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I have Comcast and own my own cable modem. I do not pay the monthly fee.

If you get the bundled service (TV, Phone and Internet), then you must rent the modem used for phone service as it is not available to consumers.

I found a cable modem for dirt cheap, and I use it instead of the rental provided by comcast. This is for internet only.

The advantage to renting the comcast modem is that if the unit gets zapped by lightening, or an electical brown out, comcast replaces it, not you.

If you get the bundled service (TV, Phone and Internet), then you must rent the modem used for phone service as it is not available to consumers.

FWIW, I have Comcast and currently rent their modem, but I'm probably going to buy my own - it will pay for itself in about 11 months. As for phone service, we recently ditched our land line and bought NetTalk. I tried it for a month before I cut my ties to the phone company. The thing about NT that is different than Magic Jack is that with NT you don't have to keep your computer on 24/7 because the NT device plugs into your modem or router directly. Unlimited calls for $29/year is hard to beat! (Compare that to monthly charge for Vonage!) Oh, and you use your normal land-line phone with NT. The only disadvantage is that you can't transfer your original number (so, we are having our original number transferred to our NT number for about $6/mo and will do that for a few more months until we are sure we have got everyone using our new number.

If you get the bundled service (TV, Phone and Internet), then you must rent the modem used for phone service as it is not available to consumers.

I'm not sure this is true in all areas. I know someone at work who has Triple Play (internet/phone/cable) and bought their own Comcast compatible modem at Best Buy. Comcast even provides a compatible device list which is useful for finding devices that will work on their network.