Comcast verses Mother Nature.



  • There's been a lot of WTFs about  phone tech support people doing stupid things because they're ridgidly following a script without thinking if it applies to the current situation.The too-rigid scripting problem sometimes affects in-person techs too.  

     

    Recently my parents' (And several other people in the neighborhood) couldn't connect to the Internet after a lightning strike. 

    The technician from Comcast made a lot of effort to solve the problem, but it was very clear from his problem-solving technique that he was looking for a SINGLE point of failure.  He would replace one component (The cable-modem, or the router) and test to see if that fixed the problem, when it didn't he would put back the original component and try replacing a different component.

    Finally I was at my parents place when the cable guy came over for the third time, and as I watched him go through this futile exercise, I kept telling him this was damage from a LIGHTNING STRIKE and it was perfectly reasonable to expect that more than one thing was damaged. He agreed with me completely and but didn't change his procedure at all!!  It was like he didn't understand that the conversation he was having with me had anything to do with the rote procedure he was going through.

    Finally I had to do his job for him as he watched.  It turns out that the coax cable splitter, the cable-modem, the router, and the NICs in my parents' computers were ALL damaged, and all had to be replaced.   (I'm not sure why their TVs survived. Or the motherboards the NICs were connected to, for that matter.)

     

    A lot of people in that neighborhood switched to DSL that fall.

     


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @VRAndy said:

    There's been a lot of WTFs about  phone tech support people doing stupid things because they're ridgidly following a script without thinking if it applies to the current situation.The too-rigid scripting problem sometimes affects in-person techs too. 

    The reason for this is, typically, because the people following the scripts aren't qualified to do anything but follow the scripts.



  • Ah, Comcast. When they came & hooked up my service, the technician sat down in front of my PC, moved the mouse, and stared blankly at Gnome for a few minutes before he found Firefox. He then proceeded to try to change my homepage to comcast.net, which was pretty irritating (and amusing at the same time, as Windows places this under "Tools", whereas it's under "Edit" on Linux).



    Anyways, I told the tech - call customer support and have them push the modem, as there's NO WAY your cd is going to run. After dismissing me, the technician was quickly flustered (strange OS, and I didn't bother to tell him Firefox was running NoScript and Comcast was still blacklisted). He finally figures out that he needs to call and have the modem pushed.



    Now, the technician had one of those walkie-talkie phones where anyone in the room can hear what you're saying on either end, so he calls to have them push the modem. Here's basically how that conversation went:



    Guy on Phone: "Look, it's really simple, just put in the CD, and go to Start > My Computer..."

    Tech (interrupts Guy): "There is no start button. This guys running... (turns to me) what did you say this was again?"

    Me: "Linux."

    Tech: "He says he's running Linux"

    Guy on Phone: "What version of Windows is that?"

    Me: facepalm


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @jchannell said:

    He then proceeded to try to change my homepage to comcast.net, which was pretty irritating
    Sorry - you say you watched him do this, and the next sentence out of your mouth wasn't "What the fuck do you think you're trying to do?"?



  • I did ask him - he said he had to do it as part of his contract. I then said "you know if you change that I'm just going to switch it right back to about:blank, right?"

    =D


    And before anyone asks, yes I did end up completing that setup myself...



  • @jchannell said:

    I did ask him - he said he had to do it as part of his contract. I then said "you know if you change that I'm just going to switch it right back to about:blank, right?"

    =D
    And I thought that’s what the CD was for, to run software that screws your computer over, and constantly changes the homepage.



  • I don't think it would make one lick of difference on my Linux box.



    The technician ended up leaving that CD. I can verify that Comcast's setup cd won't work in Wine. =P



  • It might be terribly amusing if one of those CDs ended up on a torrent site.
    @jchannell said:

    Tech: "He says he's running Linux"

    Guy on Phone: "What version of Windows is that?"

    Me: facepalm
    You: "It's not Windows."

    Tech: "Oh we only support Windows."

    You: "But the problem has nothing to do with my OS!"

