Comcast Business Internet: Bad Business Decision?

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ARGH Comcast suxerz strikes again. My blood boils when I know I’m giving them all my hard earned cash.

You nailed Chris! Comcast is so sucky! I tell you to move to Quest! I’m re-thinking of paying the $120 for bad Cable TV and Internet! Wishing I was in Orlando FL where Bright House Networks would have solve the problem long time ago!

It is good that guys like you have a little bit more clout than your average Joe.
Maybe you can talk some sense into them.

I have had a Motorola SURFboard for a few years and don’t have too many issues. I love this thing.

I do have a gaming package that is basically smaller packets and more sent. I love it. Shaw Internet in Calgary has been fairly good hardware wise. But their service waits to get a tech to your house is horrible.

Hey. Chris man that totally sucks! I had a similar problem with the wireless internet connection here on campus, I couldn’t log in to chat (kept tells me there was a security flaw and something about bubbles) I also couldn’t connect to any IRC client, Thunderbird, or Joost only to find out that the port that allows that kind of thing was blocked by the college. This isn’t the first time that I have heard of problems with Comcast, hell the website “The comsumerist” is simply full of horror stories (if you would like you can submit yours!) But at least you know you have a capable host(s) in wireless packet, Kat, Datalore, SWAT, etc.

Hey, I was that cable guy at one time in my life, only it was in Vancouver, Canada – where it rains a lot more!

The guy was right to nip the end off the RJ59 cable, as it’s not supposed to stick out more than 3mm from the connector. This is to help ensure it does damage the inside of the your coaxial device’s connector by becoming bent or burred and ripping it apart. The inside of the connection looks like so, )|( and as long as people haven’t been shoving “six cable” into your router in the past, you’re fine.

As for flakey cable boxes, I seem to recall installing all 5 of the digital cable terminals I had in my vehicle for the day in one home! None ended up working. This was common at the time (2001-2). It happens, new boxes or refurnbs.

Though I feel your pain, I suspect Comcast is like all the rest of the cable companies: understaffed and overworked. Might make your cable guy’s day if slip him a cup of iced tea and a “thank you”. Chances are he’s had a long day.

Good luck!

Ps. Never had a problem with any SMC network cards or their DSL modem/routers that Bell Canada uses. SMC…hmm… maybe it means Super Mega Cool!

doesn’t damage the connector…

Not a nice typo, but hey, it’s 2am… cut me some slack! :)

I had a similar experience and did not have an option to go for DSL.
At that time Verizon rolled out Fiber/ Fios in our neighborhood and I signed up for the same. Happy since then.

Good Luck.

The lesson here, I think, is “Don’t use their router”. They should be able to give you a cable modem with an ethernet jack and then you can attach whatever router you want to that and have complete control over it.

QWest and a Cisco 678 should solve your problems.

Chris, thanks for this info. We just installed comcast business at our office this week and I found this page when googling for answers as to why I couldn’t IRC from the comcast connection. I phoned comcast business support and they were aware of the issue with IRC and the Linksys cg814ccr modem / router and they’re having a technician come out tomorrow with an SMC gateway. Let’s hope it works for me as well.

Thanks for the tip.

Comcast Business is the worse, and considering its not cheap either I strongly suggest people stay away. They are down more then up it seems.

The problem with IRC is not a new one. I’ve had the issue with IRC for about 3/4′rs of a year now. if they are “aware” of the problem why aren’t they doing anything about it?

I remember not too long ago, the cost of a 1.5M T1 Circuit being 6,000.00 per month. Yes, 6k.

Look, people abuse Torrent and it ruins it for the rest of us. If you want to run torrent actively, then get a real circuit that is designed for that. When one person sucks the pipe dry and abuses (yes, it’s abuse because we ALL share the connection) it with torrents, legal or not, then don’t be suprised if you get blocked or slowed down or whatever Comcast chooses to do. You are paying what? 60-120 per month for an 8 to 10 meg downspeed? Hello, I mean that’s not bad for the US.

