For that price, you share roughly 1.5 mbps of capacity with the other people in your immediate neighborhood who have cable modems. It's always on, so you never have to dial in. It saves so much time versus using the old 56K modem. Other grumpy customers were Comcast clients in the Grosse Pointes, one of the areas in metro Detroit with the highest percentage of cable users. Sixty percent of the residents there use the service.
Speeds can drop in the afternoons when hordes of people go online at the same time.
I find that if I have a question about anything from what time a movie is playing, to something my child is learning in school, I check the Internet. I no longer wait for dialing, wait for pages to load. I would never go back to dial-up access.