My broadband died abruptly at 1:33 PM Tuesday the 16th. After rebooting the modem a couple of times, I called tech support at Xfinity/Comcast. One does not get the opportunity to speak with a human. There is a canned protocol which told me essentially to do what I had already done before I called. I hung up and called back; apparently they keep track of trouble calls. I was asked if I was still having trouble after rebooting my modem, and I punched the appropriate number.
Next I got a “text chat”, called “Comcast Care Chat” with a tech person, Cassandra, “a live chat agent in Knowville, TN.” Then there was a long and drawn out back-and-forth over what lights were lit, were there any splitters or amplifiers inline, etc. Most of it was like the attached image, with me having to scroll up and down in order to make sense of what the tech was saying. Some went to (4 of 4), but never in order.
Eventually she scheduled an appointment for a service tech for today, Thursday the 18th with a 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM window. I got two or three phone calls and a couple or three text messages daily, including this morning, with the option to cancel the appointment if my issue was resolved.
The service tech arrived shortly after 1:00, and I told him I had hooked up a spare cable modem and it couldn’t get a signal, either, and that I thought that I wasn’t getting a signal at all. He asked to take a look at the modem, which amounted to tracing the cable back to the wall. We walked outside, and he looked back toward the utility pole in the northeast corner of my back yard. I also told him that the house next door had been on the market for a couple of months, recently sold, and the new neighbors started moving in last Saturday. The former owners had satellite TV, but the dish had been removed. Then he went for his extension ladder, raised it to the pole and climbed up for a look.
From the ladder he told me, “Whoever came to hook them up (pointing to the neighbors house) unplugged you and plugged them in. That’s just plain lazy. We’re supposed to check the surrounding addresses for active customers. I don’t guess he did.” He explained that he was going to have to put in a splitter at the pole, because there was no vacant connector, and he would have maintenance come out soon to upgrade the terminal box for more connections. They would remove the splitter afterward, but I wouldn’t be affected.
I told him that when I signed up for Xfinity in May of ’17, I never saw a tech. I just got an email telling me when to check for connectivity, and it was live when it was supposed to be.
The tech said, “I’m going to replace everything, including the cable from the pole. I’m going to mount a weathertight box and make the connection in it, and reroute your cable under the eve and drop it down the wall and through. That should have been done when you signed up. I’m also going to check the work order for the neighbor and find out who disconnected you.”
He was thorough, efficient, definitely knew what he was doing, and finished in about half an hour.
I’m paying for 75 Mbps download, and in December of ’17 I got a free upgrade to 100 Mbps. Speed checks from time to time showed between 95 and 105 Mbps. After the tech finished, he said I should be getting a better signal than before. After I got back online, I ran several speed checks from three or four sites. The lowest download speed was 169 Mbps, the average is 172 Mbps. My upload speed average is 11.7 Mbps.
