Comcast Situation Escalates

As many of you know, I’ve been having trouble with my Comcast Internet connection since Comcast bought Adelphia sometime in late 2006. This post follows up on my progress, or lack thereof.

Yesterday, a Comcast Technician arrived for a service call and replaced the exterior coaxial cable and placed us on a different port on the cable tap. He believed this to be the final resolution, though the connection dropped again 15 minutes later and four times within the hour.

So yesterday we called and spoke with some Comcast call center supervisors, who are evidently empowered more than a standard phone lackey only in that they can add “As my rep informed you”. I demanded a Network Technician be dispatched as yesterday’s Home Technician informed me I would need. They denied my demand, insisting that a Network Technician can only be dispatched by a Home Technician. There was discussion about setting up a follow-up appointment today, though it was never confirmed.

So today I was home for lunch and the same Comcast technician knocked on the door just as I started typing out a blog entry on the subject; damn the timing. This time he thought he’d be original and ran some signal tests - As they do upon every visit - Though today he got creative and hooked his signal tester up to the coax through a splitter to monitor the network as it went down, while we took it upon ourselves to crash our own Internet connection through a variety of simultaneous methodologies:

- Downloading a 30GB file from the major Telecomm we work for
- 47 non-stop pings to different parts of the world
- Downloaded Windows Server 2008 June CTP from Microsoft Connect
- Downloaded several generic Linux images, then deleted them immediately afterwards as they’re useless except for testing the connection
- Ran simultaneous speed tests on SpeedTest.Net and DSLReports.com
- Turned on the webcam stream for lunch
- Downloaded the results of a Google search using a trial version of TelePort Pro

We were able to sustain 2MBps (Yes, that’s mega-BYTES — 20Mbps (mega-BITS) if you throw in a stop bit and parity bit), with bursts up to 4.1MBps (41Mbps - I pay for six!). The test ran continuously (and continually for those which had to restart) for 30 minutes. The best we could induce was consistent ping timeouts and a modem reset. We did not manage to cause the Cable light to go out (taking service with it) as generally happens in our tetra-hourly outages.

The techie suggested it may be due to the splitter he added and an adjustment he had to make to the amount of resistance on the line. He also planned on a meeting with his Supervisor regarding this very issue, and how it doesn’t reflect poorly on one technician when he has repeat service calls when other technicians get repeat service calls for the same address. He also reiterated his position from yesterday that it may be a network issue.

I just hope I manage to fit a digital camera into my budget before they start tearing up the neighborhood. That’ll be great; the biaxial cable from the tap to the local node is 200′ long and goes under two houses. Furthermore, based on the shape of our backyard, parts of it must be at least 10′ deep.

Regardless, for those of you who have noticed occasional site outages, that’s why. I serve my main website directly from my home.