Well…..first off….kudos to Verizon for now seemlessly offering ‘dry loop DSL’ (ie, where you can get DSL without landline service). But with that was also a pretty big price increase – from the $29.95 per month I was paying, to $41.95 per month. I decided to ask around, including the great folks who frequent the PANMA listserv, in regards to their experiences with Comcast broadband and whether the speeds they advertise are really truthful. After getting virtually all positive responses, I went for it and picked up a cable modem from my local Comcast office.

Before I get to the results I want to mention some history between myself and Comcast. About 8 years ago, when I first moved into my current home, I signed up for the @home broadband service (not to be confused with the new TMobile@Home….the ‘@home’ broadband I’m referring to was basically the first broadband available in my area…they turned out to be one of those dotcom busts even with the huge infusion of cash via an IPO). I had that service for about 18 months. Back then, I played lots of online multiplayer games, particularly MOHAA (the first one!). So lag and constant speed was important. The @home service was TERRIBLE. It was really laggy, and worse, it would drop for hours at a time. No internet. Or sometimes it would just be no email for 5 minutes here, 3 hours there, etc. Really annoying.

Then, Comcast bought them. The service did get better. Much better. But it was still real unreliable. Then, Verizon offered DSL for much cheaper, so I jumped ship. I’ve had DSL since then and can’t remember a single outage other than one time when it went down for a day (and IIRC, it was just email that went down). Verizon credited us proactively.

So I was leery about going to Comcast broadband again. But it’s supposedly reliable now, and after having it a few days (for what that’s worth…not much) it’s been solid. For just a couple of dollars more than the cost of keeping the DSL service from Verizon, I’m getting a HUGE bandwidth increase, and quite frankly I’m regretting I didn’t make the switch a couple of years sooner.

What is the speed difference? Well, the Verizon DSL was rated at, I believe, 768kbps. To their credit, I consistently got 2.8mbps down, and 350kbps up. The Comcast service is rated at 6mbps down. The speed tests vary with the Comcast service, but I’ve not seen it go below 7mbps yet. In fact, amazingly, it usually is in the 25mbps range!

As you can see from the screenshots above, there is no contest. The Comcast broadband test was done while my wife was upstairs surfing wirelessly or else I would have expected it to be in the mid-20mb range. It’s that much of a difference in speed between it and the DSL. Also, I’m not sure if I have the ‘Comcast Speedboost’ upgrade or not.

So…my point? DSL is a bad value now. Unfortunately FIOS is not available in my area, but unless it can guarantee me a steady bandwidth of greater than 20mbps down, and the cost is equivalent to the Comcast service, then I’ll be sticking with this for a while.

I can’t believe I’m a Comcast fanboy all of sudden.