Comcast employee cancels my internet after receiving complaint

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I've never been too big a fan of Comcast. At the begining they were nice, but after a months their services just tanked. There would be packet loss at random times of the day, usually during around lunch till dinner time. The web would suddenly grind to agonizing speeds, leaving some sites to load fast and others to load dial-up slow. It was operating this way for months despite the numerous service technicians that had failed to fix the issue. The last Comcast employee identified line issues and permitted a line tech to come and try and resolve the issue. I guess that failed because again on March 19th there it was again, that nasty packet loss.

Before we go any further, here's proof I'm not just making this up. Here's the first time they came out, and here's the second.

I took it upon myself to visit Comcast's website (which ironically loaded slow) and discover their live support. I decided to fool around with them and entered the chat.

Jamie(Wed Mar 19 2008 19:43:26 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time))>

Hello Alex_, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Jamie. Please give me one moment to review your information.

Jamie(Wed Mar 19 2008 19:43:36 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time))>

How can I help you today?

Alex_(Wed Mar 19 2008 18:45:03 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time))>

rhetorical question: if you paid top dollar for crappy internet that slows to a grinding halt daily during peak hours, how many months would you put up with them for before you finally just cancel their craptastic service?

Jamie(Wed Mar 19 2008 19:46:11 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time))>

I am not sure, it would be up to the customer I suppose.

Alex_(Wed Mar 19 2008 18:47:10 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time))>

not really when there's a monopoly

Alex_(Wed Mar 19 2008 18:47:34 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time))>

of course I could go to 56k, I guess at this point even that's an upgrade

Sure it was rude but I was sick of their crappy service.

Literally seconds later; maybe even before I finished the last sentence, my internet shuts off. I use OpenDNS for my nameservers so at first I couldn't identify the issue. Later it was discovered that when you use Comcast's nameservers it redirected everything to comcast.net. There was a portal where you could choose if you were a technician or customer.

I remembered this part I thought, it was the page I had gotten when I had first installed my service and hadn't confirmed it. Oh shit did they really do that?

After being around 30 minutes late to his appointment, the Comcast employee arrived. After insisting the issue was on Comcast's end I was reassured it was my modem that was the issue. That is after running endless tests, the splicing many wires unnecessarily, and swapping modems for a brand new one.

When the new modem was installed, it was the same issue. I was almost certain that wouldn't solve the issue, and it didn't. In the end he ended up calling up a Comcast line that was for technicians in northern Chicago. The whole conversation was on speaker so I could hear the conversation clearly.

He confirmed that my account wasn't associated with that modem anymore and then asked the lady to associateship it. I forgot the exact term he used for it, but there was an exact word. After giving the person on the phone my modem's Mac and IP address the modem was authenticated once again and online in no time.

There were no issues with my modem, lines, or PC configuration settings. Every packet loss issue I'm experiencing is/was on Comcast's end. This was confirmed for a second time today and another line technician has been dispatched. I won't hold my breath for it to work properly.

I find it pretty ballsy of an employee to sabotage a customer's account. I don't have any direct proof of this, and I doubt I ever will. I just don't think the odds of my modem being disassociated with my account as I'm making fun Comcast very high.

For the record the employee was just doing his job by the book. He was pretty nice and did fix the issue eventually. He also confirmed the packet loss after testing wires on the poll (which he didn't have to do), and sent the line technician.

Xbox 360 Red Ring Of Death Fix

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Since the beginning, the Xbox 360 has been an extremely unreliable. Some reports indicate that up to 16.4% of them fail, while its competitors the PS3, and Wii are at 3%. Up to 60% of these failures were caused by the red ring of death. Team Xecuter has now come up with a repair kit which will fix the red ring of death. So far it's been tested and is still working on 18 consoles, both new and old.

The fix isn't the best solution as it requires you to open up your Xbox console to install it. It comes with the needed T10 and T8 screw drivers and each kit will cost $12.95. Considering opening your console voids your warranty, I don't think this solution is practical for the average user. However, if you're a modder, or even out of your warranty then this is the perfect solution.

I myself am quite skeptical of this fix. For the price, what could be in the kit? Not many details are given about it. I'm guessing it will be similar to X Clamp; thermal paste and some cheap hardware.

It has been an awful long time since we have shown any activity in the scene and the break has been much needed after a solid 6 years working at the top level.

Maybe it's a modders last ditch effort to get back in to the scene?

Edit, Team Xecuter has responded to some community concerns and changed the pricing as follows:

1 Kit $9.95 each
10 Kits $8.95 each
50 Kits $6.95 each
100 Kits $5.95 each

Also some points need addressing.

1. This is not any kind of X-Clamp or washers or screws or thermal paste or anything like that. It's not rocket science and didn't take months of development - more like 10 minutes

2. This is not sold as a permanent fix. You want that then get a new Xbox. All I know is that its simple, easy to do with little fuss and works on the boxes I've tested so far. It's impossible to say how long it will last for - only people actually giving it a try will be able to answer that.

3. Yes you could probably make this kit yourself. All I have done is made the kit to an exact spec in an easy to use and cheap package.

