Comcast NOT with the program....

Here we are on day 11 of Comcast attempting to fix the situation with my "Business Class" cable...

We are paying a premium for a service that is NOT being provided, and there is no end in sight. I called Bobby, the "plant manager" that gave me his cell phone last time I saw him here. He said that he was awaiting a phone call to find out about something pertaining to a node near mine. The phone call was at 2PM today, he told me he would call me back and let me know what was going on.......and here I sit at almost 10:30PM.....no phone call......am I surprised? Don't make me bust a gut laughing!

Joy, the local "corporate representative" called the wife today to do a "follow up" on what was going on and to make sure the issue was taken care of. When she was informed that the issue has NOT been taken care of, she was appologetic. I don't want appologies! I want what we are paying for!

I AM NOT PAYING FOR THIS! <----click to see the latest ping results! They are WONDERFUL, makes me all giddy inside....

I attempted to call Joy at about 6:30PM, but her office closed at 6...of course. So, I will attempt to call her tomorrow to see what kind of progress is being made. Meanwhile, we STILL have not heard any more responses to the wonderful people that we emailed, after they told us to email them. I still haven't gotten a response from Bobby. My wife is still dropping calls like they are hot plates. I am just so tired of this, you guys have replaced every single inch of coaxial cable in my house, from the pole to my house twice now. Your techs and your maintenance crews have seen with their own eyes that there is an issue. But, none of you know what is wrong or what to do now...... And stop referring to it as "packet loss"! Kripes people, I have less than 1% packet loss, that doesn't seem to be an issue. The issue is that I have to type a letter, put it in the packet, post it, and mail it, and wait for it to get back to me. I think even the USPS has you guys beat to my house right now for speed!

So, next time I call Comcast, don't tell me that your techs know what they are doing when I tell you what they need to do. Why? BECAUSE THEY OBVIOUSLY DON'T HAVE A CLUE!

Day 6 of Comcast.

Got up this morning at 8:00 to Comcast techs here to re-wire the entire house.  Last night they decided to check to make sure that we weren't getting interference off of old wiring.  Now we have nice shiny new cable in the house!  But we still have the same problem.  I think they're getting tired of us.  I know I'm tired of having people here every day. 

Now the Eustis police is here, since someone keeps egging DH's truck.  Fun times!

Comcast still can't get it right.....

Alrighty then! Today, I personally had a meeting with a new customer this morning and had to drive to Deltona. Wife stays home and works (well attempted to work today) as she always does. On my way back, I saw 3 separate Comcast maintenance trucks on and around my street. Well, I think, maybe they will finally figure out what in the heck is going on and get it fixed today! (I know, stupid me, that's what I get for thinking)

I then continued on to my job to finish out my work day. I asked Paulette what was going on at about 1, and she informed me that the internet had been down most of the day, and she was still waiting for a call back from the person she talked to earlier. Another wonderful thing about Comcast, don't EVER expect them to call you back, EVER. They will tell you that just to get you off the phone.

So, around 5 this evening, one of the maintenance guys knocks on the door. He asks if he can come in and see some ping results on the computer. We ran a few in succession, and kept getting good numbers across the board. So he proceeded to leave, but just before he did, he stopped and turned and gave me what appeared to be his personal cell phone number so that I could call him if there was still a problem.

Here it is almost 9pm, and I don't want to call this guy. He was a younger guy, and let me tell you, at that age (and this one) when my work is done for the day, the last thing I want is a phone call at 9pm telling me that the work that I did for the day did NOT fix the problem I had been working on. That, and work is done, it's my time to myself. Comcast isn't paying him to be on call for customers I'm sure!

Now, how do I know there is still a problem? Well, at first everything seemed just great. Surfing the web seemed fine, course it was after 5 at this time so the phone was turned off. So, no way to truly tell if everything was working as it should. Well, the next best thing to monitoring the line, turn on the Xbox 360 and hop on and play some online. After being dropped from 2 matches, and seeing my connection bars go back to the red and yellows, I turned it off and got some dinner.

After this I came back to the computer and proceeded to run a continuous ping to see if I could see anything. Guess what? I sure the hell did see something! My ping looks like a flipping roller coaster.

Here are the ping results to Yahoo.com

Or, if you aren't happy with me pinging Yahoo....How bout I ping you, my non-service provider?

Here are the ping results to Comcast.net

I personally like where Comcast.net does a timeout, has a mediocre ping and then wakes up like "Oh yea! That's what I'm supposed to be doing!"

