I’m stuck on dial-up for a few more days. My notebook has a 56K modem, but my desktop machine has a rusty old 28.8K Supra external faxmodem, which I keep around because it supports distinctive ring, and how often do I need to do dial-up, anyway?
A quick rant about Comcast. I placed an order for service two weeks ago. We agreed on an appointment window between 8 am and 12 noon yesterday. The guy showed up at 11:59 (of course) and told me, apologetically, that he couldn’t do a thing because their underground folks need to come out and run a wire from the cable tap across the street to my new house. That will take 7 to 10 days, he said. The surly service guy I talked to an hour later (to see if that could be expedited in any way), said it could be up to 15 days.
Excuse me? Could no one have foreseen this two weeks ago? Comcast is living up to its reputation for terrible customer service.
Meanwhile, Qwest says they can have 7Mbps DSL installed on Friday, and they’ll match Comcast’s price. It’s a deal! I’ve had Qwest DSL before, and it worked just fine. If they can deliver the speeds they promise, I’ll take it. I should have a week or two to evaluate it before Comcast shows up.
And if Comcast doesn’t have an HD-DVR here by the end of the month, DirecTV might get a call.
For the next two days, though, I get to experience the 2005 Web at 1995 speeds.
Ed Bott 
For television, what’s the advantage of Comcast over DirecTV? Isn’t the fact that DirecTV’s channels are ALL digital, while only Comcast’s premium channels are, justification enough to drop Comcast?
Or do you pick cable over satellite simply so Windows MCE can tune the channels? Do we need a DirecTV receiver that can interface with MCE?
Cost is the big item in Comcast’s favor:
Their HD-DVR is (essentially) free. DirectTiVo boxes, even at their most discounted, cost $600-700 (list $999). That’s a big up-front investment.
The programming package from DirecTV vs Comcast is about $25 a month more. Or was last time I checked. I’ll have to recheck. But there’s another $300 a year that I would rather not pay if I don’t have to.
I think I could connect a regular DirecTV digital converter (or two) to an MCE box, so that’s a nonissue. But DirecTV wants to charge extra for each converter, whereas Comcast will give me the extra converters for nothing. Again, there’s that cost issue.
DirecTV + MCE isn’t terribly fun I will admit. However the DTV HD Tivo vs any current cable DVR is not even a competition. Yes the cost is high and yes it will be useless in a year when DTV goes to MPEG-4, but it is a great device. You can get it for $699 and tell DTV to woo you from Comcast and they can throw in as much as $250 in free programming.