I can’t believe I’m going to patronize Comcast again :(

After being with AT&T for about 3 years, I find that their U-verse rollout is conflicting with my DSL connectivity. According to a guy I know at AT&T I’m far enough away from the nearest Central Office that they have a special profile for me (anybody my distance from the CO). I’m about 18,000 feet away and that’s apparently a pretty big deal.

As I understand it, this particular profile can cause interference with U-verse transmissions and so I’m being scaled back to some other profile. The long and short of it is that my AT&T DSL keeps dropping which I noted as a problem in my blog a couple of months ago. After verifying that all wires were properly attached to things they needed to be attached to, the tech changed my profile and made a few other soft adjustments and everything settled down and worked perfectly. However, he warned me that this could change at any time. It’s just that he knew that nobody was using U-Verse on my … what do you call it .. trunk? Node? Who knows?  So this wouldn’t adversely affect anybody.

This worked great for about a month but, as of yesterday, it seems that the profile has been reset again. This happened once before but then switched back on its own. My little DSL light (on my modem) has been flashing red fairly regularly whenever I want to surf the web.  I’m told my best option would be to downgrade my service to a 3 Mbps or possibly some kind of 1 Mbps connection in order to guarantee stability.

So, I checked out Satellite (why does Hughes NOT give you ANY technical details on their site?), Wi-Max (not in my area yet) and looked into various local providers but it appears that I really can only choose between my two duopoly-mates AT&T or Comcast.

Looking on Comcast’s site I saw a plan (“Performance” 15 Mbps down / 3 Mpbs up ) that would be $19.99 / month for the first 6 months and then $42.99 thereafter. Then I found that that deal only applied if you got cable too. So the price otherwise will be a straight $59.99 / month.

I found a deal that offered the same $19.99 *plus* a $125 Amazon gift card but then found that was only for 6 Mbps / maybe 1 Mbps.  To get to the “Performance” plan performance I’d end up paying $69.99 / month.  Man! Comcast definitely makes sure you will pay every last cent to them even if they offer you a deal, it seems you will repay the offer in spades.

So, I reluctantly went back to the original Comcast site and filled everything in again (I canceled the original order when I found out that the small print prevented me from getting any kind of deal) and found that this time it let me right through. So, for Internet service ONLY I now seem to qualify for $19.99 per month and $42.99 after 6 months.  I went so far as to confirm this with the Comcast rep that comes up in chat mode when you submit your order and all seems copacetic.

I get the new service installed on Tuesday (maybe) so we’ll see…