I've been running pings like this to multiple websites and servers across the country for the past 45 minutes. THEY ALL SHOW THE SAME ROLLER COASTER EFFECT! I can let them run for 100 pings or 200 pings or more, and the results are the same. I'm good, good, good, bad, bad, bad, good, mediocre, good, good, mediocre, mediocre, bad, bad.....Hopefully you get the gist of what I'm pointing out here.

Comcast, if you haven't gotten the gist of it yet, I'll make up a little graph for you and hope that somebody there knows how to look at it and see it. But, I don't really expect ANY RESPONSE FROM ANYBODY THERE! I've gotten 2 responses to the ongoing posts to this blog, we've done what you've asked, we emailed the address you gave us. Out of the 2 total emails that have been sent to Comcast at the email address We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com. One email to Rick Germano at Ecare@comcast.com. One email to Frank_Eliason@cable.comcast.com. We got ONE (1) response from Mark_Casem@cable.comcast.com that states: "Hi Paulette - we have our local colleagues looking into this. We will have someone contact you as soon as possible today"

....email responses, those are just like those phone calls we are STILL waiting for....

I think the words "later" and "today" translate to NEVER when it comes from Comcast...

Another day of crappy Comcast connection...

Well, another 2 techs showed up yesterday. Another 2 techs that say, yep, there is a fluctuation in the signal. Maintenance was scheduled to come and work on it, but as far as I can tell, they did the same thing as the last couple of times they were here....nothing to fix the problem.

The problem STILL exists. I called Comcast on 3 separate occasions yesterday trying to find out what was going on. First at noon, to tell them that the problem is still not fixed. Second time at 4:30 to tell them that nobody had shown up to work on it, and that they had missed their 4 hour window. Third time at 5:30 to find out WTF?!?!? STILL NOBODY HERE!!

About 15 minutes later, the 2 techs showed up. They confirmed that the problem wasn't fixed and that the maintenance guy was supposed to be here to fix it.

Guess I'll be wasting more of my time today on hold as I wait for somebody new to chew on over the phone. This is just ridiculous! How bout you guys shut your business down for 8 days and see if you make any money. See how happy your customers are when you can't answer the phone, or when you do, you drop the call on them multiple times!

Get it together comcast! The problem isn't in the building, the problem is at the pole, stop sending me techs that can't do anything but monitor it and confirm that there is a problem. Send maintenance out here to FIX THE DAMN PROBLEM AT THE POLES!

Pinging Naples at 400+ ms is just retarded.... Way to work on that award for worst company EVER!

Still not any better.....In fact it may be worse.

This is the worst day by far.

It really stinks to go from High Speed to this.  I just want the situation fixed!  Being as I work from home, it makes it really hard to do my work.  I am dropping calls left and right.  I hope someone comes soon to work on it.  Its such a pain when they miss the window, because then it takes forever to get it rescheduled.

Comcast still sucking!

So, since Saturday, we've had a total of 6 technicians and 2 maintenance here at the house. Hell, yesterday, we had 3 techs here at the same time. Guess what? OUR INTERNET IS STILL FRIGGIN BROKE!

They can see the problem, it only took 3 different techs coming here to determine that problem! Yet, when I call to complain that our service is not working, the person on the other end of the phone insists that their techs "know what they are doing and are supposed to do" No they don't, hell I've had to tell each tech what to do to find out that there was a problem, so when is Comcast gonna start paying me for training their techs?

Yesterday they "found" the problem. But, they didn't fix the problem.... They have good signal on the pole a block away, and bad signal here at the pole that goes to my house. Do I really have to tell you morons how to fix this problem? RUN A NEW FRICKIN CABLE FROM THAT POLE TO MINE!!! GET WITH THE PROGRAM PEOPLE, AND STOP WASTING MY TIME WITH ALL THESE TECHS THAT DON'T KNOW ANYTHING!

One of the things that I find amusing...they told my wife to check the connection today to see if it was ok. But, if it wasn't ok, she needed to wait until noon to call??? Why? Tell you what, it's still not working here at 10 AM, I'm calling and rippin heads off.

Comcast strikes AGAIN!

These two screenshots were done less than 5 minutes apart.

Comcast pisses me off so much right now, I feel a migraine coming on.

