That company, you know the one

Fuzzy Cumulonimbus Cloud

So there's a certain company, that ends in cast and may or may not provide internet service.
I pay for 6 mbps, I receive 3.
I have a router, but I find it very unlikely that my router is halving the internet speed.
When I call them they say, "Is your internet working? Oh, then what is the problem?"
They then proceed to blame the router.
This is a common modus operandi for an ISP company.
How can I prove to them that either my router is not to blame or that it is on their end without installing their router system. They would also charge me to install their router system, but then I could "Blame" it on them.

I also have their router, just purchased on my own. There would be no difference by using their router.

corcorigan

Not getting maximum speed from providers is pretty normal. It's called the 'laws of physics' as BT put it.

This is why they have to say "up to 8mbps" in UK advertising, rather than just "8mbps".

Gdiguy

Fuzzy Cumulonimbus Cloud wrote: »

So there's a certain company, that ends in cast and may or may not provide internet service.
I pay for 6 mbps, I receive 3.
I have a router, but I find it very unlikely that my router is halving the internet speed.
When I call them they say, "Is your internet working? Oh, then what is the problem?"
They then proceed to blame the router.
This is a common modus operandi for an ISP company.
How can I prove to them that either my router is not to blame or that it is on their end without installing their router system. They would also charge me to install their router system, but then I could "Blame" it on them.

I also have their router, just purchased on my own. There would be no difference by using their router.

Why even tell them you have a router at all?

Hook your pc directly through the modem, test the speed that way, and if it's significantly impaired then call them again

Now, whether getting 3mbps when you're supposed to get up to 6 is significantly impaired is another question... especially on cable, it depends when you're trying to do this test and how many people in your neighborhood are sharing the same total bandwidth pool

Rhino

There a LOT of factors that will effect your true "internet speed" and can take a good deal of time (and skill/experience) to debug properly.

More then likely most consume grade ISPs aren't going to care. As long as it works they are going to say that's good enough and aren't going to go into detail in troubleshooting, just blaming it on your Router, Operating System, "electrical latency" and a slew of other BS.

Like the above poster said, you can plug directly into the modem (bypassing the router) and then troubleshooting it that way... but more then likely they're going to blame it on something else; like the firmware version of your modem or the latency of the metric ton of light as it passes though your outdated network card... or who knows what.

Try that, if that still doesn't work - see if you can escalate it to a manager... not a business manager, but a tech manager; he might be more knowledgeable and helpful in troubleshooting it.

Pheezer

Asking for a supervisor will not help you. When you call support you're not talking to Comcast, you're talking to a third party call center company called Convergys. When you ask for a manager, supervisor, lead, whatever, you're just going to get transferred to someone with the same training, but maybe a little more experience and therefore a lot more cynicism. Oh, and they'll have spent the last four hours talking to people just like you and will have absolutely no interest in helping you because they really don't have to.

Just disconnect your router and hook your PC up directly. Call up, do the troubleshooting, see where it goes. Odds are you'll just waste about an hour on the phone, get nowhere and give up like a good consumer should. There's really no light at the end of this tunnel, just be happy that you're getting 3 mbps and not less than 1. You're getting a pretty good level of service, to tell the truth.

Pheezer

If you want to see what the people who actually work tech support in those call centers have to say, go take a look at this board:
http://www.csdconline.com/index.php?board=15.0

I take no responsibility for what you find there or how you feel about it. It should mostly be SFW but fuck if I'm going to guarantee anything.

Blake T

Do you have cable or DSL?

The speed of the internet for DSL degrades the further you get away from the exchange.

Pheezer

He has cable Internet. Comcast provides cable Internet.

Zifnab

When you call support you're not talking to Comcast, you're talking to a third party call center company called Convergys.

Maybe in the middle of the night or when we're really fucking swamped, but otherwise you should be able to get through to a Comcast-run/Comcast-staffed call center, as far as I know. Now, where you're located in the country will determine how much they are able to do directly and how much they have to bump up the chain for, though. For example, to do a full connect for a customer, most centers have to put a ticket in for our advanced services because they have access to the provisioning software. In the Northeast, though, most frontline reps have access to that software directly. Each call center is surprisingly independent as to what training they get as well. It's a lot better than it used to be, though...

