Comcast Connection Conundrum Continues

We had a small thunderstorm again last night. It wasn’t even a big, fancy, exciting one; just some cloud-to-cloud action with some rain and rolling thunder. My Comcast Internet connection went down, of course.

My connectivity issues have been intermittent since Comcast bought Adelphia so many months ago. When it was Adelphia, there was never a problem. Since the buyout, I’ve been seeing many problems; the outages average 5-10 minutes in length and 4-6 times a day.

Comcast has sent over a dozen technicians so far, and none of them have figured it out. Allow me to walk you through the obvious troubleshooting process:
1. Check signal. This is done on every service call. The signal quality here is so good that it’s been commented on by technicians both on-site and at the call center as “unusually good”.
2. Replace the modem. This has been done three times; we’ve had two used modems and two brand-shiny-new modems.
4. Eliminate any non-certified splitters which have a SNR lower than the commensurate packet loss ratio tolerance of the modem. Every splitter in the house has been replaced by a Comcast technician.
5. Replace the coax from the modem to the wall. This has been done twice.
6. Replace the coax under the house. This has been done and took some time.
7. Replace the coax in the wall, connecting the cable segments mentioned in aforementioned steps 5 and 6.
8. Replace the coax from the house’s outer foundation wall to the neighborhood node box.
9. Start tearing up the neighborhood.

They’ve gotten as far as step 7 and seem afraid to proceed beyond that point. Every time these people come over, I explain the following points:
- Everything you want to do has been done by multiple Comcast technicians already.
- When the Cable light on the Cable Modem goes out, it’s obviously a Cable outage. So stop trying to blame my router and home network.
- The problem is intermittent and occurs mostly outside of your business hours, so don’t think you can predict when a 10-minute outage window will occur.
- Everything in this house from the modem to the exterior foundation wall has been replaced. Time to go outside and tear up the neighborhood. These people just don’t get it.

First they sent a subcontractor, who arrived in his El Camino and left his maglite. He left in a hurry to get to his other job, as he was late.

Next they started sending contractors, who arrived in more impressive-looking pickups with coax spools. These are the guys who run signal tests; the motivated ones generally replace the modem and in-room coax.

One day I was suprised to see they sent a full-fledged Comcast employee; he even had a real Comcast-branded van and everything! As he was being paid by the hour as opposed to by the job, he took the time to replace all the coax in the entire house.

The last service call was a Line Escalation - Basically the regular technicians give up and send a supervisor to figure it out. His answer was they can replace the modem and run signal tests, but that’s it. Thanks alot.

So tomorrow we have another one scheduled. I’ll let him run his tests and replace whatever he wants. But he isn’t leaving until he replaces the cable that connects the house to the neighborhood node, and at least looks at the node itself.

Then when it goes down again (and it will), I’m gonna go up three levels of supervision and talk to a manager at their call center - Clearly the regular supervisors aren’t helping. Perhaps then I’ll see results.

Oh, yes; and I frequently see a group of 3-5 Comcast technicians huddled around a large Comcast routing box on a nearby major intersection. they even set up their Comcast van with the flashing orange light, blocking half a road of traffic. They show up once or twice a week. Next time I see them, I intend to wander over and ask what exactly it is they do here anyway.

Sadly, my only real alternatives (DSL, Satellite, stealing WiFi from the local coffeehouse) are equally unreliable. Zomg what can I do?