SpicyLemon's dashboard

If it's any consolation, you aren't alone. Here are a couple similar issues listed on this website.
Running out of business support
Trying to transfer our business internet service to our new office

As far as comcast's customer service in general goes.... just poke around at any of the other comcast threads going on this site.

The good news, others that have had the same problem as you (transferring business service) have had their problems handled fairly rapidly through this site.

Good luck!

Comcast doesn't care what you want or how good thier service is. Just keep sending them that check.

This was one of the major annoyances I had with comcast. I'd call up and complain that there my internet was out. Then, after it came back on, I had to call AGAIN in order to get a credit for that outage.

I never had any problems getting credit for times when my service was out but it was really annoying to have to call back in order to get it. They pro-rate the refund based on the time between when you reported the problem and the time that they show it was fixed. They won't issue the credit when you call the first time because they don't know (at that time) how long service will be down. Since their system doesn't have anything set up to automatically issue a credit after service comes back, you have to call in and request the credit.

It's annoying, but, in my opinion it's the only thing that'll cause them to actually fix some of their problems. That's all I could think to do; hit them where it hurts, their pocket book.

Even that's probably just wishful thinking though because a credit of $10-$15 every couple months is still just a drop in the bucket compared to their $700,000,000+ net income

I've been trying to fight my own feelings about the battle between Qwest and comcast for worst company. The best answer I could come up with is that at least Qwest didn't make me sit on hold for 30-45 minutes. Qwest also had a better track record for ACTUALLY fixing any problems I had. Neither are companies I'll use again though. – SpicyLemon, on July 18, 2008 16:34

I've been trying to fight my own feelings about the battle between Qwest and comcast for worst company. The best answer I could come up with is that at least Qwest didn't make me sit on hold for 30-45 minutes. Qwest also had a better track record for ACTUALLY fixing any problems I had. Neither are companies I'll use again though. – SpicyLemon, on July 18, 2008 16:34

I never got charged for any of the tech visits I needed. But, as stated before, that doesn't mean I didn't loose money by having to take time off of work, loose productivity etc.

Often, when getting a new modem, Comcast will enter in the new mac address and keep the old one there too. I don't know if they have an order preference though. I had a heck of a time when my old modem was damaged by lightning. I bought a new one and got it set up just fine but every couple of weeks Comcast's system seemed to forget that mac address and go back to the old one. It gets even more complicated if you bought a used modem. Their system can't seem to smoothly handle when the same mac address was once in one account and is now being used in another.

There is definitely something wrong with their system in reguards to changing modems.

I would also make sure to let them know that this has been an ongoing problem. Whenever the phone tech asked, "How can I help you today?" I would respond with, "I'll give you a minute or two to read through my log." It's always good to have them be as familiar as possible with your issue. Occasionally I'd actually get a good person on the phone that understood my pain and made the call 5 minutes instead of the usual 30.

I guess that was a lot of extra stuff... sorry. The main point is that I was never charged for any of the tech visits and that sometimes comcast's system forgets mac addresses.

They almost always told me they had to send a tech out. That tech then had to set up a maintenance tech. There was one occasion, though that I got so upset with them that they were able to skip the regular tech part. I think part of that, though, was the several regular techs that had been out recently.

"Why do I let them?" I thought the same question and here's the answer I came up with for myself. I had a very bad experience with Qwest (a phone carrier) and have an extreme prejudice against telephone companies. Therefor I was extraordinarily reluctant to go to DSL. I see now that DSL does actually have internet packages that are comparable to cable internet. If I had never had Bresnan cable internet before Comcast, I would probably have the same distaste for cable companies as I do for phone companies.

That's right comcast. You are on par with Qwest. Qwest randomly added things to my bill, but at least they provided the service I paid for and fixing any problems was a 5 minute process (as opposed to a 45 minute initiating phone call leading to a 2 month process and countless other phone minutes with comcast).

Looking back, I would take Qwest over comcast if the decision was necessary.

There's always the Better Business Bureau too.

Like I said before, "Don't let them bully you into buying a new modem." That's their scapegoat. They see that the modem isn't theirs and tell you that it's your modem that's the problem. That, and they love to blame your router. At least they'll deal with routers now. They used to refuse to help you unless you took the router out and hooked your computer up directly to the modem.

