Beyond the basics, Comcast supplies an impressive bundle of free software, including McAfee's VirusScan and Personal Firewall Plus and Simple Star's PhotoShow Deluxe photo editing and sharing software. Comcast provides free access to its PhotoCenter (Snapfish) with free storage and 12-cent prints. You also get a Comcast-specific version of Rhapsody Radio Plus Internet radio, with 25 free on-demand of song plays a month. Comcast's Games Channel, with a ton of free Web-based games, is another bonus.
Although faster services are becoming available (companies are rolling out 15Mbps over fiber-optic lines in select markets), Comcast's speed is good in our area of San Francisco. For our tests, we used the 6Mbps download/384Kbps upload, $42.94-a-month service, but you can also choose a $52.95 8Mbps/768Kbps option.
The classic gripe with cable broadband is that, unlike DSL, multiple customers share the same bandwidth, so your connection slows down when more users are online. When we tested our connection's speed with the CNET BandwidthMeter, Comcast's High-Speed Internet service clocked in at just under 3Mbps; faster than many DSL services but less than half the speed advertised. We also suffered two outages in the past year.
Comcast's service requires no contract, and you may quit it at any time. The company provides 24/7 telephone support, online chat with a technical agent, and e-mail support for less pressing problems. All the representatives we talked to via phone and chat seemed knowledgeable, and the scripts that some of them followed were thorough and well thought out. The documentation you'll find on the Web site is helpful if you can find your problem, which we were not always able to do. The answers are there, but the site could organize and present them a little bit better. We had only one complaint: the lack of support for compatibility issues with third-party applications--even prominent ones such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver.
As far as hardware support goes, if you rent your cable modem or a router, you simply have to return it and pick up a new one should it fail. The same goes for the $5-a-month router, unless you purchase it from Comcast ($179), in which case you're covered only for the one year of the warranty.
