Sorry to post this here, but since Comcast literally does not provide an email contact for customers, this has to be out here in the public.
A friend recently asked my about my experience with Comcast Internet (xFinity). Here’s my reply:
Ugh. It’s kind of love / hate. They make you feel like an abuse victim. I upgraded to “gig speed” and sometimes actually get 800mbps depending on a zillion factors. But also, often it’s just weird, bad latency, and in practical terms doesn’t feel any faster for real world activities. I have to build up emotional strength to just call them or chat. You know it’s never going to go well and everything is your fault. And they will try to get you to rebuild your network from the ground up every time. They seem to block ports (even outgoing) and sites at the network level which can make diagnosing problems a challenge and a time sink. We don’t have a lot of choice here so that’s probably also part of why I feel abused. The occasional big download is quick, again, depending on many factors, but often I never really see the so called gig speed. And I currently have their “gateway” which is a pain, but switching away to “bring your own hardware” has its own issues where they basically won’t help when it doesn’t work. If you do go with them, I’d probably bite the bullet and purchase your own “supported hardware” modem and router from the outset because now that I have their gateway I have to go through it all again to switch to my own hardware.
Additional notes:
Their “gateway” is garbage. It loses devices all the time and devices on the same Wi-Fi can’t find each other. I spend so much time resetting and retrying and all kinds of nonsense because of it. I’d get more done with 10MB that worked reliably than the stupid 1000Mb that is constantly flakey.
I have to do so many work arounds. It’s just infuriating.
And weird things like phone apps crashing because they can’t access their AWS S3 buckets because Comcast does blocking deep in the network for outgoing connections.
