I was having problems like this with Comcast in the Spring. They were never able to solve it. They kept blaming my computer and my software. I had the tech guys out to my house a dozen times. I spent hours on the phone with the customer abuse reps. Long story short, I dropped them. My computer and my software work flawlessly with DSL. DSL is also at least twice as fast as Comcasts crappy broadband ever was for me. Good luck to you.
I live outside of Atlanta. We have comcast now and had it at our last house also in the metro area. We still occasionally have problems but they have gotten better. This past spring was a nightmare. The connection was constantly going out sometimes for hours, once for THREE days. I'd call tech support only to get a recorded message about how the service for half the city was out. At our last house one of the culprits, besides their infrastructure, turned out to be a faulty signal amp mounted outside the house. Of the 5 or 6 tech reps that came to the house only one really knew what he was doing. Of the dozen or more I talked to on the phone none knew what they were doing. In fact they would tell me the problem was on my end even though the recorded message I had to listen to before they answered said Comcast was having a problem. I have read their reputation is pretty good over most of the country, they do not have that reputation here in the south.
The problem with DSL is that you usually have to be within a 3-mile radius of a local telco switching station. The fiber-optic cable that is used by COMCAST does not have those kinds of technological restrictions. Out here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we are able to download at over 4MB. ( just did a speed test on my Comcast Cable and got 4453, 5908, and now 6113 on the download and 355 on the upload at 5:20PM). Here is a great broadband website for customers of either DSL or Cable High Speed Internet. Lots of Forums, Message Boards, Troubleshooting, and Tools to check your speed, packet loss, etc. http://www.dslreports.com Here is the link to the speed test: http://www.dslreports.com/stest
I have been using Comcast in Chattanooga TN for about two years. For about the last month my connection is dropped on an average of three times a day. Some days could be dropped six times. I may be able to obtain a reconnection in three minutes or it may be hours. I have long since quit calling Comcast tech support as they are hopeless. I think Comcast works on their hardware at my local node and take the service down until they are ready to turn it back on. I just have to wait until the line comes back up. When the line is up it works great. Comcast does beat the ISDN service I had previously.
Sweet, thanks for the link. I just tested mine, I'm capped on download - I think 1.5. I have Qwest DSL but use a different ISP. Here's my results. 2005-11-19 13:43:37 EST: 1249 / 691 Your download speed : 1249 kbps or 156.1 KB/sec. Your upload speed : 691 kbps or 86.4 KB/sec. Never had a problem with the line. Just when my ISP goes down. (Snow storm or heavy rains- maybe twice a year.)
I had Comcast cable in northern California (Silicon Valley), and I was getting very short (few seconds) disconnects. Most people wouldn't notice or mind the glitches, but they were interfering with my trading. I switched to DSL, and I will probably stay with that as long as I live at this address. One of the characteristics of coaxial cable is that it is susceptible to interference. That may have been my problem.
When I lived in a multi-unit building and had Comcast most of the outages were caused by a cable guy disconnecting the whole building while they were working on someone else's cable connection. I had this happen a couple of dozen times over a three year period in two different locations in two different states.
i guess it depends were your at. i had dsl for 5 years and have both now and like cable much better but as is aid having both if cable messes up i'll jsut flip to dsl