My Comcast bill has gone up again and I am getting irritated.

I have not had a lot of problems with the service but the constant price increases are out of line. Does Verizon do any better? Do they offer similar programming for a lower rate? Do they offer decent service ... I have had a couple negative reports about that part.

Are there other providers in Philadelphia that are more reasonably priced with decent service?

At the moment, no. Both Verizon and Comcast are happy with the Status Quo. But the future does look bright.

Verizon FiOs: It will come to Philadelphia one day, and when it does, it should open up to smaller "me too" companies that will have DSL speeds on these wires....

EarthLink Wi-Fi(Philly Wi-Fi): Yeah, it not doing so well, but it is an alternative that would of made the internet as available as water is.


Sprint's XOHM WiMax: WiMax is what Wi-Fi is now, but x100 faster and can go farther. It is coming to Chicago, Baltimore and DC is the second quarter of 2008. So it shouldn't be too long to see it here in Philly.

http://www.xohm.com/

700mhz spectrum(The Google Factor): This one is the intresting one:


So yeah, by 2009, we should have alot more options besides Comcast and Verizon.

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"And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they're going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and Election Day."--Rev. Arnold Conrad

I just switched to Verizon from Comcast after getting sick and tired of the rates going up and up. They are currently offering their 3mbps DSL for $27.99 for life. It is a 2yr commitment. Regular price is $29.99 fist yr $39.99 after that. I went to DirectTV as well and they offer $10/mo credit if you sign up through them. I still need to call VZN and see if they will give me the 2yr lifetime rate.

In terms of speed, if you are a typical home user you won't see a difference between Comcast and VZN. My Comcast connection usually gave me speeds around 5500kbps and my speedtests over the last few days have been about 2800kbps through VZN.

I'll take $29.99 or $27.99 instead of $42.95 any day!

I have no hope that we will see Fios in town any time soon....and least of all as a TV choice.

I thought that Fisos was available already?

Unfortunately, I can't get any type of satelite at my apartment. Then again those bad kids might start messing with it anyway.

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I am very disappointed in you.
-Mayor Michael "Nut" Nutter.

Fios is available in some suburbs and in parts of S Jersey. Their TV service isn't available everywhere that their internet is either. They are a LONG way from covering Philly.....what with the infrastructure costs AND dealing with a corrupt city that is in bed with Comcast??? No way. Not holding my breath.

The Verizon DSL doesn't require a dish, it is 3 MBPS over the phone lines. I just ordered it throuh DTV for the extra discount and to dump Comcast for good!

There is a big myth out there that Cable internet is always faster.

It's a big lie. You are sharing your bandwidth with at least 4 other nearby sites which are colluded on the same switch as you. Some modems don't even mask the other traffic and if you use a sniffer tool such as WireShark, you can actually see the IP packets going back and forth between other cable subscribers near you.

So if everybody is doing BitTorrent and downloading porn, your speeds may drop some until they shut off their downloads and go to bed... then all of a sudden your speeds go back to the rate you thought you were getting when you signed up.

Basically, that means Cable internet is the usually the same performance as DSL, where DSL subscribers packets are not locally colluded. You generally do get better cable speeds if you live somewhere that your neighbors don't make heavy use of their internet.

If your closest neighbor is a senior center, for instance... out in a rural ex-urb... you'll usually get excellent speeds from Comcast provided the signal between you and the signal repeater is good and the voltage is correct.

But you will probably lose it the moment an apartment complex is constructed next to your house or the senior center turns into condos for horny singles.

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WHYY pays their CEO $750,000 a year. So WHYY should I renew my membership? Seems they have no problems finding money and spending it unwisely.


And this is why you should donate to PACCA, not PETA:

In September, PETA made headlines in Vermont and across the nation for asking Ben & Jerry's ice cream to use human breast milk in their ice cream, instead of cow milk

We started out with Comcast and loved it because it was 100 percent reliable, but we also got fed up with the ever-increasing rates, so we were easily lured to switch to Verizon.

Verizon's service, on the other hand, while very reasonable, was frequently on the fritz -- especially when it rained -- and getting the service resurrected was always a major hassle. We just got sick of dealing with Verizon giving us the runaround on the all-too-frequent occasions when we needed to have the repair technician come out. So we finally decided we just had to suck it up and just pay greedy Comcast's exorbitant rates if we wanted to have consistently reliable service.

i'm pretty happy with direct tv plus verizon dsl. the dsl is quite relialbe and reasonably fast - usually 500kb or so on the mcafee internet speedometer.

BUT - would love to have the choice of fios. still not here!!! (bella vista)