"Comcast is a very bad internet service provider with customer service representatives holding an IQ below average" - asd

Every now and then I'd get someone who didn't seem like a git. I'd say it was about 1 in 10 (yes, I had to make so many calls I can say that). My favorite was when I was told that "latency" is not the proper term. The proper term is "uptime." No wonder Comcast has so many problems. They measure "uptime" in milliseconds!

"I had a similar problem, it took many tech visits to fix it... ... ...Comcast loves to waste your time." - Robin

I second that. All in favor?

Aye!

I fought this problem for several months as well. The only thing that seemed to do any good was to always have a tech scheduled to come out. I would often tell them that I wasn't going to be able to be there but to check everything around the house and leave the pink slip in the door.

They got the packet loss problem fixed.... after who knows how many techs. Then I had to deal with a disconnect about ever week.

My advice is to bite the bullet and go DSL. You've still got a mountain of pain ahead of you.

If you're up for a chunk of poorly written reading, http://hot-rind.blogspot.com/

I feel your pain.

In the end... the only thing that stopped ME from having this problem was to move out of the comcast service area and get another carrier.... but that's not really a viable corrective plan.

"God this is a nightmare."

That really seems to sum up comcast pretty well. The best advice I can give you is to drop them and go with DSL.

Try this though experiment. Estimate the amount of time that has been wasted by comcast's "techs." Use that combined with your current wage to calculate how much of your money comcast has wasted in your lack of productivity over this issue. Add that to the amount you're PAYING comcast for their "service." Now you have an actual number for what its costing you to use comcast. Odds are, you'ld save more money (including lost productivity) if you switched to DIALUP!

As has seemed the case with this site, they'll actually handle the matter within a day or two. Then you'll have this warm fuzzy feeling because the problem is solved. Just keep this experience in mind the next time something goes wrong. You'll have to go through this entire process again to get it solved. It's not worth the increased blood pressure.

If there's one thing that comcast seems good it it's run-a-rounds.

The chat is nearly worthless. I once spent 30 minutes on it getting consoled before the tech even started actually addressing my issue.

If it actually was escalated then your problem should be fixed pretty soon. Just hope that you catch that call they promised. They're not always the best at re-returning calls.

Unlike comcast, I actually do have sympathy for your situation.

Good luck.

I can't believe it's been 8 days on this one and there hasn't been a response from Comcast. I was trying to give them a chance first but..... well... yeah.

First we need to troubleshoot our router. Next time this problem pops up, before restarting anything, try to ping your router, modem and other computers on your network. You could also try to open a shared folder from each computer and the control pages for the router and modem. We're just trying to see if things are still communicating.

To run ping test, fist look up the IP addresses of the devices to test. To do this on windows, hold the windows key and press the R key. Type cmd into the run dialog that pops up and press enter. You should see a black screen appear that says something along the lines of "Microsoft Windows XP..." This is the "Command Prompt." At the command prompt type "ipconfig" and press enter.

Something similar to the following should appear in the command prompt,

Windows IP Configuration

Ethernet adapter local Area Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix:
IP Address: 192.168.1.100
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway: 192.168.1.1

Record the "IP Address" so we can use it on one of the other computers in your home.

To do the actual ping test, open a command prompt and type "ping <ip>" but change "<ip>" to one of your recorded IP addresses.

To test connectivity to the router, try opening the router configuration. The most common way of doing this is opening a web browser and typing the router's IP address into the address bar. Most of the time the IP will be either 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1. You may have to look this up in your router's manual.

To test the modem, try to pull up it's diagnostics page. I don't know if this is universal, but where I had Comcast, just north of Atlanta, this was done by typing the IP 192.168.100.1 into the address bar of an internet browser. This also works for me here with my Bresnan Cable. In both cases I had a Motorola Surfboard modem. It's black, stands on end and has the Motorola logo above the lights. If you get some sort of Page Load Error, you'll have to contact Comcast and find out how to access the diagnostic page of your modem. Judging by experience you'll probably have to keep at it a bit before they'll tell you. Don't let them tell you that it's not possible because it is. Tell them you don't mind holding while they find out how to do it.