    Tech: "Sorry"



  •  Comcast was worse with me.  Here's how it went:

     Me: Hi, I just got cable internet, but I'm not getting an IP.
    Them: OK, What version of Windows are you running.
    Me: Not Windows.  Linux.
    Them: we don't support Linux.  You can't connect to the cable modem using Linux.
    Me: (lying) Oh, I'm sorry.  I meant XP.  Windows XP.
    Them: OK.  Did you run the install CD?
    Me: Sure......
    Them:  OK, *clickety, clickety*, we're resetting your modem now (I'm assuming this is them "push"ing the modem).
    Me: OK, there we go.  It's online.



  •  When I first activated my Comcast account I found that their activation website  (The one it forces all traffic to until you type in your magic number) was IE only.  I run  Linux.

     No problem, it gives a number to call if you don't have IE.

     

    I call them up, explain the situation ... and they offer to mail me a disk with IE on it.   After I asked to be transfered to the supervisor he said "Oh, wow, man. You can get Internet on Linux now?"

    They eventually told me that I would have to borrow a Windows PC to activate the account.

     

    Closer examination showed that there was a javascript lock-out preventing firefox from viewing the page.  After bypassing that, I got to a page with an executable download. With the help of WINE I figured out that program was just a EULA click-through with an embeded IE window pointing to the REAL activation page.  

     

    So I pointed Firefox there.  Done.



  •  Not so long ago, I had repeated visits from Comcast Technicians because of a problem that was clearly at their local node (neighbors were having the same troubles), but they insisted on going over everything from the pole on into my house just to have done something.  There was one exception which was nice.  I met him at the door, he says "It looks like there's a problem with the local node, there's not much I can do here."  I said, "I know."  He told me they had techs searching for the source of the noise and went on his merry way.  It took months of reports from multiple people in my neighborhood for them to finally start investigating the real problem.

     On another visit, I made the mistake of sitting in the next room while the tech was fiddling with my cable modem.  He power cycled my router (running OpenWRT), which was a little annoying since it was at 500+ days of uptime.  Even more annoying, when he asked me to test it, the router couldn't get an IP.  I asked if he did anything with the router, he tells me that he power cycled it because "you have to do that when you power cycle the modem".  I'm pretty sure that even the default firmware on most consumer routers has a DHCP release/renew.  I tell him the router's not getting an IP, and he responds "Oh, we don't support routers".   Unfortunately, I was too polite to respond how I really wanted to:  "Then don't fucking touch it!"



  • @Minos said:

     Not so long ago, I had repeated visits from Comcast Technicians because of a problem that was clearly at their local node (neighbors were having the same troubles), but they insisted on going over everything from the pole on into my house just to have done something.  There was one exception which was nice.  I met him at the door, he says "It looks like there's a problem with the local node, there's not much I can do here."  I said, "I know."  He told me they had techs searching for the source of the noise and went on his merry way.  It took months of reports from multiple people in my neighborhood for them to finally start investigating the real problem.

     On another visit, I made the mistake of sitting in the next room while the tech was fiddling with my cable modem.  He power cycled my router (running OpenWRT), which was a little annoying since it was at 500+ days of uptime.  Even more annoying, when he asked me to test it, the router couldn't get an IP.  I asked if he did anything with the router, he tells me that he power cycled it because "you have to do that when you power cycle the modem".  I'm pretty sure that even the default firmware on most consumer routers has a DHCP release/renew.  I tell him the router's not getting an IP, and he responds "Oh, we don't support routers".   Unfortunately, I was too polite to respond how I really wanted to:  "Then don't fucking touch it!"

     So much for him saying they don't support routers after he cycled the power on yours. Hey! I can screw up your setup, but if I mess it up, I don't have to support it !