Let’s try to focus on the positive and remember the days of dialup and 28.8 modems. And let’s also remember that the Internet is riddled with variables. From operating systems, to hardware, to applications, the options are vast. Don’t expect Comcast to actually provide anything outside of the box. That’s not how the model is designed.

It is what it is. Keep it simple, suck it up, and move on. I am more than happy to pay 100.00 for 10m. Oh, btw, I use torrent just fine, I just don’t run it day and nut or abuse it to the point where I am on their radar. Believe me, if you are getting messed it, it’s because you are operating outside the normal spectrum. And I don’t mean legal verses illegal, rather you are forgetting that it’s a shared service.

For those of you that feel you should get the whole pipe and they should do this or that, well figure this. Comcast and all the other cables are riddled with debt upon debt. They are essentially state run operations where old school fat cats can suck off the troff. Why get upset about something that is what it is. Instead, figure out how to make more money so you can get your own 100M full duplex pipe right off the ring into your bedroom. It’s a far better use of your energy.

No harm, no foul.

Crack Google

Oh, and for all of you crying about IRC. Go read about Port Triggering. It’s not Comcast’s problem.

If they can ping you, then they don’t care. It is what it is.

I think this link:
http://chris.pirillo.com/2007/10/02/comcast-business-internet-bad-business-decision/

is blocked by Comcast. I have comcast business internet and cannot get to this page via that way.

I tried it via a different ISP and here I am. Interesting. Try it.
Stan
Coupeville, Wa.

Hi Chris, I know this post is over a year old, but I thought I would keep it going.

My issue is more with poor customer support along with bad hardware. Just plain horrible experience since i moved to the west coast of florida. Was on Brighthouse business class previously and while they had their problems on occassion, I was generally happy with their business class service. Not the case with Comcast. I am just holding steady waiting for an alternative in my area.

Shanno
Englewood, Florida

Comcast? what a joke.. three times in one month we’ve had problems with 4 business lines. The service people make you wait for hours before any help is given.

The report operators are rude and also un-helpful, if you want to keep your business going, stay the heck away from Comcast. This was the worst business decision I have made in twenty two years. Going back to qwest asap.

Ahhhhh….I dumped Comcast a few years back. They had threatened to cut off my service due to over usage so I just switched over to FIOS (happily).

Now, I agree with some people who have posted that people who are power users “ruin it for the rest of us” and all those sorts of statements. However, the only problem is that Comcast sold, and continues to sell, it’s service as an unlimited usage service. I specifically asked the sales person if Comcast put limits on the network usage and the sales person said that there was only physical limitations of the hardware that may vary ones access speed, but that there was no other policies to limit usage. That was a lie.

Whats more, when the Comcast secret policy called me threatening to cut off my service I called back their sales department pretending to be a new customer and asked them that same question again and got the same reply. In fact, when I told the sales and support team about the threat they didn’t even know that there was such a secret branch of their company that was monitoring network activity of clients and threatening to cut their services.

When I finally got around to contacting the Comcast secret police. I asked them what I did wrong. They said that I was using too much bandwidth. Again, I would not have minded such a statement provided they told me of such limitations prior to my purchasing their service.

Still, wanting to comply with their request I asked them what the usage limitation on my service was as I was unaware that there was any such limitation. They replied, “There is no limitation on your usage, you are just using too much”. So I asked them how much is “too much” and they replied “We can’t tell you that as it implies there is a limit on your usage, and there is no limit on your usage, you just have to use less or your service will be terminated.” So I asked them how much less do I have to use, and they answered the same “We can’t tell you that since there is no limit on your usage.” So, I asked them how much I was currently using and they said the same thing, “We cannot tell you that within the context of this discussion as it would imply that there was some limitation on your usage, blah blah blah”. The conversation was silly.

Now again, I don’t mind it if a company tells me ahead of time that they have some caps on usage, and even if they want to be a bit unspecific about it and say that the caps vary depending on the location. That would be fine, but they did NOT do that and as far as I have heard they still do not make that clear to people. On top of that, they insult my intelligence by saying something stupid like “…we have no limitations on your usage, but if you don’t use less we will cancel your account…and we can’t tell you how much less, or even how much you are currently using because that would imply we have some limitation on your usage…just use less or we will cancel you”. I mean, that is really what got me mad.