Now, on to your speed issue. Definitely try connecting the computer directly to the modem. You'll have to powercycle the modem to get it to connect to the computer--the modems bind to the MAC address of the device connected and will refuse connections from other devices until they are reset. If you have the voice service and thus have an eMTA, there should be a pinhole reset button on the back. Use that. For all the rest, unplug it, let it sit a few seconds, plug it back in, let it connect. See if that clears it up.

To be honest with you, it's pretty unlikely that the router is the culprit. I also doubt that it's the modem, but if you want to replace it, take it and the power cable to your nearest service center and swap it out. Don't tell them that a guy on the internet told you to do that, just tell them you want to change it. Once you get back home, plug the modem in and go through the provisioning (make sure a computer is directly connected at this point). If that doesn't work, call in and get them to provision it. Possible reasons could range from a slightly bad amp or splitter between your house and the tap, a slightly older tap on the trunk line, ingress from the guy down the street with a CB antenna, or some old guy stealing cable and pumping your node full of noise. Hell, a woman in Michigan set her treadmill up wrong a year or so back and backfed so much noise into the node that it took a whole neighborhood offline. There are probably 50 more things that could be at fault (entirely or in part) that I can't even think of because I don't have the access or the knowledge. Comcast is on a big campaign to clean up their nodes because of Digital Voice, but there's only so much they can do.

Oh, and remember that even if you can't pull 6mbps from a single source, that doesn't mean that your connection can't max out at 6mbps across multiple sources.

If you want to, PM me your acct number or your modem's MAC address. I'll try to pull it up at work and see if there's anything funky going on with your setup. I really can't guarantee that I'll find anything, but I'll give it a try.

Pheezer

Zifnab wrote: »

When you call support you're not talking to Comcast, you're talking to a third party call center company called Convergys.

Maybe in the middle of the night or when we're really fucking swamped, but otherwise you should be able to get through to a Comcast-run/Comcast-staffed call center, as far as I know.

Yeah, you know this probably isn't bullshit. I mean, those three or four call centers with a couple hundred agents staffed during daytime hours and half staffed graveyard crews proooobably don't take too many of the calls, right? I mean, it's pretty reasonable to assume that all of those centers are just for show.

Totally.

The thing about the "speed problem" here is, the company who provides you high speed Internet overpromises and under delivers as a manner of doing business. You're not going to get what you're looking for, no matter how much time you spend on the phone, but if you're going to try anyhow, at least play ball and disconnect the router and connect your computer directly because you're not going to get anywhere by fighting with one of their call center employees. They don't care and honestly, I don't blame them.

theSquid

Arguing with a tech support employee to keep your router in place or firewall on does nothing but piss them off, since no one is going to be trained in the peculiarities of the gazillion models of router/firewall out there - nothing to do with half-arsed training, for once. It's a waste of the tech supports time, since if he does help you with whatever he's learned about networks at his community college and he's caught, he's in trouble. The argument itself adds to his average call time, and leaves people in the queue with real problems waiting.
Removing the router from the equation is itself a troubleshooting step, since if everything works fine from there, then you know it's a router issue, and know to call the router's manufacturers tech support line instead of Comcast.

Sir Red of the Manti

As it turns out, you're not the only person to get annoyed with this company. I suggest using alternative contacts to perhaps get your problem heard by the right people. Of course, if they refuse to listen to you, I suppose there's always other people you can turn to for assistance.

DrFrylock

How do you know you're getting 3mbps instead of 6? The Internet is a big place and Comcast is only selling you bandwidth from your cable modem to their exchange. Anything beyond that is going through myriad other routers not owned by Comcast at all. You have a good shot at determining something like your maximum bandwidth by downloading a sufficiently large file from a server not-too-many-hops away from yourself, but even then you have to take the results with a grain of salt.

Fuzzy Cumulonimbus Cloud

So, there's nothing I can do but take it up the rear?

The router is identical to the router they will give me.