  • Every August for several years Comcast service would go out for my street.  All of us would call and comcast would dispatch techs.  The problem was the tech's never talked and always did the same things over and over again (recycling the modem, and checking the lines in the houses).  Each tech would swear it was a problem with the pole and wander off.  then the next tech would come and the cycle repeat.  The whole street would get refunds for the month of august.  and come september the situation would resolve itself.  All of us tried to convince comcast to send out a bucket truck.  Often noting the reccomendation from the techs.  One never Arrived.  after a few years of this the whole street switched to rcn and the problem never came back,



  • @VRAndy said:

    A lot of people in that neighborhood switched to DSL that fall.

    As if ADSL would survive the lightning...


  • @galgorah said:

    Every August for several years Comcast service would go out for my street.  All of us would call and comcast would dispatch techs.  The problem was the tech's never talked and always did the same things over and over again (recycling the modem, and checking the lines in the houses).  Each tech would swear it was a problem with the pole and wander off.  then the next tech would come and the cycle repeat.  The whole street would get refunds for the month of august.  and come september the situation would resolve itself.  All of us tried to convince comcast to send out a bucket truck.  Often noting the reccomendation from the techs.  One never Arrived.  after a few years of this the whole street switched to rcn and the problem never came back,

    I've never had a problem with Comcast.  My connection never fails and I usually get around 15/3 Mbps.  I'm probably going to upgrade to 50Mbps soon, whenever I get around to it.

     

    I hear lots of people hating Comcast but I love it.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I hear lots of people hating Comcast but I love it.

    Yes, Comcast is great.  Until you have a problem.  Then they are the spawn of Satan.  

    I moved recently (from Burlington, MA to Arlington, MA) - I had RCN in Burlington with absolutely no problems.  In Arlington, I've got Comcast.  The internet service goes out an average of 2x / week and I have to power-cycle the thing.



  • @Auction_God said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I hear lots of people hating Comcast but I love it.

    Yes, Comcast is great.  Until you have a problem.  Then they are the spawn of Satan.  

    I moved recently (from Burlington, MA to Arlington, MA) - I had RCN in Burlington with absolutely no problems.  In Arlington, I've got Comcast.  The internet service goes out an average of 2x / week and I have to power-cycle the thing.

     Yeah, same here. I know some people who have great Comcast service, and some just curse at them because they have to keep resetting the modem.



  • As if ADSL would survive the lightning.

     It's not that DSL would survive lightning. It's that COMCAST technicians were unable to fix the problem, and had no problem leaving it in a non-working state without offering you a next step.  (But continuing to bill as if nothing had happened.)

    When stuck in that sort of bureaucratic infinite loop, the easiest way out is to simply switch providers.   (Unless you personally know how to fix it yourself.)



  • @pitchingchris said:

    @Auction_God said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I hear lots of people hating Comcast but I love it.

    Yes, Comcast is great.  Until you have a problem.  Then they are the spawn of Satan.  

    I moved recently (from Burlington, MA to Arlington, MA) - I had RCN in Burlington with absolutely no problems.  In Arlington, I've got Comcast.  The internet service goes out an average of 2x / week and I have to power-cycle the thing.

     Yeah, same here. I know some people who have great Comcast service, and some just curse at them because they have to keep resetting the modem.

    Let me give another story of Comcast incompetency....

    Prior to Burlington, I lived in Winchester, MA.  This town is notable in that all the utility stuff is underground - that'll be important to the story in a bit...

    Periodically I would no longer have internet service (tv would still work fine).  After a call to tech support, a technician was sent out.  Hooray!  I've got internet service again.  This cycle repeated, and on the 3rd attempt I asked the technician what was the problem?    His answer:  Periodically a Comcast van would roam the neighborhood and check all the wiring and "tighten up the neighborhood" (his exact words).  They would install filters on wires to homes that did not subscribe to internet (apparently keeping the signal clearer).  And the technician then said that since the wire going to my house was unlabeled, they routinely put a filter on the wire which would stop internet signals from working... You would have thought that after a couple of calls they would have labeled the wire going to my house?   I asked him to label the wire and he said he didn't have any labels (they use these fancy plasticized ones). 

