I’m not, repeat NOT, a Comcast fanboy. Far from it. But it did come to the rescue of one of my small business clients. In February, I posted about this client and their saga of slow DSL.

I am happy to report that I helped them successfully transition to Comcast Business Internet. So now, rather than having 134Kbps downstream, they now have about 2.5Mbps downstream. Granted, I’ve seen better speeds on Comcast, including my own Comcast HSI service… but clearly this is a huge performance gain for them. They are now paying less and getting better performance.

The transition itself couldn’t have been easier. I kept all their old DSL-based infrastructure active and intact while Comcast sent out an installer to bring in a Coax feed and set up their business router (I think it was a Comcast branded box built by SMC). Once I got the call that that task was completed, I scheduled a visit to their office.

To make the switch as pain-free as possible (for them as well as me), my approach was to reconfigure the Comcast router to use the same Subnet and DHCP ranges as their old system. That way, I would not have to reconfigure anything else on the network. I actually never was able to log in to their old router (a WatchGuard Firebox SOHO) because they had no idea of the login credentials, it was set up some years before I started doing support work for them. And I never found a good enough reason to go through the hassle of resetting it to factory defaults. No matter, it wasn’t rocket science to figure out the key bits of IP info I needed to more forward.

I had to call Comcast business support to get their router’s login creds, and within moments, I was logged in. The rest was a piece of cake. Just as I planned, I simply disconnected the old router’s patch cable from their workgroup switch, replaced it with a patch cord coming from the Comcast router, and everything worked. I told them to wait a couple weeks before turning off their old DSL service, just to be sure the Comcast service was reliable enough for them.