Hacker News Reader

Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

I don't like Comcast, but at least in my experience, others I know and companies worked at, it's been surprisingly reliable. Used them at multiple locations over the past 15+ years and could count the number of outages or other issues on one hand. Is that unusual?

Do we know what the data says about it? Statistics on uptime, ping, speed, customer response turnaround...

View on HN

This is just anecdote:I have two houses with Comcast: one in Palo Alto and one in the sierras. The one in the sierras is pretty fast though had lots of multi-hour outages that stopped a couple of years ago.

The one in Palo Alto goes out a couple of times a week and is quite slow.

Luckily they haven't implemented the mooted usage caps: last year I was traveling for a few months but somehow managed to transfer tens of GB over the network in the sierras, according to Comcast's site.

They have a lot of good network engineers but the work at the edge is inferior.

There’s a certain irony that you ask for data instead of anecdotes to chastise /u/blackearl’s claim, then provide a personal anecdote to support your claim.

This seems like a reasonable start to build a case against Comcast:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Comcast

Just questioning, not chastising. Nor making a claim based on anecdata. I thought that would be obvious by asking for actual data.

I included my anecdote simply to question the narrative.

What I'm looking for is proof.

When I used comcast (which was several years ago) the actual service was fine - it was the terrible customer relations that really got my goat, and it's harder to quantify customer satisfaction but the fact they aren't the absolute worst company isn't a mark of honor, showing up on customer surveys as one of the worst companies is enough of a black mark - the ranking is less important than being on the top ten at all.

I used them in college in Chicago ~ 4 years ago and we have 12+ outages in a single year, several of which took multiple days to resolve, and we never got close to the speed we were paying for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com