    Needless to say, after the tech left, I went out, opened the underground box, and labeled the wire.  Presto, no problems after that.



  • @pitchingchris said:

     Yeah, same here. I know some people who have great Comcast service, and some just curse at them because they have to keep resetting the modem.

    I actually have more uptime with my current Comcast cable internet (2-3 outages/week) than I did with Time Warner back in Ohio (5-7 outages/week), but Comcast's customer service is about on par with Dell's home user service plan, somewhere near dripping lemon juice into an open wound. In addition to this sort of mess (or this one, too), they have thrown at me all sorts of stereotypical customer service gaffes in the one year that I have been paying for their service.

    A few highlights:

    • Telling me that they could not push the modem from their end as long as a router was connected to it.
    • Telling my wife on the phone that having a wireless router could ruin our cable connection
    • (Related to the linked story) Also telling her that, once her remote control stopped working, the only way to fix it was to replace the cable box, wiring, and remote controls.  I fixed the problem when I arrived home by power cycling the cable box.
    • NOT SHOWING UP for installation appointments!
    • Refusing to actually run cable from my cable box to the outlet.  (Thankfully, I had a store of my own coax that I could use.)
    • Giving me the *wrong* cable box for my cable plan/cable connection. (It had poor signal quality, took seconds to browse between chanels, and a half-minute to load guide data.)... I learned that it was the wrong box when the tech came again months later, noticed the box while working elsewhere, and decided to give me the correct one.
    Yeah.  Comcast happens.

  • Garbage Person

     When Comcast sent out the first tech to install my shit, I had set up a virus-and-spyware ridden Win2k3 box on a stool in the basement 2 feet from the initial splitter for them to molest (I'd also chosen a monitor with the red and blue pins snapped off the cable).

     

    The technician arrived driving his personal Toyota Celica. His van had broken down on the way, so he just threw the modem in the trunk and drove out in his own car. Brought no other tools whatsoever. The house had been without CATV for about a decade, though there was still a dry-rotted coax dangling between the pole and house. I'm attached to the last pole on my utility run - none of my neighbors have cable.  Plugged in all the TVs and got a grainy signal on the analog. "Good enough" he decided. He then plugged in the digital cable box - which got no signal whatsoever. "Good enough" he decided. And then he got to the modem - and it got no signal whatsoever. He thought it was alright and would go away within the hour - but I refused to let him go until he'd at least tried to fix it. It was only at this point that he called home and gave them the MAC addresses for activation - still no signal. "We'll send out another tech in 2-3 weeks."

     

    ... 2-3 weeks go by, and another tech gets there. This one takes one look at the tap on the pole, says "That has to go." Then he looks at the dryrotted coax from the tap to the house and tears it right down. 15 minutes later, that's all replaced and suddenly everything works great, but my internets aren't active yet. "Aren't you going to activate my internet?" I ask him, knowing perfectly well I can do it with a phone call but also knowing that I fucking paid $10 to watch that cnut have to deal with the rig from hell. "I don't know how to do that" he says, and hands me a self-install CD.

     ... Comcast never did refund those $10 (though they did refund the 2-3 week lagtime between install and shit actually WORKING)

     

    Oh, and the digital cable box, when we decided we didn't actually give a rat's ass about Digital Cable. They made me drive down to return the fucker to their office 45 minutes away, despite having a service truck in the neighborhood every other fucking day. They've also been calling lately insisting that we upgrade from analog to digital cable, and we finally agreed to when they said they'd provide the equipment for free and have it delivered. 3 months after that, they called and said "You need to come pick this up before we deactivate the analog portion of your plan." I told them to STFU and go away, we'd keep the analog, kthx. The day that stops working is the day they lose a TV subscriber.

    The very fucking minute I see a FIOS install truck working its way up my little utility line, I'm signing up for the most expensive plan Verizon has to offer, because they fucking deserve the money way more than Comcast does (and I like bandwidth)

     



  • @Weng said:

    "Aren't you going to activate my internet?" I ask him, knowing perfectly well I can do it with a phone call but also knowing that I fucking paid $10 to watch that cnut have to deal with the rig from hell.

