Comcast In San Francisco sucks is not currently living up to my expectations

So Tuesday night, Tasha and I were settled down to watch some streaming Netflix. It's tough to find series that we both like so we compromised on Jericho, which is presented in Netflix Streaming HD. After about 30 seconds of what I presume is "powerboost" quality picture, Netflix cuts out with a note about how my internet connection "has slowed". Netflix rebuffers the signal to a lower bitrate. So while I'm not happy, at least we are able to check out the show to see if it's worth watching.

But after another minute of the degraded video quality, the same "connection slowed" message comes up and the signal "adjusts" to literally the lowest quality streaming Netflix I've seen. We ended up trying a couple other Netflix HD movies in the queue and finally just watched some SD Dr. Who that we'd missed.

We've just moved less than a mile from our previous residence where we had AT&T Uverse, which never had any Netflix HD Streaming Issues, but did kill torrents regularly at about the same Mbps service level (18 Uverse vs 16 Comcast).

16mbps is Comcast's fastest website-advertised speed. I know there's a 22 Mbps and a 50 Mbps; they're $80 and $190 a month, respectively. I had initially thought I'd try out the 16 speed and upgrade pretty quickly, but 16 Mbps should certainly be able to run Netflix Streaming HD. I mean, we're in San Francisco 94107, the Mecca of interweb civilization.

edit1: found this guy's experience very similar to what we're experiencing.

edit2: In what has been a very interesting sequence of events, Comcast has commented on my blog, emailed from the regional office, emailed from Comcast Corporate, and even personally phoned from Executive Customer Support. I had Comcast for a few years in MD when they were overadvertising their ability to deliver HD content to a set top box, so the Streaming HD yips weren't really that surprising, but the quick response from the Comcast team has been very impressive. Apparently I'm going to get one more call to schedule some line testing and a swap to a newer modem. I'll update as the story unfolds.