Now there's a word that belongs in the hall of fame for deceptive advertising. That bit of minimalist fine print expands to several geeky paragraphs that, if the consumer could understand it, completely negates the bandwidth claimed in the advertising. Those ComCast commercials with the tortoises are amusing, but I just have to shake my head in disbelief that the FTC hasn't come down on them like a ton of bricks for the patently false claims they make. Sure, there's an asterisk after the comparison numbers. But on my analog TV, each line of fine print is only two scan lines tall. The law long ago stipulated that fine print must be legible, and ComCast is clearly violating the law.

What grabbed my attentnion is your present provider's promise of 6Mbits. Did I read that correctly? That is remarkable, because with DSL that's sustained bandwidth, not "burst". Hell yes, go for that deal, that's at least twice as good as cable at half the price.

Lucky bastard. Where I live, I'm too far from the CO, and though I check about once a year to see if the situation's improved, it hasn't--the best I can get is 768K. So I'm stuck with cable, "bursting" once in a blue moon, but all too often slowing to a crawl as my neighbors download videos.