    You're a spiteful one.  And you wonder why you get bad service.

     

    I want FiOS, but it's never going to come to my city and my building is too old to get it installed, regardless.  Like I said, Comcast is good to me, but I think it's partially because the infrastructure is well-maintained and the area densely enough populated that outages generate thousands of unhappy customers.  As far as bandwidth, Comcast offers 50Mbps which is equivalent to FiOS, so that's good enough for me.



  •  Periodically I would no longer have internet service (tv would still work fine).  After a call to tech support, a technician was sent out.  Hooray!  I've got internet service again.  This cycle repeated, and on the 3rd attempt I asked the technician what was the problem?    His answer:  Periodically a Comcast van would roam the neighborhood and check all the wiring and "tighten up the neighborhood" (his exact words).  They would install filters on wires to homes that did not subscribe to internet (apparently keeping the signal clearer).  And the technician then said that since the wire going to my house was unlabeled, they routinely put a filter on the wire which would stop internet signals from working... You would have thought that after a couple of calls they would have labeled the wire going to my house?   I asked him to label the wire and he said he didn't have any labels (they use these fancy plasticized ones).


  • Garbage Person

     Are you sure you and I are talking about the same Comcast? Their DNS servers routinely go out, affecting VAST SWATHS of their customers across entire regions. This is in spite of DNS being one of the oldest, stablest, and indeed simplest and most fundamental services and protocols in existence. If DNS is down, 999 times out of 1000, "the internet is down". I can't possibly fathom why in the name of god DNS could ever go down for any reason at all, but it does. I suspect they're fiddling with it in some unethical way.

    I have a daemon running to check Comcast's DNS once every minute just for my own amusement - I personally have my systems pointed to talk directly to f.root-servers.org (well, its IP) - because f is the most distributed of the roots - with the other roots as alternate failovers just in case of apocalypse. Comcast goes down for about 15-20 minutes almost every night.



  • @Weng said:

    Are you sure you and I are talking about the same Comcast? Their DNS servers routinely go out, affecting VAST SWATHS of their customers across entire regions.

    I personally run my own DNS server, because Comcast's DNS servers routinely go out, affecting VAST SWATHS of their customers across entire regions (except, of course, for those who're clueful enough to run their own DNS servers.)

    I suspect Morbs and anyone else who has anything good to say about Comcast in the greater Boston area does this or something equivalent also.  My initial network architecture prevented me from providing DNS service to my wireless segment, and my wife was frequently complaining about outages.  Since I put an internet gateway server in front of our wireless router/firewall, she's not complained once.

    I'd like to say I can't imagine trying to use Comcast for internet without either a local DNS cache or a local DNS server, but unfortunately my memory's good enough that I can easily remember.



  • Hear hear. I've been using OpenDNS to resolve that issue. I also have to power cycle my modem at least once a month.

    Oh yeah, and another thing - Comcast does this "speed boost" thing where connections get great speed initially, then they taper down as the download progresses. Great for loading webpages, but absolutely HORRIBLE for streaming video - any longer than, say, 10 minutes of video and I have to pause it to let it load. :(

    And the new webmail interface? Atrocious, to say the least...


  • Garbage Person

     Comcast's mailservers also fall over a lot. Then again, I use POP3, and they try to discourage that these days.

     

    And the "speed boost" thing is utterly irrelevant to me, because a second of 30mbit before it settles down to 22mbit just doesn't make that much difference in real, honest to god downloads (and DEFINITELY makes no difference whatsoever in loading normal websites because none of that content is THAT big). However, it seems they throttle the popular video sites in some manner, because despite my epic speed (which can pull down 1080p H264 faster than realtime) a stupid youtube video will require pause-play action.



  •  I think YouTube is also doing some throttling around 200KBps as well. I've had a lot of trouble with the same issue on Armstrong Cable's 5Mbps service.