Doc

You could switch to DSL. That's about it.

eternalbl

Comcast service may suck, but to say that everyone working there will give you the runaround is BS. The reason they'll want you to disconnect your router is because they don't have experience with it and it quite honestly could be the problem. How dumb would it be if you ended up spending hours on the phone just to disconnect the router after and find that it IS the problem. If you go into it with the attitude that the person on the other end of the line is there to fix your problem, its no wonder you get nowhere. You have to go into it looking for help with your problem. On the other hand, Comcast is known for bandwidth shaping. Are you torrenting linux distros and its going slower than you'd like? Also, are you getting your performance numbers from multiple speed test sources or what?

Aridhol

Not sure how comcast does it down south but if someone were to call in with speed issues with my company and refused to bypass the router and try a couple speed tests they'd get ZERO help.

You know it's not your router? awesome. How do you know?
I know that it seems like the people on the phone are ass's but having worked in the business for 2 years and dealing with this on a DAILY basis we're just trying to eliminate the obvious so cut em a little slack.
If you bypass the router, connect direct in safemode w/ networking and your speeds are still shit it could be the modem, or more likely node saturation.

Ask the tech dude to check what the saturation is like on your card.

The cable company IS NOT out to fuck you over (at least not up here) but we aren't going to do shit without complaints.


Prove the problem, no router, multiple sources/pc's if you got em.
Call and explain what you've done, then follow their steps no matter if you've done it.
After you jump through the hoops they only have 2 options, check the modem (could be bad, not likely) or fix saturation issues (node split, more cards on the CMTS, node re-org e.g. put high bandwidth dudes with grannies who use shit all)


In short you need to do what they say until there is no other option except shitty network performance on THEIR end, arguing that it's not YOUR equipment without offering to prove it will get you nowhere and honestly I'd say about %40 of the time it IS the customer equipment.

Tomanta

I hate dealing with speed issues. HATE it. Because there's so many things it could be and even when *I* can see that it's something on our end (ping multiple modems on the node and they all have packet loss) I send the tech out who does NOTHING at all.

Then two hours later the customer calls us back.

Anyway, not sure if Comcast can do this but have them ping your modem. A lot (my tool does 50 at a time and I usually refresh it several times during a call). Get the min/max/avg ping times as well as any lost packets. Find out how the Receive/Transmit/Noise levels on the modem are. Have them check other modems on the node to see if they have similar issues.

Before you call: Bypass your router. Disable firewall. Remove any splitters you can on the cable line. Run speed tests at different times of the day. Then call them and do whatever they want you to do just don't give up. If it gets to the point where you've had a couple of techs come out that don't do anything, request they send a lead tech. Don't be afraid to insist on higher-level support (Tier 2, supervisor) if you don't think the person you are speaking with is helping you.

And realize it could actually be your equipment (including the wiring in your home).

Zifnab

One tip--don't call in and say "Hey, I did a speed test and I'm only getting 3 instead of 6, you guys suck". We hate those people, mostly because those are the people who are most likely to be dicks about doing any troubleshooting. Call in and say that you're having speed issues and give as much information about time of day, your setup, and type of issue (latency, slow load times, slow downloads, etc) as you can. There's no reason for you to name any numbers up front. Ask them to ping the modem. Heck, have them ping the node as well. Like Tomanta said, have them check the node's status and ping other modems on the node. To warn you, most frontline guys have no real idea how to read the node information beyond "is there an outage?". Don't be surprised by this, there's just no reason for them to learn to do it. Get them to put in a ticket for speed issues instead. This should get it checked out by people up in the plant monitoring group who are well-trained on those sorts of things. Go through all the hoops the guy asks you to do--bypass the router, try a different computer, disable firewalls/antivirus, etc, etc.

The key to getting all this done, instead of getting hustled off the phone, is twofold: First, be nice about it. Feel free to be firm, feel free to insist that this get taken care of, but don't get mad. That won't get you anywhere. Second, call when they're not busy. If you call at 5:30 pm, they're going to be in queue up to their ears and things will slip through the cracks. If you call at 11pm, yeah there might only be 20 people on the floor, but they're probably going 10-15 minutes between calls and will be a lot more willing to work this out with you. If the first guy doesn't, call back. Don't say "Hey, the last guy wasn't helpful", instead just tell him you called earlier and the problem is still going on/has gotten worse/whatever you want to say.

As for call centers, there's at least one and up to three actual Comcast call centers in almost every state they do business in that handle the vast majority of the calls in-house, as far as I know...