Researchers should know that the following information was rejected:
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I can't tell you the average downtime for all broadband services.
I can tell you I have Cox and can tell you that the downtime is
minimal - less than 3 hours a year, especially once I figured out
that my cable modem was outdated and put in a new Linksys. That
about doubled my speed, and eliminated any outages I'd had.
However, DSLreports amasses data from its members all over the
country, and provides excellent assessments of the various ISPs
based on users' ratings and experiences.
Here's a page which ranks the major companies according to the
user reports, and calls it the Good, Bad and Ugly report. Comcast
is in the yellow (caution) area, with a C rating in reliability:
http://www.dslreports.com/gbu
You can easily use this page for selecting an ISP. Just look for
the highest-ranked provider in the green area at the top that
lists service in your state.
You can also pop your zipcode into the box on this page, and pull
up user reviews and ratings for the services in your exact zipcode
or in the surrounding area:
http://www.dslreports.com/allreviews
And here's a page on which Comcast alone has been rated by 2723
users, with statistics for the last 6 months, which indicate a
connection reliability of 74%, and a Bronze Award overall (being
the lowest of Gold, Silver, and Bronze):
http://www.dslreports.com/reviews/1579
If you read through the latest user reviews, you'll find that they
reflect a mixed experience, from aces all around to much worse.
You can contrast that with Cox, which has a connection reliability
of 78%, with a Silver Award overall for better customer service and
the like:
http://www.dslreports.com/reviews/1911
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Research showed that Comcast was rated 74% in connection reliability,
vs Cox at 78%. Since that 78% for Cox translates into less than
3 hours per year, for me, Comcast would be down about 3.5 hours
per year, on average.
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I should probably add that, since most cable outages are due
to lightning strikes, much moreso than the infrastructure of
the cable networks, the number of outages you experience will
have more to do with the weather where you live than anything
else. Cable companies are relatively equal in their responses
to outages of this type, and with multiple reports from the
customers in one area, they can typically repair these problems
in 1-2 hours.
Additional information may be found from an exploration of
the links resulting from the Google searches outlined below.
Searches done on DSLreports.com:
comcast downtime
http://www.dslreports.com/nsearch?cat=review&old=1&q=comcast%20downtime |