Here's how to interpret a ping result.
A successful ping has four lines that look similar to this

Reply from <ip>: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64

This is followed by a summary looking something like this

Ping statistics form <ip>:
Packets: Sent =4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 3ms, Average = 0ms

The interesting part of the results are the 4 lines and the "Lost =" part of the summary. If the four lines are anything but "Reply from ..." then there's the ping was unsuccessful.

If pings are unsuccessful to other computers in your home as well as the router then there might be a problem with your router.

If pings are successful to your modem, router and all your computers, your router is fine.

Second, let's check out the modem. This is a little trickier and will require help from comcast customer support. One of the catches with this is that ISPs have a nasty habit of blaming modems. They love to blame modems because they're difficult to troubleshoot and they're often not the property of the ISP. Even when the modem is being rented by the ISP, they like to say it's the modem so that they can appear to be doing something.

Here are some things you can do to test your own modem. First, make sure you can access the diagnostics page. Second, call comcast and verify the mac address of your modem. There's a problem with their system where sometimes it just "forgets" mac addresses. Be very pressing and have the double check that it's in the system and that it's set permanently

If the problem persists and you are renting your modem call them and make them come out and replace it. If you own you modem, tell them that you want to make sure it's your modem before spending the $50 to replace it. Don't let them bully you into buying a new modem.

Every time you have to reset your modem, call Comcast and make them run some diagnostics. Schedule a technician to come out and check everything in and around the house. Explain the problem but again, don't let them bully you into thinking it's your modem. Like I said earlier, they like to use modems as a scapegoat. Ask them what exactly happens that causes it to require a reset. It's difficult to tell whether your modem stopped talking to the comcast routers or the comcast routers stopped passing information to/from your modem. It's been my experience that 99.99% of the time it's the latter.

If you own your modem and comcast has made an actual effort to fix the problem and they still insist that the problem is your modem, don't buy a new one. Rent one from them for a month to see if the problem still exists. DO NOT let them take your modem. They have a nasty habit of saying that the modem is theirs even if it isn't.

If your problem happens even once, call them up and get huffy. Let them know that the problem has happened now with two modems, so it isn't the modem that's the problem. Schedule a tech to come out, check everything/pick up their modem and switch back to your modem. Also get them to refund you for the modem rental as you only got it because of their insistence that it's the modem that's the problem.

If you change the modem and you don't have to reset it for a month or two, then you've got a couple options. Either a) keep renting the modem or b) buy a new one and stop renting it.

As you can see I'm pretty skeptical of comcast and their troubleshooting abilities. Keep at it. Bug the crap out of them if you have to. Make lots of techs come out if you need to. For tech visits, make them find a time that works for you. Your time is more important than comcast's. You are paying them for their time. They are not paying you for yours (or refunding you for the time you've wasted on them). If they've been there a couple times and have noted that everything is okay inside the hosue, you can have them come out and check everything outside the house even if you're not there. Make them leave the slip in the door so you know they were there.

I guess that's all I've got. Good luck.</ip></ip></ip></ip>

I feel your pain Vil. For about a year, everything was in my roommates name. He owned the house so it made sense. However, I knew a lot more about the internet stuff than he did so I took care of it. I ended up having to have him call comcast and add me to the list of people authorized to make changes to the account. That at least let me do minimal "troubleshooting" over the phone with them.

If it makes you feel any better, I didn't get the feeling that comcast cared any more about my complaints when I became the primary name on an account. I had all sorts of complaints ranging from, "Why do you have to wait until 3 people from the same street to complain before declaring an outage?" to, "Why does your 1-800-comcast answering service put me in the sales queue after 11:00 pm when the sales department is closed and no one will be there to answer the phone?"

If internet's not your main concern I'd say you're much better off without comcast (and the headaches that come with it). It's hard to say that a $50/month crappy 6 meg/s cable connecting is worse than a $30/month 1.5 meg/s dsl connection. Plus I've got some major distrust of phone companies after some very shady actions on the part of qwest.

I feel your pain though Vil. All I wanted, too, was the service I was paying for.

Wow! That is uncharacteristically great service! Maybe they're actually trying now. Of course... it would've been nice if they could have gotten it right in the first place... without the involvement of managers.

But I'm glad you got your problem fixed. Congrats and good luck!

