One of the blogs I follow is Sean Conman's The Boston Diaries, a blog that's oddly named because he doesn't live in Boston, and doesn't even like the city. He knows I follow him because he once E-mailed me to let me know that my Commafeed reader instance was hitting his blog's feed way too many times. I changed the default polling interval to 1 hour, and that made him happy.
Recently, it seems, he was setting up Comcast service to replace a failed DSL connection, using a "wireless service unit" (some sort of cable modem, I'm sure) and not getting anywhere, even when he had to call up technical support and confess his inadequacies to someone whose only career option is working in technical support. Finally, he just used the device's Web interface to configure it and get it running, without any more tedious mucking about in hyperspace.
I've felt that pain, Sean. Fortunately, this time around, Nicole brought her own privately-owned cable modem from her Houston house, which the Comcast installer had no problems getting running. After that, I moved it to the basement, installing it in the house media panel (where all the coax and Ethernet connections from the house terminate) and running it through my OpenWrt router and managed network switch to feed the house. Comcast gives /64 addresses out for IPv6 under this system, too, so it's not just Sean's gateway. (Here, the router gets the prefix and hands it out.)
Hopefully it performs as well for him as it has for us!