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Comment by drewr | Hacker News Reader

I use them at work and home (no choice). From a technical perspective, Comcast is usually rock-solid for me. Sure it's expensive, and an absolute joke that I have to call every year to keep the discounts and a TV plan that I don't use, but I'll give credit where they have actually done a good job. I'd much rather a stable service that's a bit of a pain on the billing side than a terrible service that has a nice website.

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I also use Comcast at home & work. In my experience, my home service has been more reliable than work. My office is in the northern Chicago Suburbs, my home is in the western Chicago Suburbs. I've literally had days when I've had to leave the office to work from home, because, at least from home, I could still VPN into our data centers in NY/NJ from home, but no access from our office.

Yes, everyone loves to complain about the cable company but in my experience Comcast's network, technicians, and support people are the best in the business. You could not pay me to use CenturyLink, for instance.

> in my experience Comcast's network, technicians, and support people are the best in the business.

in the context of US based ISP 'businesses', that's like saying 'the smartest kid on the short bus'

CenturyLink seems to have far fewer phone outages nowadays than they did e.g. three years ago. One time by some miracle I got someone on the phone who wasn't a "basic" CSR. He admitted that they knew why their outages lasted for hours. Whenever they had a fault that required a system-wide restart (!), they just rebooted everything at once. So there were millions of modems trying to talk to the RADIUS/DNS/etc. servers all at the same time. Which didn't work at all. I asked if anyone had considered a rolling reboot. "Yeah, that's what we've been telling them..."

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