One of the reasons that Comcast offers high speed Internet access along with its other services is because high speed Internet has almost become a necessity these days. Anyone who has used a dial up Internet service lately with any frequency knows that there are just a lot of places on the World Wide Web that you just can't go with that slow of a connection. For example, just about any web page that takes advantage of Flash media will be really slow to load, and some of them won't load at all.

Dial up Internet connections will also slow down almost to a standstill for no particular reason and will often simply stop in the middle of downloading a large file. Of course DSL is much faster than dial up, but it's still not an option for anyone who wants to take advantage of the rich variety of media that's offered by the World Wide Web these days.

For all of these reasons, a true broad band high speed Internet connection, like what Comcast offers, has become a virtual necessity. Comcast's broad band Internet service offers download speeds that can reach as high as eight megabytes per second. That's up to six times faster than DSL and one hundred times faster than dial up. With that kind of speed, it's easy to take advantage of lots of the multimedia experiences that the Internet has to offer. For example, there are now a variety of massive multiplayer online video games that encompass entire virtual worlds. One example of this is Second Life. Second life allows players to interact with each other through virtual avatars.

It's also possible to do business within Second Life and some companies are even holding board meetings in Second Life, and Reuters news agency even maintains a virtual office within the online video game in order to report on things that are happening there.

World of WarCraft is another virtual world where it's possible to built things like castles and make things like swords both of which can be sold to other people in the real world for real money. Comcast's high speed broad band Internet connection will allow you to take part in these two virtual worlds and more.

There are also a lot of different types of media to take advantage of online. In fact, there's so much video, music, and even literature online that you may never need to go to the library or the video store again when you have the bandwidth to take advantage of downloading all of those things. For example, you can download a huge variety of music and an ever growing variety of video from online stores like iTunes. If you ever do need a solid CD or a DVD or a paper based book, you can buy it online and online shopping is a lot more convenient with a high speed Internet connection.

Of course it's common sense that when you have access to the Internet, the malicious computer programs on the Internet and the people who create them have greater access to you. Because of that, it's a good thing that Comcast provides a lot of different levels of protection for you. This protection ranges from free anti virus software and regular updates for that software to optional firewalls.

High speed Internet access is definitely a good thing no matter where you get it, but with a variety of extra features to increase the value of the service, Comcast provides some very good options.