July 24, 2007
Have you been Comcasted yet?

The switch is going on, and they say it's going smoothly. Which I suppose they would, but that doesn't mean they're wrong.


About 75 percent of Comcast's Internet and e-mail customers in the Houston area have been switched from the Time Warner Road Runner system to Comcast, and remaining customers will be there by Friday, the cable company said Monday.

[...]

Some customers may have noticed temporary outages during the transition in recent weeks, but spokesman Ray Purser said the problems have been minimal.

"It's all gone very smoothly," Purser said. "I think it's been a lot easier than people thought it was going to be."


I think we got switched last night. I know I had to reboot our cable modem this morning, and I did get a call from Comcast yesterday saying we were about to be switched. That call also told me to look for an email with more information, which I have not gotten, so I'm just guessing. I also got a second call from Comcast yesterday, but my cellphone battery died right after I picked it up, so who knows what that was about.

Customers get the faster Web-surfing speeds without having to do anything, but those who used Road Runner e-mail -- houston.rr.com -- need to register comcast.net addresses.

Comcast is sending e-mail users a message telling them they will need to change their addresses and providing a link to do so.

[...]

Comcast has been sending customers an e-mail giving them 60 days to pick a new e-mail address.


That email I haven't gotten, though perhaps I'm assuming incorrectly that it will go to the email address associated with my billing account, and not to the actual houston.rr.com address we have; that address belongs to Tiffany, so maybe it's been sent and I just don't know it. She hated the rr.com webmail interface, and switched to gmail pretty quickly, so there won't be too much hassle with that. We do have an old rr.com web page, though. I've downloaded everything from it, and may or may not resurrect it as a Comcast page. I may host it on this site instead, we'll have to see.

How has your Comcast switch experience gone?

Posted by Charles Kuffner on July 24, 2007 to Technology, science, and math
Comments

How are your speeds?

This site is one that a lot of people use (because it's easy to share your results): speedtest.net

Technically, I'm now on a Comcast IP address, but I haven't been "switched" as the official email goes.

Right now, my download speed is one-third to one-half what it was under Time Warner, but upload speed runs double to triple. All ping times are much worse now.

I ditched the video portion of the service for Dish Network after significant downtime and snowy signal after the switch. It looks like the internet service may be getting dropped soon as well.

Posted by: Kevin Whited on July 24, 2007 10:36 PM

It appears to be about as fast as before. Thanks to our PC crashing last week, I didn't do a baseline pre-Comcast speed check, so I can't give you a real comparison. But my eyeball test says it's about the same - certainly not any worse.

Posted by: Charles Kuffner on July 26, 2007 7:46 AM