Orion,
I got Adelphia cable access about four months ago here in VA. The 1.5meg figure is [i]very[/i] optimistic. the fastest I've ever gotten is around 1.3 - 1.4, and that was at two in the morning. Most of the time (especially during the "Peak" evening hours) I get anywhere from 150K to 600K.
We have had quite a few outages as well. For the last three weeks, I've been able to receive E-Mail, but not send it. Now they have that problem fixed, but I haven't gotten any download speeds over 150K since.
The next county down from me is raising heck with the county board of supervisors because their service is so bad. they want the board to kick Adelphia out altogther (not likely, we went through that last year when their franchise was up for renewal. Adelphia fixed most everything in the months leading up to the board vote and then said "what bad service? Everything's fixed".
Adelphia has a website where you can check the system status in your area. [url]http://24.48.59.187/forms/netstats.cfm[/url] I suggest that you spend some time monitoring it to see if the service in your area is OK or not.
All of that being said - I could [b]never[/b] go back to dialup. Dependable as all get-out, but toooooo sloooowwww.... I'd never be able to stand it.
The installation is simple. Adelphia supplied the modem, plug it in, hook up the coax to the modem (I used a splitter), hook a RJ45 patch cable (supplied) to the NIC card in the computer (supplied), call Adelphia Tech Support and 10 minutes later you're done !!!
HTH
Edited to add link -MA