Comcast Drops Pivot

I got a letter in the mail a couple weeks ago that Comcast will be discontinuing the Pivot / Sprint Cell phone plan effective June 25, 2008.

I was a bit disappointed with this news as one of the reasons I signed up with the service was to bundle my cell phone service with my cable bill. One less bill was really appealing, but the main reason I signed up was the price was about $10 cheaper per month that what I was paying with Verizon.

Current Pivot customers have the choice to continue their service with Sprint for the same price or drop the service without incurring any early termination fees. As an extra incentive to stay with Sprint they are offering one month of free service if you do stay with them.

I did a little research on the current cost and features of plans in my area (New England) and decided to stick with Sprint. For the basic family plan that I am using Verizon appears to be about $10 more than Sprint. Cingular is the same price but does offer rollover minutes but friends that have the service in my area report spotty service. The free month helps and I am not in any rush to buy new cell phones after having my current phones for 6 months.

So overall I am not real happy with the switch but based on the issues I had with Pivot billing and my conversations with billing support I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Free McAfee Anti Virus

Many people may not be aware that if you you use Comcast for your Internet they give you McAfee Security Suite for free. Buying off the shelf will cost you $120. Buying Anti virus software every couple years can be pretty expensive and then you have to keep renewing in order to get the latest virus definitions. This is a pretty nice feature for Comcast to offer although it probably saves them money in the long run as I assume they get less calls from people whose Internet has stopped working because they got a virus.

Not sure exactly what the licensing rules are if you own multiple PCs but I was able to install the software on my desktop and laptop without an issue.

As far as how good McAfee is compared to other antivirus software I am not sure that there is a consensus. I did a quick google search for "best antivirus software" and came up with numerous best of lists. Most had Mcafee on their lists none at the top though, every list had their own idea of what was the best. From my personal experience I have also used Norton, which seemed to slow my PC down quite a bit. It also installed some software that I was never able to uninstall.

In the two years that I have been using McAfee I haven't had any problems. For the price it really can't be beat.

Comcast HDTV Service

I first signed up for Comcast's High Definition service back in 2002. I can remember my first few months with the new HD box the reception was really bad. The picture would get really pixelated or would just go black once in a while. This lasted for a few months until it slowly disappeared. I assumed they were just working out the kinks, that is the price you pay for being an early adopter. When the picture did come in and I had people over they were really blown away by the picture. This was back when not too many people had HD so it was still pretty new for most people. Back then I think I only had 3 or 4 channels. One of the channels would only broadcast scenes of flowers blowing in the breeze. Nice channel to show people what HD is all about but a pretty useless channel otherwise. I think they have done away with that channel or at least have some better programming now, it might have been the PBS channel.

Over the years Comcast has done a pretty good job of adding a few new channels a year. In my area (New England) there are 35 available HD channels. I currently get 30 based on the package I subscribe to. I think it is a pretty good deal based on what you pay. Comcast has raised the price of their HD package over the years but I think only by a few dollars. I think they are currently charging $8.99 for the service. These are the Channels available in my area:

• PBS
• CBS
• ABC
• NBC
• WMUR
• National Geographic
• Discovery Channel
• Fox
• MTV
• TBS
• HGTV
• TNT
• USA
• A & E
• WSBK
• HD Theater
• CNN
• Weatherscan
• Golf / Versus
• ESPN
• ESPN2
• NESN
• Comcast Sports Network New England
• NFLHD
• Food Network
• WLVI
• Sci Fi
• Animal Planet
• Cinemax
• HBO
• History Channel
• Starz
• Showtime
• INHD

Comcast also makes much of their High Definition content available OnDemand thus their claim they offer the most hours of HD programming. Note that they don't say the most channels just the most programming as they are including all of their On demand stuff. Direct TV appears to have the most channels at over 90 according to their website. Though most of the channels I wouldn't have much interest in anyway. The other option in my area is Verizon FIOS which appears to have around 25 HD channels. Overall I am pretty happy with the amount I pay for the programs I get from Comcast. As long as Comcast stays competitive price-wise and keeps adding new channels every year I don't see myself switching to Verizon or Satellite anytime soon.

TIVO on Mororola motorola dch3416

This weekend I had a friend over who also recently had Comcast TIVO installed. We were comparing our experiences, we have had similar experiences and basically came to the conclusion that the box is still pretty buggy but that is the price we pay for being early adopters.


Then he noticed my cable box and noted that it was different than his, he still has the old Motorola DCT6412. I had assumed everyone who was getting TIVO through Comcast was getting a new box but apparently this is not so. So I asked my wife about the install as I was at work when it was installed. My wife's reply was "Oh yeah, they tried to get it going on the old box but it wasn't working so they brought this one in". So it looks like if they can't get TIVO working on your existing box they just install it on the motorola dch3416. For those interested the motorola dch3416 looks like this

In my opinion it is a better looking box than the DCT6412. You can find the specs on the box here. I didn't really have time to compare all of the differences between the DCT6412 and the DCH3416 but one spec did stand out to me. The DCT6412 has a 120GB hard drive and the DCH3416 has a 160GB hard drive so at the very least I shoud have a bit more recording capacity. Intersted to see what model other TIVO users have been given

Comcast Personal Web Pages

I have have been using Comcast's Personal Web Page service for around 3 years now. Initially I used it for hosting some personal family albums and other hobby websites. When I first started using PWP Comcast gave you 25 megabyres of space per accound and since Comcast allows you to have 5 accounts that is over 100 megabytes of space which was plenty for what I was using it for. They also offered some really basic web page builder tools and ftp tools. The tools weren't really that great but I wasn't really bothered by that as I have my own HTML editor and FTP tool.

