Comcast Internet Problem: Part II

That is odd that Comcast requires its business customers to use the router that they provide you. I work at a local cable company in my area and we simply supply our businesses with a modem running at the speed they are paying for. We do not hard-code any MAC addresses into the modem so they are free to use whatever equipment they would like. I do not know why Comcast would want to limit its business users to using a sub-standard router. The router should be the consumer’s choice. Also, because the router is provided by the consumer themselves, it is their responsibility to support it or get support for it through their router manufacturer. Since we don’t provide it, we don’t have to support it. I would think that philosophy would make sense to Comcast as well. I guess not…

What was the Netgear model?

Wow…. yeah, the Comcastic experience is sucktastic. We had frequent internet disconnections, and it may have been the router or modem. Sometimes it just required a trip downstairs to reset the router or modem, but other times, it was out for good. We had several days of internet outages. I think that if you’re paying for bandwidth that you can’t use because Comcast is down, it doesn’t make any sense to send a BILL for a technician’s time. If anything, the bill and compensation for downtown should cancel out.

At any rate, we got fed up with Comcast having horrible service and jacking up the prices, so we’re on Verizon FiOS, their competitor. Great way to stick it to the man: tell the whole world about your less-than-perfect comcast experience.

Time to play our song again, Chris.

Problem is, Comcast is big enough it doesn’t care who it bullies. They do cheap stuff like this all of the time. Skimp on the stuff that makes the difference, and try to charge you extra for changing it. LAME.

Glad to hear you found a good service person, that always makes life much easier.

We’ve had the exact same problems with Comcast before, except down here in Houston. I’ve wasted days of productivity due to their service.

Thats weird, comcast let us use our own router, we only had to use their modem

Chris, my hats off for the guy that showed up at midnight last night for the fixing of the router issue. Really, I laugh myself when I heard Kat saying that Comcast came to your house. I never would expect this to happen. That has to prove how special you are for the biggie Cable TV provider. E-Ya!

Moved to Comcast a year ago, but researched first and ordered D-Link DCM-202. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16825112104) As per the reviews it runs “hot/warm”, but it runs like a champ: I’ve tested downloads @ 7M+. At these prices I keep a spare 202 in the cupboard…. it came in handy when a Comcast CSR/tech challange “my hardware” during a Comcast outage. Dumped Netgear 5 years ago when they cound not connect to a ADSL dynamic IP address.

COMCAST left my wife and I without cable service for two weeks. The first week they had half service… days were off while evenings were on. They were working on upgrades in our area. It was inconvenient, but survivable for most residents. When they finished working in the area… VERIZON showed up. They trenched all over the place installing their service. They just happened to have cut the COMCAST cable. It took my wife and I a WEEK of phone calls to convince them to send a technician to make a twenty minuet repair to return our service. Oh yea, we live in an apartment complex… and several families were without cable service. The technicians on their help(less) line were in another state. They continued to tell us they were doing upgrades in our area. We explained the upgrades were completed and VERIZON had cut their service. I’ve written COMCAST, VERIZON, the State Corporate Commission and the City of Manassas, VA. NO SERVICE is unacceptable… especially for a week!? We had to beg repeatedly to speak to a senior manager and were often put on hold for up to twenty minuets before they’d hang hung-up / drop our call. I am not happy with their service center staff. They only seem to know what’s on a computer screen and do believe the customer’s comments? The local service guys were GREAT… when finally dispatched. The repair / troubleshooting technicians are great… it’s just convincing the help center you need help is the BIG problem! This centralized help center (covering many states) is a HUGE mistake. At least they were in the USA and spoke clear English… and wasn’t outsourced to India, Bangladesh, etc. Maybe that’s next?

GRrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!

Chris;
I have had many problems with Comcast in the building I live in because one tech adjusts the TV or Internet for a occupant and others are adversely affected by the adjustment. Examples are too much power on either TV or Internet. A good check I found, thanks to a tech person, is to open my browser and type in 192.168.100.1. This provides a log of activities and various signal levels. Hope this helps someone.

