I so desperately wanted to use either of those, but MonkeyBrains would require me to mount something outside my building which wasn't going to be possible at either place I've lived in the city... and Sonic... well I got Sonic.

Sonic runs on AT&Ts lines. It was slow and had lag spikes. After about a year it got to be where the modem (and Internet) would cycle for a couple minutes about once every 2 hours. The (Sonic!) tech came out, found a fault on the line, and his advice was to get Comcast.

I also tried getting Wave, but couldn't.

I went through a similar runaround with my previous building (also in SF), where I tried to avoid Comcast. Eventually I caved.

Comcast was terrible and shady from the very beginning. They sold me an internet package they later claimed didn't exist(!) even though I had the offer in writing from the sales guy. So they just adjusted my bill to what they thought I should pay.

They eventually backed down after I kicked up a huge fuss (and took it to social media), but they also threw a bunch of free stuff I didn't want in to my package as "compensation", and guess who was paying for that when my promotional rate expired before they promised it would? My rate was constantly going up if I didn't fight them tooth and nail. I had to check every bill and almost every one had a new surprise. I have never worked with such a perfidious organization.

So after all that I wanted Anything But Comcast, which I already disliked before that experience. I've seriously considered tethering to Verizon Wireless as better...

But I like to do online gaming and Comcast is the only vaguely reasonable option at this point. They're a little less shady if you avoid ALL television service.

You realize a T1 is a measly megabit-and-a-half right? Crappy 3G is faster.

3G may be faster but it is rarely better - with a T1 you are going to get very low latency and very very very low jitter.

Why would they include the T1 option but ignore the nearly equivalent bandwidth of a pair of tin cans connected with string to some acoustic modems?

T1 lines only carry 1.544 Mbps. On the upside, I don't think they cost $1000 nowadays.

10 friends sharing a t1 falls apart if more than 1 friend wants to stream a movie at the same time. Or if just one friend wants to stream a HD movie. A t1 is 1.54mbit.

Ah, the good old days - when I had DSL with 1.1 Mbps up AND down, guaranteed. My ISP didn't even have a policy against resale so I shared with 15 units in 6 different buildings - all wired. I was always amazed how much better my dedicated 1.1 felt compared other plans boasting up to 5.