LIP SERVICE

Comcast President Brian Roberts says his company has done yeoman's work replacing the now-defunct Excite@Home network. But thousands of high-speed subscribers in his own backyard — Philadelphia and New Jersey — probably feel that's not enough.

Roberts extolled the virtues of the company's new network capabilities during a press conference announcing that United Online's two Internet services, Juno and NetZero, will provide a minimal second Internet source to Comcast's own high-speed network offering. During that press conference, as Comcast's boss claimed the network was stable, Philadelphia-area subscribers were fighting more bugs than an exterminator.

At the very least, it's disconcerting that Roberts believes his network “has been stable for some time.” Thousands of Comcast subscribers who can no longer depend on their e-mail can tell him differently. Those subscribers — who this year started paying $5 more per month for high-speed connectivity — also are seeing erosion in the peripheral services that Excite@Home provided.

To be fair, Comcast does something that Excite@Home often neglected: It answers the phones. Sadly, most times the technician can't solve the problem because it's part of the ongoing “network transition.”

These service issues are particularly painful for the technical novices Comcast recruited with its clever advertising campaigns about always-on, lightning-fast connectivity. It's a small consolation to these users — and to the Comcast audience as a whole — that the company's president also said this at the press conference: “There will be some bugs. The Internet is not without peril, and people are used to that and have come to deal with that.”

No, they haven't. People have come to expect reliability. They've been through the hassles of groundbreaking online services. No one is ready to take a step back, and no one is ready to take the blame for problems that suddenly pop up as Comcast works on its new network.

“It's not always one person's problem,” Roberts said, singing a familiar and tired Comcast tune. “It's the computer, it's the software, it's the hard drive and it's your connectivity. We will have as reliable a network as exists in the business. That's our internal goal, and we will meet that.”

How soon that will happen is anyone's guess. The only thing that Comcast subscribers know is, at the very moment the company's president was indicating things were hunky-dory, the company's e-mail system was down. Again.