OT: COMCAST Sucks - Really Bad

There are few things in life as unreliable as Comcast Internet service. ...well, maybe Comcast customer service? It's at least a close second.

For the past 3 weeks, the internet here goes up and down, every few minutes. Often, it is out for hours at a time, and never up for more than about 10 minutes steady at a shot.

Each time we call the repair line, we get a recording saying there's an "outage" in our area and that they're working on the problem. Yeah, right... for 3 weeks? (This is a top-20 market, plus the girl I spoke with on the phone said the outage only started yesterday....) In a word: Clueless.

This morning, we get an "update" saying the problem will be fixed at

11:32 AM.

Anytime I see arbitrary precision like that I immediately think "bullshit". Especially from a cable TV company. Hell, they can't even schedule an installation any finer than "noon-to-5", and even then, they miss those appointments.

I even offered to fix it for them. How difficult can it be??

As expected, 11:32 came and went and still no fix. It's probably just a script: "caller_time + 2.75 hours.."

Luckily, I have an in-person meeting with some folks at the FCC later this month. I intend to file an in-person formal complaint. Not the same bureau, but maybe it will do some good. Comcast has a cable TV monopoly here -- yet they are clearly doing NOTHING to fix this problem. It's just one line of shit after another, after another, after another.

We've already placed our order with U-Verse, which only recently became available in our area.

Bye-bye Comcast. I hope you go belly-up quickly and put us all out of your misery.

Oh, and before I forget, maybe it's not such a good idea for you to put a recording on your REPAIR line hype-ing how f^cking great your new Infinity service is, with it's 15MB/sec download speeds. Blah..blah..blah...

How 'bout we take baby steps first and get google.com working?

What idiot at Comcast thought it would be beneficial to hype their wares on a REPAIR line, where it can be resaonably expected that customers are having problems?!!! For example, if I'm calling to report a problem with my internet connection, the last f^cking thing I need is a suggestion to go search for a solution online.

I wish I could paste their audio file here. Their instructions on how to reset Internet Explorer are not even possible - the suggested commands don't even exist on the menu bar.

Idiots!! It's really pretty astounding how stupid these folks are.

-mpm

Reply to
mpm
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Hey, things are looking better.... we're up to 64 kbps, but it's still very intermittent. That's kilobits. And actually, the average is still roughly half that.

They are now 5 hours past their highly "precise" repair time of 11:32 AM.

Reply to
mpm

Hey, AT&T sucks too! My DSL at home was intermittent for 3 months. Three times they had me stay at home so I could let the repair people in (in spite of the problem obviously being outside) and three times they no-showed. I finally had to get a dedicated pair, unshared with voice, to fix it. It fixed it simply because it was another pair.

At the cabin in Truckee, we have Suddenlink cable internet, and it hangs up a few times a month, which messes up my webcam and remote automation stuff. The fix is to power cycle the cable modem. I added a mechanical timer to shut it off for a half hour every day at 3 AM.

Don't get me started on their "speeds as high as..." rate structure. They never deliver what you pay for.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

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At your end, maybe, but I've had no service problems with them, at
all.
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Reply to
John Fields

No; DSL just slows down if the bandwidth is limited. It got really noisy, even on POTS, whenever it rained. So it was intermittent for our whole rainy season.

Not so much extra, but they do charge for another pair. It's not a "high speed pair", it's just another twisted pair. It can't go any faster than the old pair did, 1.3 mbps, limited by distance to the C.O. The difference seems to be entirely waterproofing.

Seems like a consumer fraud issue to me. They advertise a service level and never deliver it. You seem to imply that I am a sucker for ordering DSL. Makes no sense.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

AT&T sucks here, too, but not because of the repair people. They fix cut lines due to gardening just fine (who buries wires less that 2" deep?). ;-) OTOH, I had a modem fail and they decided that I was too far from the CO to get 1.5Mb DSL, so downgraded me to 768K before figuring out that it was the modem. It's a good day when I get half the 768K.

I had ComCast in VT (bought up the remains of Adelphia after they flamed out) and they were pretty good. Great speed and fairly good service. I then moved to Ohio and had TimeWarner. The speed was OK, when it worked. It took forever to get service when it didn't.

