Since I’m about to stay longer and longer periods of time here in the US (in metropolitan Washington D.C.) I had to find some normal broadband service available in my area. For a little while since I arrived here I had to content myself with a dial-up connection (up to 5,5kb/s) which was a really tough experience since even in Plovdiv I got used to an average browsing speeds of over 1mbit/s (Langame.net). Anyway I did my homework and found a plentiful of broadband providers of national scale like Comcast, Cox, Verizon, SBS Yahoo, … actually there are so many broadband providers and it is such a complicated task trying to figure out the best deal that sites like Broadbandoffers.com have come into life to fill-in the niche of best-dealers’ offers for a certain ZIP-area. And that is how I found about Comcast’s $19.95 offer for newly signed-up residential users and further on $42/month. For the money paid you get 4mbit/s (90% of time over 300kb/s!) and by the end of the summer another 2mbit/s will be added to my Internet speed for free as Comcast and the cable operators at large are trying to fight the upcoming big battle between regular phone companies like Verizon and the Cable companies. Just in short Verizon is about to offer through there new service called FIOS 30mbit/s to residential areas and is already up and running at areas around NYC, Washington D.C. and Maryland.
Anyway I did my order entirely on the phone (1-888-COMCAST) and had my Inernet activated on August 12th. What was interesting of a customer point of view is when you sign-up for the service (fortunately they don’t make you sign-up for an yearly contract just for the time you would use the service) it found that having only the Internet is bitterly more expensive – $59 that having the Internet and the cheapest tv-cable package available – $19.95 (total $62 per month) so it was more than logical that I would go for the TV-package also even though I watch something like 3-4 hours of TV per month.
I mexican guy came to the house and did all the cable penetrations and as most of the houses here it was already wired with cables for usage by the cable companies as part of all the regular infrustructure for gas, electricity, water and etc. I already bought myself a cable-modem (Toshiba 2600) from a little computer store for $40 compared to an average price of $80 in big retailers like Circuit City or BestBuy. Though if I had signed-up for Comcast through Circuit City you get the rebate offer from Motorola and if would fill-in the rebate details at the end you get the modem for free… but as with most rebate deals it’s such a time-consuming work that it seems most people would forget submit the rebate for the valid period of usually around 30 to 60 days from the date of purchase. I had my Internet working right away after the mexican guy called Comcast to validate my modem serial number and the speed was quite unbelievable – 520kb/s constantly!
I did lots of extensive tests on testMy.net or the visual one at http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ and as far as the server at the other end could support it, the speed was usually around 450-500kb/s! Upload is at 42kb/s which is just okey for pretty much everything on the Net unless you decide to run somekind of a public warez server 
It is true broadband service with hassle-free limitations for P2P usage, traffic and etc. The only problem now you’ve got is to find the goodies we’ve got in most LANs in the big cities – this is usually solved with P2P networks like DC++, Kazaa, eMule and etc.
I’m not posting lately that frequently as I’m still getting used to my new environment but will probably have tons of photos to publish from the upcoming trips to Boston, NYC, San Francisco and Oahu (Hawaii)… meanwile will keep on browsing for new ideas as Google is only 30ms/away