In the summer of 2007 Comcast announced that they were upgrading their Personal Web Page service and giving users a gigabyte of space and some additional features like blogging. At the time I was considering turning one of my webpages into a blog so I held off and waited until the upgrade happened.

Before the upgrade happened Comcast sent me an email informing me that my webpage would be inaccessable between 12am and 7am. Unfortunately after the upgrade access to my webpages were intermittenet at best for weeks. For a few days I also could not use my 3rd party FTP tools to upload any files to my account. They also changed the shortcut you were able to use to access webpages. You used to be able to access a webpage bu using the url :

home.comcast.net/~username
or
username.home.comcast.net

After the upgrade typing in the url username.home.comcast.net would redirect to username.home.comcast.net/~username on most browsers but I was told by some people that used aol that they were no longer able to access my webpage, I assume because AOL was preventing a redirect.

I also looked briefly at the new blogging software they provided and it was extremely basic. Not even a tenth of the features that free blogs like blogspot provide. Another issue I has was all of the entries in my guestbook disspapeared. Luckily I somehow found a way to aceess them and was able to save them but haven't been able to get back into them since.

Calling Comcast support didn't seem to help as most of the techs aren't familiar with PWP and are only able to tell you if they are up or down. The only area that I was able to find any information was in the comcast help forums. There were may people there posting with problem some much worse than the problems I was having. But at least it was a place to go to see that I wasn't the only one having issues. Seems like Comcast may have contracted the upgrade out and is was messed up royally. There are still to this day people posting messages in the forum that have been having issues since the upgrade. Some pretty unhappy people in there.

I ended up moving some of my webpages off comcast PWP and onto blogspot and hadn't looked back at the features until recently when I noticed that the new features like blogging were no longer available and the feature set had rolled back to the way it was before the upgrade. I am not sure if this is something affecting just my account or if it was everyone. I also noticed recently that the urls for accessing pages is intermittently changing. Sometimes username.home.comcast.net works, sometimes it doesn't. The new result of this is the pictuures that I have hosted on comcast are sometimes unavailable.

In summary I think Comcast PWP are good for basic web pages that only a few people will be accessing. If you are concerened about downtime don't use them. There are plenty of free blogs or cheap webhosting products that you can get if you are hosting professional websites that you plan to make money off or run a business from. Interested in hearing what others experiences have been with Comcast PWP.

The Slowskys

Usually when companies go overboard with their advertising campaigns it drives me a crazy. But I find the Comcast commercials featuring the Slowskys really funny. If you haven't seen the commercials they feature two turtles who of course like everything slow so they have DSL rather than Comcast High Speed Internet. Not sure why I find them so funny but it probably has to do with the sarcasm.

I did a quick google search on the Slowskys and found that Comcast has a website for the SLowskys. Seems like they have a bit of a cult following, On the website you can watch a couple of their commercials and there is a store where you can but t-shirts and mugs with the catch phrases from their commercials. Gotta get me a "You Push It" T-Shirt. There is also some odd random widgets on there to keep you busy on the website for hours. Someone definitely took some time putting the website together. Their advertising budget has to be huge.

Oddly you can't view all of their commercials from the website but a simple Youtube search on the Slowskys and they are all there. Looking forward to seeing if they have a new commercial for the Superbowl this weekend.

More on Comcast's new Tivo box

So now that I have had a little more time to use my Comcast TIVO box I figured I would post some more observations. I am still pretty happy with the box but it seems it isn't without its problems.

Last week we noticed that we couldn't get into any of our OnDemand content. At first we thought it may just be temporarily down as this happens sometimes, but when we couldn't get into OnDemand for a few days I decided to call Comcast. I have had some pretty good experiences with Comcast Support so I don't usually hesitate to call. Interestingly I was transferred to their TIVO support line so I thought maybe I would get some insider info. First off the woman I spoke with sounded more like a phone sex operator than the normal support geek so we were stating out on the right foot. She wanted to know what I thought of the box and I explained some of the issues we have been having, unfortunately she didn't have any solutions. Eventually she got around to having me unplug my box to solve the OnDemand issue. The good news is it solved the issue. This seems to be the cable version of rebooting a computer which solves 99% of all problems. I will warn you though, if you plan on unplugging your box give yourself at least 10 minutes for it to start back up. The start up process has some type of a diagnostic process that takes forever to get through. But it did seem to solve the issue.

We did have another problem with the box today. While watching programs on any channel I was getting intermittent cutouts of the video and audio every minute or so. After a about 30 minutes of this the box locked up and then rebooted itself. When it came back up everything was fine. But all I was thinking was I hoe this doesn't happen next weekend during the Superbowl. Pretty cool that the box realized that it was having an issue and rebooted itself but unfortunately I had to wait through the 10 minute diagnostic process again.

My wife is a little frustrated with the quirks on the new Tivo box and wants the old Comcast DVR back. I think we are going to stick with it though and see if they can get the bugs worked out.