Reply to
krw

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

We had the 'Line Noise' that affected our Verizon DSL. Took a few months for them to find and fix it. You would only hear static and a hum when it rained hard. Was told to call before it rained. I said, 'If I could do that, I wouldn't be calling you!' ;D It wound up to be a major leak in one of those overhead 'lumps' where they splice the wires. A whole area was out while they fixed it, It's been running like a charm since.

Cheers

Reply to
Martin Riddle

In , John Larkin wrote in small part:

I occaisionally get the speed I pay for. In my experience, speed varies more with where the content is coming from than anything else, close second place being time of day.

This makes me think that most of the bottlenecks are upstream of my service provider, with exception of their incoming e-mail server.

Servers at remote sites can only deliver so many megabits or gigabits per second, distributed among perhaps hundreds or thousands of simultaneous customers. It appears to me that some remote sites have a single server and a single Internet feed and hundreds or thousands could be downloading content from such a site simultaneously.

Also, what if my ISP's local feed is to 250,000 customers paying for 10 or 15 or 20 MBPS speed? Can they receive terabits per second to distribute to their customers? Even though only some percentage of those 250,000 are ever actively receiving content simultaneously, as opposed to being not online or viewing content already received, can the ISP local branch receive and distribute 50 or 100 gigabits or whatever per second it takes to keep their customers receiving at their into-the-home rates?

What about connections to specific foreign countries? How about between USA and China, Japan or Germany? At how many Mb/s can I receive a datasheet for a part made by Osram or Telefunken or Nichia or a Chinese manufacturer, during working hours of most American engineers?

I pay for 5 megabits/second download speed. I just now tried the speed test at:

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Using the San Francisco remote site, I got 4.7 Mb/s. Seattle got me a report of 5.05 but I think that figure was from a finishing sprint, with the "meter" appearing to me to average about 4.5. A 2nd trial with Seattle was a solid 5-5.06. LA was cranky, but by a slight majority indicated 5-5.06. Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Washington DC, and NYC came in as 5.04 to 5.11 Mb/s. This was a little after 8 PM EDT (same asd AST) (effectively 4 timezones west of UTC) on a Monday.

I get such speeds from some other remote sites most of the time, but most remote sites are slower than 5 Mb/s in my experience. It seems to me that my average is more like 2-3, and I have had to deal with datasheets coming in at .1-.2 or even .06.

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 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)
Reply to
Don Klipstein

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Just tried that test here.

2.71 down, 1.32 up. Not stellar, and slower than we're paying for, but MUCH better than earlier in the day. Still, by tomorrow, Comcast will back to a crawl.

Earlier in the day, I had an upload that reported 8 kbps. That's right. 8 kilobits. Makes me miss my old 64k dialup.

Truthfully, the Comcast Internet service in our area is completely unsellable. They are probably hemorrhaging customers in our neighborhood.

-mpm

Reply to
mpm

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11.19 Mbps up, .97 Mbps down.

Using the Comcast server in Jacksonville, Fl.

My contract was advertised at 4 Mbps when I signed up with Earthlink, via Brighthouse.

--
It's easy to think outside the box, when you have a cutting torch.
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

15.18Mbps download / 5.88Mbps upload, Cox ...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

They offer 40.0/10.0, but the price is too high.

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It's easy to think outside the box, when you have a cutting torch.
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

21.85 Mbps D/L, 4.81 Mbps U/L, Comcast server, Elmhurst, IL
Reply to
Bert Hickman

21.48 Mbps dn, 25.33 Mbps up, Verizon FIOS, Plano, Tx
Reply to
John S

Interesting site. Choosing LA, which is the closest, I get about 1.2M download, and about .4M upload. About what I would expect from basic DSL...

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie E.

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Then you're not very perceptive.
Reply to
John Fields

Try a different server and repeat the test. I get a better speed to the server in Cincinnati, Ohio than the Jacksonville or the other Florida servers.

--
It's easy to think outside the box, when you have a cutting torch.
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Any time you'd like to talk sense, I'm ready to listen.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

I did better than I thought. .6Mb down/.25Mb upload to the Atlanta site and .25Mb download/.05Mb upload to Seattle.

Reply to
krw

You can find the closest server to a website that is very slow to download, to see if it's just an overloaded web server or a backbone problem.

--
It's easy to think outside the box, when you have a cutting torch.
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

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