Useful info about Comcast:

Most of their tech support is outsourced. Most of the first-line call centers are in the US, and are OK. The second-tier call center is in Canada (also outsourced) but the people there are exceptionally well trained and can diagnose a lot of things the first tier people can't. You can ask to be transferred to tier 2 support; some reps will do it and some won't, some even claim that it doesn't exist. But it definitely does.

There's also a local "escalations" office for each market area that the call centers will *swear* doesn't exist, but when you've had a problem that the regular people can't solve (such as months of crappy service), locating the local escalations office will nearly instantly solve your problems. In my case, when I've called them, usually a tech is dispatched within an hour or two, and usually the tech that shows up is a more experienced one than who shows up when the call is placed through regular channels. They (escalations) are also very fair about giving credit (sometimes substantial credit) if you've been getting crappy service. I don't abuse the escalations number and only call it when all else has failed... but it definitely works. If you absolutely can't find the one for your area, I can call mine and see if they have numbers for the other ones.

On cable vs DSL: YOu can go to dslreports.com and enter your address and phone # (landline at that address) and it will tell you the exact distance in feet from the wire center that handles your neighborhood. That will give you an idea how good the DSL service will likely be in your area. If you know how to read it, it will also tell you what hardware/software that wire center has and what services it's capable of offering (as in ADSL, T1, SDSL, etc) Here in SBC land, you can actuallly get really fast DSL (6+Mbit/sec down, 512K up) but it's pricey ($70/month or so) and you have to be within about 6-7000 feet from your wire center to be able to get it. Regular DSL (1.5Mbps) can go out to about 12000 feet, but generally, the speed gets pretty crappy after about 10,000 feet.

In our area, Comcast is offering I think about 4Mbps down and 300 up for $29-50/month, depending on how much you bitch about the price. You can get higher speeds from Comcast, but it's a lot more expensive and they don't discount as much.