One reason the support folks you call are different than the service guys, is the service guys are contracted.
I had a crappy experience with some support people, too.
It wasn’t until the last upgrade that I was told Comcast doesn’t even have contact with the service workers (so they say). All Comcast service is done through private contractors.

Chris Pirilloran across an all too common problem in the IT sector - lousy support, with Comcast being the louse of the day. I can relate to his experience - I’ve had many, many encounters like this with Comcast:

My brother had intended to switch to the all in package (cable, internet, phone). well the stopped the phone and comcast hasn’t moved in to setup phone access and the fee to reattach the phone is outragious, so we are without a phone. it has been 4 months that I know of. The truley troublesome thing is that there building is 3 miles away. They are practicaly neighbors, but we still don’t have a phone.

He is actually referring to the SMC Commercial Gateway. It is a router and modem in one case.

We had an intermittent loss of our Comcast cable internet. We had to unplug power from our modem, wait 20 seconds and plug it back in to restore service. This would happen every 4 to 7 days, and the problem continued for almost a year. At their suggestion we tightened connections, replaced cables, substituted a different router, and even bypassed the router by connecting one computer directly to the Comcast/Motorola modem and using Windows’ internet connection sharing feature. The problem persisted.
Finally, we convinced a Comcast repairman to replace the modem. He connected an RCA modem instead of the Motorola and it’s been smooth sailing ever since!
To be fair, Comcast tech support were always polite and tried to help, and they credited us with a month or two of free internet service along the way to compensate for our ongoing service interruptions.

Comcast is forcing me to consider DSL again and switching to a satellite TV service. Since Comcast has taken over the Houston cable market from Time Warner cable the costs have gone up while the quality of the services and support have declined.

I see DSL and Dish Network in my very near future.

I to fell for the BS and stalling and after 34 days of excuses and dissapointment I called the (local) main office and in my frustation I slipped with the F word and the ” I’m too busy to deal with a foul mouth” lady receptionist put me in contact with THE business manager. (finally!) Now, after 25 min. worth of phone brawling and taking up his valuable time got me a months free credit and a new cable to the house. It wasn’t the netgear gateway after all.

I am on AT&T Yahoo DSL. Yes, ADSL. Supposedly they have no caps, and their router/modem combinations (by 2Wire) are fully reconfigurable. Fully. Actually, its overall neat that they have the router and modem in one box. They don’t (seem) to cap at all. They don’t flash your router with firmware, as I don’t even think they even can do that over a special phone line. But the connection works, man. It works. The only problems I have right now with that router is that over wireless it won’t assign IP addresses to certain OSs.

I would switch if you can…

I was one of Comcast’s first internet users in my area. I started with the Motorola modem which they provided. I bought a Linksys router, which they did not support. They still had the policy that if you had multiple computers you should pay for multiple IP addresses. Then when they upgraded to DOCSIS 2.0 I went to buy my own Motorola Surfboard modem. I’ve built on that initial set up to include an 8 port switch and WAP (both by Linksys). This setup has been working fine for years but occasionally I do suffer disconnects. Once Comcast admitted that they mistakenly blocked the MAC address of my modem. Since that time, I am skeptical whenever I have a disconnect and call Comcast then, suddenly my connection comes back without me doing anything to reset my modem or router.

My point here is, that you’re better off researching the home networking hardware available and getting your own. It’s a better alternative than relying on the stuff that some salesman pitched to the ISP.

This issue manifested itself today as I was set up last night with the Comcast Netgear business modem, coming off a residential account. All initially went well until today I was on a conf call on Vonage line #2 and my wife dialed out on Vonage line #1. Next thing I know…both our calls are dead…her call didn’t complete and I got booted off my conf call.

I started unplugging and replugging stuff in…I called Comcast local (Denver) business support and the guy had never heard of anything like this…so I called Vonage and they said “Well, you might not have enough bandwidth.” I was just about to freak out as I saw my entire night being lost to troubleshooting this issue when I came across your post. I immediately called the Comcast sales rep who orignally hooked me up with the business account and was shocked to hear that I had received a Netgear as he said I should have received an SMC.

