Comcast PowerBoost is useless. They ramble on about how Comcast Internet is so much faster than DSL, with PowerBoost giving you speeds up to 12mbit. Read the fine print, you’ll notice that PowerBoost only works for the first 10MB of a file (attached), and even that isn’t guaranteed. To put this into perspective, if I downloaded a 10MB file on my 7mbit DSL, and did the same on Comcast Internet with PowerBoost, Comcast would be a whopping 5 seconds faster, assuming both services work as advertised. Now if I were to download a 700MB iso with my 7mbit DSL, that would take ~14 minutes. If I did the same with 6mbit Comcast, compensating for PowerBoost, it would take ~16 minutes, DSL being about 2 minutes faster. Even if you had 8mbit Comcast Internet, the speed difference with DSL would still only be about 2 minutes.

Comcast relies on trickery to try and win over customers, by saying their internet service is way faster than DSL. In reality, PowerBoost does nothing to make downloads faster, there’s almost no difference between DSL and Cable download speeds (assuming that both services deliver exactly what they advertise), and Comcast’s methods of advertising are shady, to say the least.

I’ve setup some pages for Comcast HD stuff. They are works in progress, since channel lineup and picture quality has been changing fairly frequently.

• Comcast HD Quality In Tacoma/Seattle (By Channel)
  
• List Of Available HD Channels For Comcast (Tacoma/Seattle)

Comcast silently rolled out three new HD channels in the Seattle/Tacoma area last night. The new channels are:

• Disney HD
• ABC Family HD
• Science Channel HD

Unfortunately, Comcast has started re-encoding HD channels to squeeze three channels to a single QAM, and picture quality is very noticeably degraded on several channels, as I’ve reported before. Channels with poor picture/sound include:

• Discovery Channel HD
• USA HD
• SciFi HD
• Universal HD (only for certain content)
• MHD (only for certain content)

I’m not sure exactly what is causing this, but the picture on USA HD absolutely sucks. Even with shows like Monk or House, with little to no action sequences, there’s severe macro-blocking, artifacts, video/audio corruption, audio cutouts, and frame-dropping. This really seems like crappy/overloaded hardware to me (or possibly a bandwidth issue), rather than a re-compression problem. Normally if there’s a re-compression/compression issue, you will notice macro blocking, but not audio/video cutouts or corruption.

Here’s some examples from the movie Final Destination 2 (scaled to ~1/3 the actual size).

In this first frame, it just looks like macro-blocking.

However, in the following frames, there’s clearly corruption going on. Also, note that the audio cut out for about a second shortly after this part.

Some possibilities are:

1. The hardware Comcast is using for USA and Sci-Fi is either overloaded, or really crappy. I’ve heard Comcast has been using Imagine Communication hardware to triple-load three channels on to a single QAM frequency, and there’s been some issues with that setup.
2. USA’s encoding hardware is really crappy. That would make sense, since both USA and Sci-Fi are owned by the same company, and both have horrible picture.

Comcast quietly rolled out new HD channels in Tacoma and Seattle. The new channels are:

• Animal Planet HD
• TLC HD
• Discovery HD
• Food HD
• SciFi HD
• HGTV HD

Unfortunately, they’re still way behind DirectTV.

It’s plain and simple: Comcasts HD lineup sucks.I live in the Tacoma, WA area, and Comcast’s HD lineup here is absolute crap. I have, maybe, 20 HD channels. For Christ’s sake, Dish Network has more HD than Comcast, and I am pissed off because Comcast keeps running these commercials, saying they have more HD than anyone else. LIES!Let’s run through a couple HD channels that DirectTV has, and Comcast doesn’t:

• CNN HD
• TLC HD
• Discovery HD
• Nickelodeon HD
• Cartoon Network HD
• FX HD
• Spike HD
• SciFi HD
• CMT HD
• MTV HD
• TBS HD
• CNBC HD
• Bravo HD
• Food Network HD
• Versus HD
• Science Channel HD
• MGM HD
• Speed HD
• Movie Channel HD
• Fox Business HD

Comcast started rolling out new HD channels in the Philadelphia area, and they promote those channels in their advertisements, even though that’s the only area that has those channels. I’m fed up with this BS.