Thanks to Cybernet

Comcast Admits Bandwidth Throttling Under FCC Pressure

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For months now Comcast has been under scrutiny on how they ran their network and treat their customers. From their P2P throttling, to the invisible bandwidth cut off mark, there have been thousands of dissatisfied customers. Comcast, now under pressure from the FCC is being a little more open about how their network works. They've also changed their terms of service to reflect their "new" policy.

Standard torrent traffic is upload and download, meaning a user both uploads and downloads the file at the same time. Since Comcast has as many as 500 house holds on one node, only a handful of users can greatly effect network speed. When seeding (allowing people to download files off of you), multiple individuals on one node can clog up the network for all other customers. Comcast has in return came up with an algorithm to determine if customers are "abusing" their bandwidth. If a user uploads a file for an unspecified amount of time without downloading they will issue reset packets. This will trick your client in to thinking the connection was lost and stops the upload.

Torrents are an extremely efficient way to move large amounts of data across computer networks. Many Linux distributions use torrents to release large pieces of software, sometimes gigabytes large. This takes quite a load off the server as the file is downloaded off many people rather than a single location. So why is Comcast against such a brilliant idea?

It looks like it's time for Comcast to adapt or fail. With almost as many P2P users as TV show watchers, bandwidth usage won't decrease anytime soon. Bandwidth hogging services such as Xbox Live and other consoles, VoIP, P2P, and the transfer of large high definition media aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

As a Comcast customer myself, I definitely feel the lag spikes they're talking about. Usually occurring at peak time, web sites will load extremely slow - or not at all. I find what helps the most in these situations is steer clear of Comcast name servers, and opt for OpenDNS. However, penalizing paying customers for utilizing a service they pay for is wrong. Instead of blaming users, maybe Comcast needs to take a look at their network's topology.

Who’s Not Using OpenDNS Yet?

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OpenDNS was founded in 2006 and ever since then I've been addicted to it. Each time I'm diagnosing network issues I manually add the magic numbers for DNS. The four simple numbers are 4.2.2.1; forever embedded in to my memory. So why do I use it you ask it? For a variety of reasons. Mainly for speed, but there are others...

Faster internet speed

I use Comcast as my ISP. While they do have decent bandwidth, their DNS queries are slow and unreliable. The ping time is quicker to the OpenDNS server than to the Comcast DNS server. However, this might not be true for you. The recommended name servers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. I get faster results with the lesser known one.

Since OpenDNS is so large, it has the user base to cache millions upon millions of pages. This saves you an extra trip to a server to look up an IP. Their software relies on the webmaster to tell OpenDNS how long to cache their page using the Time to live setting.

Reliability

They have thousands of servers around the world ready to serve you. If anything goes wrong with one part of the network, a different part takes over. Using some of the most well known ISPs such as NTT, UUNET, and Cognet, there's virtually 100% uptime. When I use my default nameservers, sometimes I'll notice Firefox saying looking up google.com and delaying there for a bit. The page would then just load instantly. With OpenDNS both the query to look up Google

Phishing protection

Phishing is a common problem as the internet grows. Attackers will create domains that look similar to popular websites and then setup look alike sites to steal passwords. While the human eye might not recognize the slight differences in these phishing sites, OpenDNS has a blacklist of known phishing websites. It'll compare the website you're visiting to the black list and then prevent the websites content from being viewed.

Block adult sites

OpenDNS has an option to block websites deemed by St. Bernard to be indecent. St. Bernard is commonly accepted as a web filter at most schools and works; including mine. There is an option to add a custom logo for the blocked website to suite your company or family's needs.

Track website statistics

With the statistics feature it makes it possible to track which websites you've been to and how many times. It'll conviently place that on a graph or chart. A lot of people might find that to be a bad feature. However, that leads me to my next point...

OpenDNS data retention

Non customers like myself will have their IPs logged for 2 business days. Not bad considering other companies like Google will keep it for 18 months. A customer has an option not to log the data at all, as well as an option to just delete the data from their system completly. Neat huh?

Erase Your Search History

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In a world where the government can at any time subpoena search engine data it's growing more important for companies to think of new ways to protect their users. Ask.com, which has a history of innovation has a neat function called AskEraser. Since the most widely used search engine is currently Google, it's important for smaller search engines to offer such extra features. Ask has always been keeping us excited with features such as their thumbnail picture view and unique search results layout

It's important to remember that all the big players retain your search data when you search through their site. Basic information such as user agent, IP, and search queries are saved. So which company is keeping your data the longest? Google holds on to theirs for 18 months, followed by Yahoo who retain it for 13 months. In fact Ask.com is the only major player that will allow you to control data retention. It should be noted that if the eraser is not used, the data will be retained for 18 months - matching Google.

As well as subpoena's, your data can be compromised in a variety of ways. Many of the terms of service including Google's tell you the data may be sold to third party companies. AOL learned it's lesson after releasing the data of 600k users to the public. This so called "anonymized" data lead to the finding of multiple people who searched for very specific things.