AT&T FastAccess DSL vs. Comcast High-Speed Internet
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 1:38AM If you want high-speed Internet for your home or business in the Atlanta area, there are basically two major players--AT&T and Comcast. Sure, if you're lucky enough to live in the right area, you might get by with and 4G cellular connection or even 3G alone, but those options are best for lite or individual users.
So what are the pros and cons of each service? AT&T's entry level services start pretty cheap at about $20. Even at the high-end the service is still less than $50. And my experience has been that FastAccess DSL is both consistent and reliable. The reliability means that you'll have nearly 100% uptime and that your Internet access won't be affected by storms and the like. If your POTS phone is operative, your DSL likely will be too. And the consistency means that you can expect to get roughly the same speeds from your service around the clock regardless of what your neighbors are doing online at the time.
On the other hand, Comcast High-Speed Internet is wicked fast. It may be the fastest Internet service that I've ever personally used, commercial or residential. By eliminating several analog television channels (which has it's own drawbacks) Comcast has been able to free up bandwidth for more digital and high-definition channels. They've also been able to increase their top tier speeds to an advertised 50 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps upstream using DOCSIS 3.0. They have branded this service xfinity.
Using speedtest.net, I was able to clock xfinity downloads at over 61 Mbps down, although I only got about 4.6 Mbps up. Of course this is still an order of magnitude faster than the same test on FastAccess DSL which got 5.74 down and 0.43 up. Interestingly, the two services were far more even on pingtest.net, with both having ping times of around 25 ms and jitter in the 10 ms range. Again, the DSL scores showed far less variance than the cable scores.
So what's the downside of xfinity? Well, for starters it's expensive. Outside of the introductory rate, the top tier service will cost you $90-$100 per month. And with 100 Mbps downstream in the works, that top tier will only get more expensive (though I suspect very few people will need it). Also, the cable Internet service was not quite as reliable as the DSL connection. Not only do the speeds vary a lot above and below what's advertised, but the connection drops during the day for a few minutes at a time. It's a minor nuisance depending on what you're doing at the time, but it seems that it is a common occurrence among cable modem users.
Finally, Comcast has a fixed bandwidth cap of 250 MB per month regardless of which plan you use. That may be fine when you're surfing along the Internet at 8 Mbps, but at 60+ Mbps it's possible to eat up 250 GB in about a week of consistent use. Telling people that their limits don't increase with their speeds is like telling a 16-year-old that you're upgrading him from a bicycle to a car but that he can still only ride around the neighborhood. In contrast, AT&T has no monthly limit that I've seen. I suspect that AT&T's infrastructure is less prone to one heavy user consuming all the bandwidth.
Comcast gave me a call and warned me that my use was excessive this past month and that another infraction could get my service terminated. Now I'll have to decide whether to upgrade to a more expensive business class service which has no caps but includes a number of extras that I'm not interested in or to just downgrade to a slower speed or DSL. Admittedly, I think it would be hard to leave sustained speeds that are 10x what I've been accustomed to, but unless Comcast realizes that 250 GB was an adequate cap back in 2007 but now needs updating, I may have little choice but to go back to DOCSIS 2 or DSL.