Now, all this is kind of silly, because the people that Comcast gets mad at them are normally power users. Power users tend to be the people that other people go to for computer advice. I have personally gotten over 40 people (friends/acquaintances) to switch from Comcast to a different service. And I have little doubt that my continued efforts to let people know how bad a company Comcast is has had an effect on people all over the web (moreover there are many of these types of power users that have been angered by Comcast). So, what good does this type of power user targeting have for Comcast. Other than a short term gain, there isn’t any. Just as soon as FIOS is available in a comunity people will jump ship (the Comcastantic). I think with the economy the way it is and with all the bad news about Comcast service on the web and with all the new competing services, Comcast is going to have ever increasing problems. It is not enough for a company to do the right thing when they are running into hard times (like they may be doing now). They have to be willing to do the right thing when they are at the top of the market as well. Comcast didn’t do that and thus they will continue to pay for their past excessive abuse upon their clients. It’s sad, but honestly I will be happy when Comcast is run out of business. That is how much I dislike this company because of what they put me through (most of which I am not mentioning in this post).

By the way, I have many other criticisms of Comcasts service and support, but there are plenty of people who have had similar experiences (nightmares) on the web that can tell you all about that. So, I won’t go there.

I would also love to give you a full comparison between Comcast and say FIOS. FIOS blows Comcast out of the water for TV, Phone, and Internet. I can’t say I like Verizon much as a company, but coming from Comcast I can’t say anything bad about FIOS. The transition was like nightmare to day. FIOS is so much better that it is silly to even compare the two services (particularly since the prices are about the same). There are plenty of people giving users this comparison online as well. So, I won’t go there either.

My only point is that this has nothing to do with some reasonable limitation on power users (as some other posters suggested). It has to do with Comcast pushing their service as an unlimited usage service and then selectively over-targeting power/moderate users to boot them off their service (in an effort to save themselves the costs involved). Comcast simply wants to say that their Cable service has no additional limitations when compared to a competing services (like FIOS or even DSL). So, Comcast makes ever effort to claim that there is “no limitations on usage” (like they told me many times). That approach is just a lie. That is all that it is. It doesn’t matter whether someone third party person can explain why they think such a limitation is reasonable since Comcast is still unwilling to publicly say such a thing, and rather Comcast choices to continue to say the exact opposite (that there are no such limitations on usage). I mean, how can you say that such limitations are reasonable if Comcast is going to condemn you for even suggesting that such limitations even exist. That is the problem that I am talking about here. Comcast would rather lie to its clients then recognize that they have limitations (reasonable or not, they say they do NOT have such limitations–at least when I had their service). If you don’t believe me then simply call one of their sales department representatives and ask them.

Mind you, I also have a problem with Comcast being unreasonable in it’s targeting of power/moderate users. I would also claim that Comcast has to accommodate it’s share of power users just like any other service (they can’t just have all the grandma’s and threaten anyone that is even a moderately user–which is what they do to cut the cost of maintaining a quality network throughput). Services like FIOS have no problem servicing even the greatest of power users (let alone moderate users).

I mean, if Comcast can’t at least service some power users (or at least moderate users) then why would anyone pay for such a service to begin with. I mean, such is just a measure of the overall throughput of the Comcast network. In other words, they have a lower overall throughput than other services. I’d say it is deliberately lower as it keeps the costs down for Comcast (servicing only grandma’s users). Why would anyone want such a service? Sure if you have no other possible choice then what can you do, but if you could get FIOS or even a good DSL connection then why would you bother with Comcast? For instance, FIOS outshines Comcast in every possible conceivable way. There is nothing, zero, zilch, that can be said to answer the question “Why is Comcast better than FIOS?”. So, why would you every even consider Comcast unless you just had no clue whatsoever about your available options? It is such naiveity that is keeping Comcast in business these days, whereas in the past it was simply that they were a monopoly in most areas. So, don’t be naive, dump your Comcast service for FIOS as soon as you are able to do so.