I had a similar problem with my cable internet. Sometimes it was perfect but when it acted up it was nearly unusable. And because the problem was intermittent, it was hard to prove that there was a problem. It always seemed to clear up just before "customer service" answered the phone and then come back after the call was over.

I ended up just having to get tech after tech out to the house until finally one showed up while it was acting up.

It was very frustrating to say the least.

At least you've gotten them to recognize that it's something outside your house. That was the hardest part for me. The only thing I'd know to do now is simply watch the problem closely and call them every time it acts up. I'd like to think that at some point they'd want to fix the problem instead of wasting time/money on techs. I often scheduled appointments and told them to call me first. When they'd call me I'd tell them I couldn't be there and that they should just check everything they can outside the house.

Best of luck.

I don't know if this is related or not but here goes. I had a problem several years back where one channel (15 I think it was) had very quiet volume on every TV in the house. It was drastically quieter. So much that I had to turn the volume all the way up and then it was still kind of hard to hear. It also had poorer quality than the rest of the stations. The video was usually a little bit fuzzier too.

The root of the problem ended up being that a grounding wire that was supposed to be connected to the cable system, wasn't. Outside the house, in the box where the cable came in there was a joint where the cable and the grounding wire were supposed to be connected. The grounding wire wasn't connected. As soon as they connected it, the channel worked fine.

Now, I'm not exactly sure how all the HD channels are sent but I know that often all the digital channels are sent compressed in the range of a few channels usually in the 20s or so. If you've got some low level channels that don't actually have anything on them, that's probably them. Anyway. like I said, I don't know exactly how the HD channels are sent but (in my mind at least) there might be a correlation between the problem I had and your problem.

I'd recommend trying to get a tech out there to do that actual work though. It might be that you just need to get a tech out there and while he's there, ask him to check the grounding wire.

I'm no expert. In fact, I wouldn't consider myself anywhere close to being an expert. I just saw that you had posted a day or two ago and hadn't gotten any response and figured I'd chime in with a past experience

Good luck

I'm glad to see something resolved. It's too bad it's so difficult to get the right thing done.

I fail to see how it is "immoral" to charge for a service before you receive it. As pointed out before, you pay before using any product from a store. You pay for tickets to events before you actually go in and enjoy the event. In most cases, you even pay for your food before you even know it's quality.

The reason you don't pay in advance for utilities such as phone, power, gas, and water is because those are metered. You pay for what you use. In the case of phones, though, I have seen it where you pay for the base service in advance, and any incidentals (such as texting fees) after using them. You do, however, pay for garbage collection in advance.

In the case of cable and internet, it has ALWAYS been the case where you pay in advance. If something happens and the service is not rendered, I have never had any problem getting a refund for the downtime. That's one of the few things that was ever easy for me to do with Comcast.

As pointed out before, your payments help cover other peoples lack of payment. The more services that are rendered without payment, the higher the payments of those that ARE paying. By charging in advance, the company can cut people off sooner for not paying.

Hospital costs are so high because hidden in your bill is additional charges that cover everyone that can't pay their bill.

I had this problem for several months. It turned out that comcast was loosing a lot of my packets (upwards of 10% at times). Since it was intermittent, comcast didn't want to believe me. I simply made customer support sit on the phone with me keeping a ping going until they saw it too. Then they'd send a technician out who would check the signal strength and replace the splitter. After the 5th technician in a month, comcast finally started looking at the equipment farther away from my house. I think I had to just get lucky and have the problem show up while the technician was there.

I ended up having to deal with several complete outages over the course of a week or so (while they fixed stuff?). Once over the outages the packet loss seemed to go away.

The reason my email stuff worked but not the browsing stuff was that the email packets were smaller and more fault tolerant. It just seemed like my email client was moving very slowly because it had to deal with so much lost information.

Browsing web pages, though, wasn't working because too many packets were being lost and the browser wasn't able to recover from it. It ended up just looking like webpages were down.

If you open a command prompt (start -> run: cmd) and type in "ping -t www.google.com" you can kind of test for packet loss. To stop it hold ctrl and press C. A "good" connection should only drop at most about 1 in 100 packets. So if you start to see stuff like "Request timed out" mixed in with responses, it usually means that information is being lost.