Comcast Never On Demand
I’ve always had issues with my Comcast connection here in Pittsburgh. Typically I’d see 300 ms pings to servers which other connections would see 50ms pings to. That wasn’t all that big of a deal, but it was an annoyance, particularly when I was trying to download things and would get weird bursts and all.
This past week we’ve been dropping a lot of packets. Worse, every now and then our connection will completely drop—all packets will be trapped by the black hole that is Comcast.
So we called up tech support and got a couple of different answers. We checked all of our network hardware and directly connected computers to the cable modem to test, and things were still bad. Tech support sent out a guy to rewire our cable. He said the problem was definitely the cabling and he had fixed it.
I wish. Later that same day we had the same problems. We called tech support again and got a guy who insisted that it definitely was our cable modem. Today Mike went out and bought a brand new cable modem for us, because, as it turns out, Motorola offers no warranty on cable modems not purchased from them. Yes, you heard me. No warranty. All we had was Best Buy’s 6 months, and that was over. I can’t believe that hardware is being sold like that—especially such essential hardware as a cable modem!
Regardless, we try the new cable modem and… still have problems. We call up Comcast tech support again and the guy tells us essentially, “Oh yeah, it looks like an outage was reported on your area. We’ll get on that sometime.”
Argh. The only DSL company that offers service in our area is really crappy and more expensive that Comcast. But I hate Comcast so, so much.
have you checked out speakeasy? i’ve heard good things; it’s a bit expensive for the super-high-bandwidth packages though.
Careful what you do. Often it is six in one, half a dozen in the other. I have found (through all my various moving) that the ISP’s quality of behavior is dependent on competition. If the competition sucks, then there is no incentive.
Sometimes, as it is here in Rochester, NY, you get lucky. An ethical ISP that performs well. RoadRunner in other areas is simply abysmal, but for some reason, this franchise has kept its act together.
Good luck