Comcast Line Tech Finally Dispatched

Last I heard from Comcast, I was being considered for Contact Line ASAP pending an escalation to LMC. There was to be some deliberation and I was to be contacted within 24-48 hours of Thursday 2PM.

48 Hours passed, and I called to check. No progress had been noted on the account. Finally today (Sunday at 5PM) another Tech arrived. This one was not only a Line Tech, but a Supervisor as well.

I let him in, he gawks in awe at the raw beauty of the upstairs computer lab, and he runs some tests as they always do. Yet this time he found a distinct spike in packet loss (Recorded as “Bit Error Rate”). Evidently they strive for a BER of < 1.0×10^-9 - Roughly translated, one error per gigabit transferred.

My BER was chillin’ at the -9 mark as usual, but then it started getting higher; Which is to say, the errors per billion increased while the bits between errors decreased. There was an outage in progress.

Should I chalk this one up to the Supervisor doing a better job and catching something 20 other techs missed? No, it must be the timing. Even with a tech hooked up to the line while we transferred gigs of data on a previous service call, we were unable to generate an outage on-demand. Today, one struck at the right time by sheer luck.

So finally, Supervisor Bill says he will be sending a Line Tech (”Network Technician”) crew out within the next two days to run tests on the (Thicker, bigger, faster) biaxial cable that runs from the backyard tap to the node across the street. They will be looking for BER, attenuation, and signal reflection in an attempt to determine whether the biaxial cable itself is the problem.

If the biaxial cable is determined to be the problem (i.e. water intrusion, damage from trees, etc), they get to dig up the neighborhood and replace it. Otherwise they have to run tests on everything else between me and Rattlesnake (our Head End) to figure out what it is.