  • @.*  said:

    ...what's been said so far...

    So is this kind of stuff why high-speed Internet access is still disproportionately expensive?



  • @joeyadams said:

    @.*  said:

    ...what's been said so far...

    So is this kind of stuff why high-speed Internet access is still disproportionately expensive?

     

    No, this is why high-speed access is so expensive:

    Two weeks ago last tuesday I canceled my (residential) Comcast TV. I also have business-class internet. When cancelling the TV I told the lady on the other end that I still have business-class internet service, and that I was concerend that it would be disconnected by one of their techs. I was assured specifically that the tech would simply come out and install a filter, and that my internet would only be out for a couple minutes.

    So last tuesday I came home to find my internet not working. I called Comcast and the tech on the phone said they couldn't contact my modem so they had to send a truck. The tech got there in about 90 minutes which wasn't too bad. He started to look at my modem and I told him about cancelling TV service. He said "oh" and went out to look at the pole. 5 minutes and one re-plugged-in cable later, my internet was up.

    On his way out he said "they called me all the way down from Everett for this," (I live in Seattle) "they could have had one of the local techs I passed on the way here do it".

    *sigh*



  • @tgape said:

    @Weng said:

    Are you sure you and I are talking about the same Comcast? Their DNS servers routinely go out, affecting VAST SWATHS of their customers across entire regions.

    I personally run my own DNS server, because Comcast's DNS servers routinely go out, affecting VAST SWATHS of their customers across entire regions (except, of course, for those who're clueful enough to run their own DNS servers.)

    I suspect Morbs and anyone else who has anything good to say about Comcast in the greater Boston area does this or something equivalent also.  My initial network architecture prevented me from providing DNS service to my wireless segment, and my wife was frequently complaining about outages.  Since I put an internet gateway server in front of our wireless router/firewall, she's not complained once.

    I'd like to say I can't imagine trying to use Comcast for internet without either a local DNS cache or a local DNS server, but unfortunately my memory's good enough that I can easily remember.

    Nope.  No local DNS caching and the DNS daemon I run is only used to add results, it still uses Comcast DNS as upstream.  Never noticed anything unreliable about Comcast DNS in my area, although I do plan on replacing it with my own DNS eventually since Comcast started redirecting all invalid DNS queries to their servers.



  • @Weng said:

     Comcast's mailservers also fall over a lot. Then again, I use POP3, and they try to discourage that these days.

     

    And the "speed boost" thing is utterly irrelevant to me, because a second of 30mbit before it settles down to 22mbit just doesn't make that much difference in real, honest to god downloads (and DEFINITELY makes no difference whatsoever in loading normal websites because none of that content is THAT big). However, it seems they throttle the popular video sites in some manner, because despite my epic speed (which can pull down 1080p H264 faster than realtime) a stupid youtube video will require pause-play action.

    I should point out I don't use their mail servers, so I can't comment there.  Is the "speed boost" thing some sort of client-side app?  Generally, that's how these things are implemented, with an installable app that "optimizes" the connection for snappy web surfing.  I don't use any of their client software (just a stock router w/ a motorola modem) and I've not noticed any weirdness with downloads starting very quickly (well, other than the Firefox "pre-download" thing).   I should also point out that I've never had any of the Bittorrent problems that Comcast is notorious for.  My torrent speeds only seem limited by uploads from peers and I can routinely pull over 1 Mbtye/s on torrent with sufficient peers.



  • I had the opposite experience getting DSL installed at the video game store my wife an I used to own. The pre-installation checklist they sent us said we had to have a Windows PC, and of course, we didn't. So the night before, I installed Windows on a spare hard drive in a spare machine. I wasn't sure I'd get there before the installer did, so I drove the machine to the store the night before and left a note that this was the Windows machine the sheet said they needed.

