The Karl-ification of My Home Office Broadband
The great thing about the weekly VUC calls is that there’s just so much to learn from the various participants. I sometimes struggle to know if I prefer when we have formal guests vs those weeks when we just ramble aimlessly through the seemingly endless universe of VoIP geek minutia.
Here’s a case in point, some weeks ago VUC regular Karl Fife indicated that he had Comcast Business Class internet service…to his home. This got me thinking. When we added the cable modem about a year and half ago we just ordered it through Comcast’s normal consumer channel. That seemed simple enough. It’s how we had the similar service from Time-Warner Cable long, long ago. I simply never occurred to me that we could go through the business services office.
Well, the consumer services people treat you like an just any other idiot. They offer only two services; 1.5M/384k or 3M/768k. Since I needed the faster upstream bandwidth I was forced into the faster service at $64.95/mo, and even that was just barely enough to get by. Further, consumer service has no option for static IP or additional IPs.
Just today I signed up for Comcast Business Class Internet Service. It’s 16M/2M and costs only $99/mo with one static IP. I can add IPs as necessary later on. That’s same price that I pay for Covad TeleSOHO DSL which is only 3M/768k. Comcast wants a minimum 12 month commitment which is no problem at all.
Our new Comcast rep Edgar also tells me that 50M/10M service is due to be available in Houston by Q3.Perhaps Comcast will become my primary IP provider over time. Or not. In any case my wife will find that the TivoHD downloads Amazon movies a lot faster!
Yes, then there’s Edgar. Perhaps the best part is that we now have a local account representative that we can contact when there are issues. That alone is worth the price of entry. A real, live human on this side of the planet, familiar with both company policy and US laws. He’s located close enough that I can got get-all-up-in-his-face if there are major troubles. Wow!
We’re hoping that the installation, simple thought it might be, can be done Friday…my one day at home in the coming two weeks. They want to give me a router as part of the service. I told Edgar I’ll just put it on the shelf, but it’s what they do. I expect that I’ll be building up pfsense on my last remaining HP T5700, possibly with the Freeswitch module so that I can do some experimentation.
I guess you can say that my Comcast service has had the benefit of the complete Karl experience, for which I am grateful. Curious about your own Karl-ification. Try one of the following:
sip:karlonhold <at> sip.kfife.com
(360) 519-5689
Comments are closed.
I have COX Business Internet here in Omaha (residential address), essentially same features and price as you quoted.
On the rare occasion there is a problem, you can talk to a person that knows the difference between a MAC and IP address.
Highly recommended.
Thanks for the article, and let us know how it goes. Our household is looking at Comcast business as well, although not necessarily because we need better service/support or a static IP (although that would be nice). To start, we like ComcastHSI a lot and find it’s a great value. And we recently benefited from the DOCSIS 3.0 rollout in our area and had our service bumped from 16/2 to the new 22/5 tier. But we’re looking to Comcast Business simply to get out from under the 250GB cap.
While the (para)phrase “250GB ought to be enough for anybody” does come to mind, we’re getting uncomfortably close. With four children (three are teens) in the house, and more than half (and growing) of our screen time coming from online sources (Netflix via Xbox, HD movies & Hulu via AppleTV, etc), going over 250GB is an inevitability. And this isn’t mentioning our daily VPN to work, Slingbox, VoIP setup, and no, we don’t bittorrent. Getting cut off would be disastrous. With no alternative available, DSL or otherwise, it’s a risk we don’t want to take. And at $99, we’d still find it a great value.