It's Comcastic!
Always Connected, Always Online™
Today makes ten outages in nine weeks. Not just “you’re throttling me” or “you’re resetting my TCP connections at random”, either—I can work with those. I’m talking about total service interruptions affecting me, my entire apartment complex (twenty-odd buildings, who knows how many subscribers), and probably the better part of the city.
Today’s was from 7:05 AM to 10:36 AM. It’s not a cable break… at least, not a customer-facing cable. Broken cables act like weak antennas, picking up enough RF to give me some kind of signal on broadcast channels. I don’t get any of that, which leads me to believe that the cable is being actively grounded. I don’t get signals at all, TV or Internet.
On top of that, Comcast service is terrible. They’re 2 for 5 on having a supervisor call me back. The customer service reps make up details to give to customers. They offer meaningless solutions: one supervisor offered to send out a tech or refer me to the network group so they can test my line. “I was told earlier that this is an outage affecting thousands of customers.” “Right.” “So, how will looking at my equipment or testing my line help?” “Looks like we can have someone out Saturday…”
Bell South won’t sell me DSL without a land line. I don’t want a land line; my wife and I use cell phones, and it works great. The person I talked to said they don’t offer metered service or emergency-only any more, so I’ll have to buy a full local line ($20/month plus who knows how much in taxes) just to get DSL on top of it. For that price, it’s cheaper to grab the laptop, drive out to Panera Bread and buy a few meals a month to work while waiting for the cable to come back up.
Sucks.
UPDATE: Another outage, this time affecting only Internet access, from 4:48 to 4:58 EST.
UPDATE 2: I’ve gone ahead and made monitoring scripts that poll various things across my line and poll my cable modem itself. The resulting output looks like:
- Up from 2007-01-30 19:12:30 to 2007-01-31 02:42:20
- Down from 2007-01-31 02:42:20 to 2007-01-31 02:43:30
- 2007-01-31 02:42:40: Started Unicast Maintenance Ranging – No Response received – T3 time-out (code R005.0)
- 2007-01-31 02:43:13: Received Response to Broadcast Maintenance Request, But no Unicast Maintenance opportunities received – T4 timeout (code R004.0)
- 2007-01-31 02:43:17: No Ranging Response received – T3 time-out (code R002.0)
- 2007-01-31 02:43:22: DHCP WARNING – Non-critical field invalid in response. (code D003.0)
- Up from 2007-01-31 02:43:30 to present
It’s pretty cool.
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I have had comcastititis about 1year ago… Ordered Cable 6mbps… called tech support regarding a CONSTANT 12 -14% PURE PACKETLOSS on TCP , UDP, ICMP , etc…
-They claimed it was my cable modem… no problem… purchased a Linksys from Best Buy…. packet loss continues
-They claimed it was my Netgear FVS318 Router… no problem… purchased a Linksys Router from Best Buy…. packet loss continues
-They claimed it was still my router… no problem… installed a Cisco 2621 Router …. packet loss continues.
-They claimed it was my router yet again… no problem… Installed a Cisco 7505 with a RSP4 + .... packet loss continues.
The Cisco 7500 RSP4 + can handle 2.2mpps (Million Packets Per Second) and is considered to be one of the best Enterprise Routers that Cisco Makes….
Called to cancel my service… I was told service was cancelled…
1 Month Later; BIll comes in… I called and they said that they would remove the invoice from my account and RECANCEL the account.
1 Month Later AGAIN ; BIll comes in… I called and they said that they would remove the invoice from my account and RECANCEL the account.
1 Month Later Once More; BIll comes in… I called and they said that they would remove the invoice from my account and RECANCEL the account.
Month 4 rolls around…. Get a collection notice for all three months!!! .... Called them up… They have no records showing the account has been cancelled…. I asked for the account to be closed ASAP and to give me a confirmation number for the cancellation of such said services… Their remark was just TOUCHLESS !!!
“Sir, Comcast Does not have confirmation numbers.”
So i asked how can i make sure that the account is cancelled… and the remark was yet again comcastic!!!!!
“Sir, That is an easy one SIR … Simply hang up the phone and call us back… Once you get to a customer service REP , simply ask the the status of your account”
WOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
file sharing remains a nightmare with comcast. they continually throttle me whenever I start demanding downloads from bittorrent or other p2p file sharing progs.
Comcast slammed me on the BLACK LIST Feb 14th for what I was told was excessive downloading /abuse!. After a dozen calls I finally got the email addres to protest and was reconnected with the threat of “ABUSE” again, and I would be cut off for a year. It was claimed I had dl’s of 296Gb in the period I was checked. I am not sure if that download amount was supposed to be during a 1 month period or what specific time.
I never knew a certain amount of dl’s would get you slammed. Any info drop me a mail at panamared1951@yahoo.com I would like to be more in the know and COMCAST surely will not tell me.
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I’ve been trying for a long time to switch from Comcast after get more and more offline times in the recent months. The problem is that they have a monopoly over the Cable service in my area and Verizon are even harder to communicate with.