    The installer was actually completely clueful. I got there about an hour after he did. When I walked in the door, he told me that everything was set up and that he had connected the router they supplied to my switch. He handed me a sheet with the IP addresses, resolvers, gateway address, router password, account information, router configuration summary, and his pager number. He confirmed the connection was working with his laptop and had me configure the IP information into one of the Linux machines at the store. I confirmed everything was working on my machine as well, and he left.

    AT&T, believe it or not. Maybe I just got lucky with which tech they sent out.

    The Windows machine never got turned on. I still have it, and it still has that hard drive in it (though disconnected) ready to boot Windows should I never need it to.



  • @joelkatz said:

    I had the opposite experience getting DSL installed at the video game store my wife an I used to own.

    You probably got a business line though. For certain ISPs the bussiness and residential sides are actually completely seperate departments (to the point where residential doesn't even know what bussiness offers and vicsa versa).



  • @blkballoon925 said:

     I think YouTube is also doing some throttling around 200KBps as well. I've had a lot of trouble with the same issue on Armstrong Cable's 5Mbps service.

    That would explain why HD videos on Youtube have been doing the play, pause thing lately.  I thought it was just something with the route between myself and them, as my 4Mbps service from Broadstripe seemed OK everywhere else.



  •  Dang, I thought I was going to read a story about "I called my Internet tech support people and they knew what they were doing." That would be worth reporting.



  • @pitchingchris said:

    Yeah, same here. I know some people who have great Comcast service, and some just curse at them because they have to keep resetting the modem.

     

     Comcast has been acceptable for me. I went through several DSL providers first. I beleive when selecting any service provider, the major difference is the local people and equipment. The DSL folks could not seem to understand why I was unhappy when my connection would drop every time it rained. When people ask me for advice about this stuff, I tell them to ask their neighbors- Every company has it's horror stories, but if your neighbors have a good experiance, you probably have good local techs doing the actual linework in your area, and the rest of the batshit crazy stuff will affect you less. YMMV.

     No DNS Outage has affected me enough to notice, although it wouldn't be difficult to correct if it did. The web mail front end is about as bad as most web mail front ends, but I never use it.

     Last time I dealt with Comcast support was about my cable box. It was on its 3rd or 4th reset in the past month or six weeks, so I asked them to replace it. They agreed, and gave me a date the tech would be available. I was just about to leave for a few days, and this date was before I would be back, so I asked if I could reschedule for a later date. I was told that if I wouldn't be available on this date, I should call back and reschedule.

    This went back and forth for a little bit, and eventually I accepted the apppiontment. The tech asked "Is there anything else I can do for you?". I responded "Yes, I have a service call scheduled on the 20th, but I won't be home. Can I reschedule for a later date?". For some reason, this time the response was "Sure, I can do that for you".

     I wondered if some kind of stupid performance metric system they use for their call centers allowed to guy to get credit for two issues by doing it this way. But then I realized I don't actually care.



  •  @powerlord said:

    @blkballoon925 said:

     I think YouTube is also doing some throttling around 200KBps as well. I've had a lot of trouble with the same issue on Armstrong Cable's 5Mbps service.

    That would explain why HD videos on Youtube have been doing the play, pause thing lately.  I thought it was just something with the route between myself and them, as my 4Mbps service from Broadstripe seemed OK everywhere else.

     

    4mbps from Broadstripe, you say?

    I pay for their 12mbps service and lately it has been utter shit. A complete network failure 2 weeks ago took me down for 5 days, resulting in "No problems" on their end and a claim that my self-owned modem had failed. The modem was almost 6 years old, so I bit, and bought a new one. 2 days after I bought a new modem, the service went down and my modem log showed all-too-familiar T3 timeout and ToD Failure entries. Service came back up shortly afterward. A day after that, it went down again. That was two days ago. 

    We are currently on a standoff with Verizon (we have analog service and refuse to get The Works from them, so they refuse to run a new fiber line to replace the staticy copper line we have) so I can't get FiOS, thus Comcast is my only other option. I'm highly considering paying out the nose for the Business Class internet, but the 50mbps Residential looks mighty appealing (and I can even use the new modem I just bought). 


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