So, now I wait for the new SMC router to arrive…and hope that it makes this issue go away. I’ll post again with final results.

Talk about big brother … go to be at night and wake up with your internet service changed to a new site that does not work. You would think that before they stuff a change down our throats, they would make sure it works! Well … I’m not waiting, Quest sign us up!

Comcrappy is upgrading their format - and, now, my personal webpage doesn’t work . The tech said this is a “national” problem with no time frame for when it will be fixed and then he closed out my trouble ticket! Also, email stopped working - had to change all passwords all of a sudden, and Comcrappy techs would not support Outlook.

I am aslo having a running probem with Comcast in my condo building in South Florida. This area has always been an issue for signal problems and now in 2 different units off the same tap we have Comcast internet disrupting wireless routers and we have to refresh the ip address to get the service working again. I can only assume that since if you are wired to the connection it stays up it might involve a timeout or wireless vs wired connection feedback that creates the problem.

Mine is a linksys router on a Toshiba cable modem

I think most of my internet problems comes back to poor service and a lack of competition. Call your local city franchise office and make them aware of a chronic problem and they will at least give you better lip service.

All,

It is comforting to find others who had similar experience with Comcast. My experience with them has been very unprofessional. First of, the service is terrible and is not stable at all. I am an online instructor and the gateway has led me to cancel my class twice already from home. Customer Service does not communicate that with you and always say that they have sent a technician and have had times when nobody showed up. I have already called support so many times and finally decided to get rid of the gateway and use my own router and their modem thanks to some of you that suggested that.

Hey all, Vonage contracts its tech support with Endeavor. I have been a tech with Endeavor and, to work for them, you have to have 2 mil worth of liability insurance, a laptop, cell phone, and a telephone test set. They pay you a set fee per call and expect you to give them 50 miles before they give you any additional compensation (right). Also, they have an online training video, which is essentially a joke. In my area it seems that they are having trouble recruiting and keeping techs (no wonder). I try to help the customer all I can (within reason), but there are time limits because Endeavor does not take kindly when their techs reschedule calls (to spend longer at one site if necessary). All the ‘benefits’ of outsourcing are for the top shelf, and being an ‘independent contractor’ sucks when you add everything up. These companies should go back to basics by providing their tech(s) with secure employment, a van, and proper training, but you (the customer) wind up getting that THEY pay for.

I had a similar problem when I went to Comcast business, I upgraded from Comcast home. When I first had it installed it was very flaky. I would get intermittent connectivity and speed. VPN, XBox Live, and Vonage were all terribly affected. I troubleshot with their technicians and we determined it was a bad Netgear cg814ccr Cable modem, which they promptly came out and replaced. After it was replaced I still had poor VPN performance (both Cisco VPN, Juniper SSL VPN) as well as poor XBOX live. All of which worked perfectly with Comcast Home internet service. Again I called and worked with their technicians, they verified the firewall on the Netgear was disabled, but it turned out to be Smart Packet Detection on the Netgear which was causing all the problems. They shut off Smart Packet Detection and everything has worked perfectly since. The symptoms I saw with this were most clear with Ethereal, showing severe packet loss (retries galore) when VPN’d, but clean as a whistle when not VPN’d.

I’m 90% sure it was the smart packet detection causing you issue as well.

Comcast Internet And Phone Line They don’t flash your router with firmware, as I don’t even think they even can do that over a special phone line .Comcast Internet Problem Part II Chris Pirillo. naked DSL” which requires no local phone line. If your local DSL provided offers naked DSL, you should definitely go with that over Comcast. Comcast has . wtf?you should fore go the Internet and get into an English class and learn .

I called comcast 3 days ago because my phone and internet went out. They said there was some sort of short, and it would be fixed within one hour. It turns out there was no short at all the customer service representitive was just too lazy to take the call. Comcast is a horrible service. Even when it is working I get random ~5 minute disconects. If we had another high speed provider here I would switch in a heartbeat.