you can at least get guaranteed minimum throughput that's always available.
I use comcast in NJ and it's been very very dependable -- no outages in 2+ years (at least that I noticed). Before that it was spotty. I have verizon DSL too, that's been out a few times mostly due to thunderstorms in the area. I suggest bitching to comcast as much as you can, I've heard stories about bad routers on their end and such, and if you bitch enough they'll look into it and fix it (just to shut you up . I use two Dlink routers (one for cable modem, one for DSL) and they freeze up every 3-6 months, but I could probably prevent that if I cycled them on/off over the weekends once a month. SSB
I have comcast with a Mortorola modem. Pretty stable, but every once in a while it will just freeze and then everything reloads. I have access to Verizon Fiber and I may try that. A friend says it makes a cable connection look like a dial up.
My brother works for SBC out in cali. He's at a training seminar right now learning about fiber routers that provide (+-)1G/sec. Says he thought the service costs somewhere around $35,000 /month.
I was googling to verify what I said above and found this link to be interesting: $200 Billion Broadband Scandal
I've got comcast as my ISP and use IB. I have a Surfboard cable modem and was using a Netgear wireless router. Which worked great until a couple of months ago when it up and died on me. Took it out of line and haven't got around to replacing it. I only used it so I could move around with the laptop anyway. As far comcrust goes they are the only only local cable provider. So it's either that or a Dumb Slow Line (which I have to put up with at the office). When it works it works great but they (comcrack) do have a lot of outages. Seems to come and go in spurts. Been relatively trouble free for many months now. But a couple of years ago I went w/o cable for THREE days once. I was about ready to go visit their office - with a chainsaw. Never had any comcast/IB/router related issues that I know of. When there is a problem it's is just IB or just comtragic.