I'm in the far western suburbs (Aurora area) and +1 on the price issue and service.

There have been outages recently, but not too bad.

Is WOW in your area? I have heard they have good service for the price. Can't comment much further than that.

I'm leaning WOW when i move into city limits

Thanks for your comments. The lure of better speeds and a current price that's half of what my DSL is probably not worth the headache of changing and dealing with Comcast. Wish I could get a different cable company in Niles.

I just got a letter from AT&T telling me I can now get Uverse Internet and offering specials. Haven't had time to call to see how the price compares; but with my current plan going up again in July, I need to make some kind of change.

WOW sounds interesting. Here are the service locations - not sure how current it is, but includes Oak Forest, which was announced in April 2014

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/4028

You can enter your address on this page and they will tell you if you are in their service area or not.

I live in the city, but this could describe me exactly: my Comcast internet has been fast and reliable. It is only after I added cable TV that I started having issues and had to deal with customer service - and it is as bad as everyone says. I recently added a TV to the home and went with Roku for this one. Roku runs off the wireless and has been very good - smooth and no crashes.

While there are a few folks I know that like AT&T, most don't like AT&T's performance and put up with ComCast nightmare.

Agreed, most people I know who have had both indicate that U-Verse internet is slower than Comcast. However, the ones who stick with it do so due to price and TV.

I've been so busy with conferences and travel that I haven't had time to even think about this. I was leaning to sticking with DSL, but now I'm not so sure.

The placement of the cable connection in my condo is problematic for where I need the modem, but not impossible. It would, however, mean moving a bookcase and file cabinet to run cable under a wall to the office.

U-Verse also has mandatory contracts and equipment rentals along with higher taxes. Amusingly, in many areas Comcast is the lesser of two evils.

I've had U-Verse internet for several years and never have had a problem with speed and it has gone out perhaps twice for less than an hour in five years. I've had their TV service for about 9 months and I'm delighted with it. I have had no outages, the constant pixilation and frequent disappearances of certain HD channels I had with Dish. It's certainly not cheap, but basic service is included in my assessment, so I can get Premium service for what I convince myself is a reasonable monthly fee. :)

The pixilation and erratic signal loss are more likely due to dish placement and LMB issues. Currently I am a WOW customer but was a Dish customer for many years and had few signal issues. Most were related to really severe weather.

Mine too - predictions of severe weather several days later. ;) Actually, my building (250+ units) had Dish for 7 years - they wired the building when it was under construction. There were complaints all 7 years and many efforts (allegedly) to fix the problems. Their incompetence resulted in them losing tens of thousands of dollars.

One thing AT&T has managed to perfect in all it's years of existence is telephone lines. They are reliable in pretty much all weather.

Weirdly enough in my small town on the other side of the lake I was able to get Uverse (thanks to cordelli for finding out for me, may be RIP) for phone/tv/i-net. I've had Uverse for 5 years & been pretty happy w/ it in terms of it working & customer service. The very few instances I've needed cust svc they've been pretty good, but if I got a clueless rep (coming from me that's saying something) I just said switch me to Tier 2 cust service & got someone who knew what he was doing. But as I noted I haven't had to deal w/ them very often/am happy.

The price went up over the years & it was my bad for not calling to get a promo before now. I just did that though. After a few years of listening to FTers tell me I should get Ooma I signed up for Ooma for telephone (after buying the Ooma telo device my phone bill is now $3.82 which are monthly state/fed taxes), so I saved on that by dropping ATT phone. But the cable etc was still too high. I called the retention department & got them to almost match (a few $$ dif) the new customer promo for my tv/dvr/i-net. Yes I had to sign up for a 1-year contract, but I probably would have had to sign a 1-year contract w/ Comcast which is the only other option.

I've heard so many horrible, horrible things about Comcast cust svc (even before the infamous call that went viral last week) I really, really didn't want to switch to them. Some friends in town have Comcast & think the company is the devil incarnate.

Cheers.

I agree with all those who said that when Comcast works, which is most of the time, it works great (never had a problem with TV), and when it doesn't (have had problems with internet), their customer service makes you wish you could reach through the phone and punch them in the face.

I used to have this experience on a monthly basis when I lived in the city, gave up on Comcast when I moved to the north shore. There are other options, not great ones but there are options (and by options I don't mean ATT U-Verse :)).