Who here uses Comcast Business Class for the phones and internet at work? I am looking into switching from Qwest to Comcast and would love to talk to some businesses that have made a similar transition. It would be a bonus to me if you are a similar size business of 8-20 phones/users. PM me if you would be willing to put me in touch with whoever at your company is responsible for you phone/internet service. I will also take any other comments from anybody who is actually using comcast at work. Please keep this somewhat constructive if you could, thanks. -Rob
Well, my info is about 2.5yrs old, but I used to run Comcast business class at home when we lived in Eden Prairie. I wanted to be able to run my own web/mail servers etc, and wanted a static IP address for my VPN gateway. We didn't use it for telephony directly, but using Vonage over it worked like a champ. And the customer service/tech support was light years ahead of the domestic side of things. Hopefully, somebody will come along with more current info, but from the 3yrs or so that I used them, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the service.
God no. Thankfully we do not. A T1 is 1.544 MB, NO MATTER WHAT. Sure, streaming things sucks at times but guess what, you shouldn't being be doing that at work. Comcast might be cheaper, but the reliability will never come close. Oh, don't forget that if the power goes out, you have no phone service. That's not the case with Ma Bell. You pay for reliability. Whether it's a T1 or an OC 192, it always works at the advertised speed.
Yes and No. If you are using a flex T1 for voice and data, every call you make is between 64-80k of that. So your data pipe can go down in size. Stream on your phone and not on your PC. Sometimes a T1 can be as unreliable as a cable connection. I saw one go up and down every time it got below 30 degrees. Champlain is notorious for T1s going up and down with weather. And if the power goes out, your T1 goes down. The only one that doesn't is an analog line. In today's world, almost everyone has a cell phone. You can still call 911. If the power goes out and you need your phone calls. Call the telephone company and have them forward your calls. Besides, if the power goes out, all you can do is play angry birds anyways. I'd say the reliability of a Comcast connection is decent. Ours is up about 97% or more of the time. But we have a T1 to fail back to... when we have power. As far as voice over your connection? Yeah it's fine to some degree. Most of the time you can figure about 80k bi-directional per call. But if you latency and ping times are high, even 5mb+ down/768k up might not be enough for more than 2-3 calls. Keep in mind that doing anything but the analog lines that come from Comcast might be fighting for bandwidth against the data. They are not very accommodating to other VOIP traversing their network
We have the 50/10 internet at our office and it performs quite well for the $199/mo. We had Qwest previously, but the fastest we could get was 1.5/1.5, hence the switch. We don't have the phone service since we don't have a "company line" besides our google voice number. My dad's business has the phone service though and hasn't had any real complaints (they have 5-6 lines I believe). I've only had to call customer service a couple times, but it's a totally different group than residential... a much better experience. The only reliability problems we've run into are when some random contractors down the street cut the fiber line with a backhoe. Comcast rolled a truck and fixed it the same day though. Overall, I would definitely recommend them for the increase in speed vs. price alone.
