The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease

Following up on The Saga of the Comcast Internet Connection, yet another Comcast Technician was sent to my house today.

As some of you will recall, Comcast bought Adelphia in late 2006. Comcast has replaced everything from my network to the backyard cable tap. The house is filled with brand-new coaxial cabling, and we’re on our fourth modem and second router.

Our previous visit on the subject resulted in a line escalation to a Network Technician. He evaluated the situation in a consultation with a few of the technicians who have been sent out here. The diagnosis is that we are victim to a faulty cable node which may be affecting up to 800 customers.

Because Comcast’s local city WAN operates on a Tiered-Star network topology, they are unsure which node is the problem. It may be our direct feed node a few hundred feet away, or another one between there and the Head End. The Head End is a large network routing system with full server racks inside a building; it’s called Rattlesnake. However, it could also be a problem with the fiber from Rattlesnake to the first node or from the first node to ours.

As I had mentioned in my earlier posts, I needed a Line Escalation to a Network Technician. I finally got one today.

The notes on the work order indicate that this is the 4th technician to be dispatched on this issue; However, as the problem has been going on since last year, it adds up to more like 15.

So back in May, I was talking with one of their friendly-but-ignorant call center CSR’s and managed to escalate to a Supervisor named Kieth. He gave me his cell phone number and told me to call back if the issues continued; and they have.

So the Network Technician seemed well-versed in the problem at hand, but could offer no course of action except that someone should really fix it. The problem is that the Network Technician has to be at a customer’s home during the outage to run his tests; but they can’t stay here for four hours waiting (And it usually goes 4-6 hours between outages). He waited 20 minutes; Yesterday’s technician waited a full 30.

So today I called Kieth’s cell phone and advised him that the issues have continued (Keeping in mind they started in December 2006 after Comcast bought Adelphia). He promised to “Make some calls” and call me back within 30 minutes.

Kieth called back, having spoken with Comcast LMC (Read: “NOC”). LMC was suprised to find that none of my 15-20 service calls resulted in an escalation to LMC. So now we have to escalate to LMC, which unfortunately involves another service call on Tuesday from 5 to 7 PM. Fortunately, that’s a little closer to when the outages generally occur more often (7-10PM). The technician will determine my eligibility for something called “Contact Line ASAP”, which is a bad name; it should be “ASAP Contact Line”.

If I am determined as a good candidate, which is likely, I will be given contact info for Comcast LMC and “priority access” meaning when I call they will depatch a Tier 2 Network Technician immediately, even if it means waking someone up to come over. This way they have a better chance of seeing the outage and thus determining exactly where the problem lies, and it’s alot better than the 3-day delays I’ve been dealing with all year.

Amusingly, I found the phone number for LMC with a quick Google search: 866.292.9711. My Google search also revealed that this is Not an unusual problem for Comcast. The linked Comcast review on DSL Reports indicates others may be having problems with Comcast during the same time, on the same WAN segment.