3 days ago, we started having issues with our internet connection speeds. First noticed that there was an issue when Paulette started dropping calls on her VOIP work phone. Then I started noticing when I turned on the 360 and my lag was so bad, it's almost unplayable. I called Comcast and waited on hold for 30 minutes, somebody picks up the phone and then hangs up on me. I call again, and am told that the "business side" is closed, I explained that I just got through, but was hung up on, so I was transferred again. This time somebody did pick up and proceeded to tell me that their network was down, and that she couldn't help me with anything, check back in a couple of hours.

The next day, Paulette calls, and they have an automated response stating that there are multiple outages in the area, and expected repair time was unknown.

Today, Saturday June 5th, I attempt to play on the 360 again. My connection is like I'm on dial-up. People are warping all over the place, I fire a shot at somebody, see them round the corner and about 2 seconds later, they die from my shot. Instead of 3-4 bars of green connection, I am lucky to get 2 bars in yellow, and spend most of the time with 1 bar in red.

The problem lies in the fact that it is not like this 100% of the time. It has it's good moments, and it has it's bad moments. The bad moments seem to outnumber the good ones by a large amount though while trying to game online.

So, I call Comcast. I spent about 40 minutes on hold before someone answers. I explain to the person on the end of the line my situation, telling her that one second I can ping yahoo.com at 35 ms, and a minute later, I ping yahoo.com and get a speed of 300+ ms. She says to me, so you can't get on the internet? I said, no, I can get on just fine, it's just unbelievably SLOW! She tells me a tech can be here between 1 and 4 PM. This is GREAT news to me! It was about 12PM at this time, so I wouldn't be wasting the day waiting.

The tech arrives, and proceeds to spend approximately an hour here. He came in, sat at one of the 2 computers in the office and proceeds to run ping, tracert, and Comcast's own speedtest. Having the computer hooked directly to the modem (as it is usually), he was pinging and getting the same results that I was. He proceeded to do the speedtest on the web, and it was giving excellent pings. But, as soon as we went back to DOS and did the testing, it was crap.

After about 4 phone calls to other techs in the area, he decided to replace the modem. After that ordeal was done, no change. I say ordeal because he had to make 2 separate phone calls to switch out a modem, which meant 2 different times he had to sit on hold. He was getting great ping from speedtest, and not from DOS. Another couple of phone calls, and we had accomplished NOTHING! He basically said that was all that could be done, and that the last phone call was to "Level 3 Tech Support". WOW, REALLY??? Level 3 out of what? 3? 100? At this point, he left, and basically told me that it was as good as it was going to get. He said he would check the line outside, and walked out the door, got in his van, filled out some paperwork, and left. He never did check the line.

My problems with this whole ordeal is:
1) Don't have techs answering phone customer support that don't even know what "pinging" is!
2) The tech did what he knew how to do, and what he could do with the equipment he was given. I hear him say multiple times that, "Oh, we don't have those here." and "Yes, we have the tool, but what I need isn't "unlocked" on ours" WTH people, you are sending techs to go handle problems without the TOOLS that they NEED! Get with the flipping program.
3) The tech NEVER ONCE tested the line coming into the modem. Pinging to speedtest was fine, it only sends out one signal to ping back. Then it takes 1 minute for the process to run to show speeds. He only did this a couple times, and it always came back with good response. I just did 5 tests consecutively, as soon as one was done, I started the next. Guess what? First 2 showed great results, 31ms and 32 ms. Guess what the last 3 did?? Yeah, 116, 212, and 174....

Now, what do I do? The techs answering the phones don't understand laymen geek speak. The techs in the field are overworked, and don't have the equipment needed to do the testing that needs to be done. I have busted frickin internet, and all they can do is say, well, that's as good as it's going to get. But, when I go to get off the phone with them, they LOVE to say, "And thank you for choosing Comcast!" LIKE I HAVE A FLIPPING CHOICE???

Now send somebody here to monitor my line for 1 hour, hell I'll let you get away with half of one. THEN tell me there isn't a problem! Oh wait, they don't have those tools here... Just remember, not all of your customers are idiots that believe everything they are told, some of them do know their stuff. This is business class internet for a reason, there is a business being run here. If my wife can't answer the phone to run the business, then we don't get paid. Guess what? We don't get paid, YOU DON'T GET PAID! GET OUT HERE AND FIX IT!

I'll be calling again on Monday, since I'm sure I won't have a snowballs chance in hell of getting somebody on the phone line on a Sunday without at least an hour wait! And I don't have much more time to waste on Comcast! Don't believe me, check the previous fun we've had trying to get a Tivo hooked up!.