[Discuss] Cable Modem Woes / Looking to Compare Notes

[Matt Shields]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 8:33 AM, Rick Umali <rickumali at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I'm looking to compare notes with people who use Comcast Internet.
>
> For the past month or so, my wife, who works from home, has complained for
> fairly regular outages with our Internet. We live in Arlington, and the
> outages happen typically between noon and 4 PM. The outages are of a long
> duration (sometimes seconds, sometimes a few minutes). She's begun to
> become very familiar with the light patterns on the cable modem, and she's
> not technical at all.
>
> When our TV began to exhibit tiling, we called Comcast, and the technician
> determined our signal wasn't strong enough. He put in new coax "from the
> pole" to the side of our house.
>
> A week or so after that, we contacted Comcast about our cable modem issues,
> and another technician came out, and said the signal to our cable modem was
> weak, and he took the coax from the side of the house and directly
> connected it to the cable modem.
>
> However, the outages continue to happen. Now Comcast has suggested we
> replace the cable modem. We're hopeful this makes our Internet stay alive.
>
> Has anyone had any similar experiences? My big fear is that replacing the
> cable modem won't fix anything. The other cloud hanging over me: the first
> technician said that the coax in our house walls are of an older
> generation. He recommended that we replace it, but it's something an
> electrician would have to do.
>
> Thank you all for any thoughts on this matter!
> --
> Rick Umali / www.rickumali.com
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>

A few years back I had a lot of issues with Comcast and they kept saying
there was nothing wrong.  I always have something like DynDNS setup so I
know my home IP address, so I setup Pingdom.com to monitor my home internet
connection and alert me.  I used those graphs to prove to Comcast that
there service kept going down and managed to get 2 free months of service
because of all the problems.  After that they came out and fixed the issues.

Matt