Is something going on with Comcast? No recent posts hating on them.

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philb2

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 26, 2021
Messages
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Just wondering.

I have Comcast, and lately the service has been pretty reliable, except when we had these "atmospheric river" storms.
 
I have an annoying thing where twice a day, usually about 10 hours apart, my modem resets and I lose internet for about 45 seconds.
Then it reboots and everything is fine.

Otherwise because I pay their fucking ridiculous fee for unlimited data and my own hardware, they don't seem to care that I use 5+ terabytes of data a month, so we're cool.

Wish I had more than 40mbps upload though.
 
TheSlySyl said:
I have an annoying thing where twice a day, usually about 10 hours apart, my modem resets and I lose internet for about 45 seconds.
Then it reboots and everything is fine.
Click to expand...
Which modem? Maybe it's a modem issue, and not (!!) a Comcast issue.
 
philb2 said:
Which modem? Maybe it's a modem issue, and not (!!) a Comcast issue.
Click to expand...
ssssshhhhhh, don't let them hear you say that, or they will probably cancel Sly's service, just out of spite...

Is that hateful enough for ya ? Cause if you have a few hours, I can list a about a 1000 or so reasons why I hate them....
 
It's an Arris SB8200.

It worked flawlessly for years. Problem is, if I call Comcast they'll berate me because I'm not using their equipment and blame my modem no matter what the problem is. (I think it's a line issue). I'd rather just deal with 2 minutes of down time a day than their atrocious technical support.
 
TheSlySyl said:
I have an annoying thing where twice a day, usually about 10 hours apart, my modem resets and I lose internet for about 45 seconds.
Then it reboots and everything is fine.

Otherwise because I pay their fucking ridiculous fee for unlimited data and my own hardware, they don't seem to care that I use 5+ terabytes of data a month, so we're cool.

Wish I had more than 40mbps upload though.
Click to expand...
So what exactly are you downloading 5+tb of worth per month? That's basically unheard of for the average home user even when Warez monkeying. If you need more upload too might be time to go to a business line like most people do in your situation.
 
GoldenTiger said:
So what exactly are you downloading 5+tb of worth per month? That's basically unheard of for the average home user even when Warez monkeying.
Click to expand...
4K content isn't small ;P

I still have service drops but not as bad. I just recently "quit" them so I could rejoin as a new customer since loyalty means jack S#!+, got 200mbps or maybe 300 but my neighborhood can't get above about 200 anyway, unlimited data, and their flex crap for no-contract 2 years ~$30 maybe 35. Was paying 140 for worse internet and streaming their TV service lol
 
GoldenTiger said:
So what exactly are you downloading 5+tb of worth per month? That's basically unheard of for the average home user even when Warez monkeying. If you need more upload too might be time to go to a business line like most people do in your situation.
Click to expand...
I'm, pretty obviously, not the average home user.
 
Last edited:
TheSlySyl said:
I'm not the average home user.
Click to expand...
So pay up and stop complaining? What are you using so much transfer for as a home user? Buy your content instead of pirating it. If you're looking for more upload as a home user, it's typically for torrents.
 
GoldenTiger said:
So pay up and stop complaining? What are you using so much transfer for as a home user? Buy your content instead of pirating it. If you're looking for more upload as a home user, it's typically for torrents.
Click to expand...
5tb a month is a lot even for Linux distro. You have to be literally downloading everything to reach 5tb a month.
 
Why would I pay more? If I had anyone but Comcast, for the price I pay per month it should be symmetrical 1gb instead of ridiculously lopsided 1.2gb down and .04gb up.
I pay for a certain bandwidth, I use within that bandwidth. It's not my fault that I'm an outlier, comcast still needs to deliver on what I'm currently paying for.

If a company isn't delivering on what I'm ALREADY paying for. Why the fuck do you think that paying them *more* would be the answer?

Likewise, 5 terabyte is only about 150-200 gigabytes a day. Which isn't much at all. Some days I can hit that in minutes.

Oh look, new gamepass and PS+ games dropped. There goes 300+gigabytes easily.
 
philb2 said:
Just wondering.

I have Comcast, and lately the service has been pretty reliable, except when we had these "atmospheric river" storms.
Click to expand...
Bay Area? Yeah, same. Had some outages during bad weather, but it was actually worse at my office where an antenna bent a bit and their 500 sym service went to 20%+ packet loss and basically completely useless.
 
SamirD said:
Bay Area? Yeah, same. Had some outages during bad weather, but it was actually worse at my office where an antenna bent a bit and their 500 sym service went to 20%+ packet loss and basically completely useless.
Click to expand...
Yeah, Bay Area. Antenna bent due to the wind? Wow, but not surprising.
 
KamikazePlatypus said:
Damn, are the winds really that bad up there?
Click to expand...
I'd seen winds in the SE US growing up from severe thunderstorms and even tornados, and while these are brief, the Bay Area stuff is like something I've not experienced before. Winds that start out slow and build up with peak gusts that start to approach what is probably named storm territory and then lasting days. With the soil being pretty porous and almost never level, water softens whatever is there and then trees fall quickly on overhead power lines that make a mess of the area. Bad drainage engineering causes puddles and pools up water so bad that even on newly constructed highways lanes are closed (absolutely pitiful imo--it wasn't designed or built right), and contributes to urban flooding and more mayhem. And the sheer lack of response capability will keep people's power out for days. During the last bad one, my brother didn't have power at either work or home or both for 3/5 work days. How anyone is supposed to be able to do stuff during those times is beyond me as you're basically trying to find the basics. The economic productivity losses are probably a billion a day if not in the multi-millions.

Of course this all being said, it doesn't happen often like it did in the SE US, so it evens out in the end if you consider quantity vs quality and sum it all up. Plus, the days here are absolutely pristine where you don't even have to think about the weather most of the time, so that's the flip side.

I've started looked at the house and what the winds are doing to it--I've got cracks in exterior stucco along lines that have been repaired before, but also some new ones on the wall where the wind was beating on my patio door. And with climate change making all this probably worse vs better, I was thinking about how to get the place more 'weather ready' vs being in a reactive stage when something does go boom.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
It's been a fun winter around here. On top of the record rain/snow and flooding in the state, many of the storms also featured some pretty good winds.

Everything will dry out in 2-3 months and the wildfires will start up again...
Click to expand...
I almost forgot about the fires, lol. And don't forget about the 3.5 and 4.5 recent Earthquakes. :D CA is where it's at! :ROFLMAO:
 
Oh, I can hate on them a bit if you want. They've started rolling out higher upload speeds to customers in some areas but you have to buy their "Xfinity Complete" package which comes with rented equipment. They also have a new 2.0Gbit down plan, but they haven't approved any 3rd party modems for it. The problem here is their routers and WiFi gear are consumer grade and crap even for consumer grade. No custom firewall rules, no VLANs, no multiple SSIDs, and if you use their Pods you can't wire the backhaul or split the 2.4GHz network off on a separate SSID to work around all the problems people have with Comcast gear and older 2.4GHz equipment. So I'll be keeping my MikroTik router, managed switches, and wired TP-Link access points even if I can't get the speed upgrade. I will, however, hate on them for it and jump ship to AT&T if they ever get around to bringing fiber to my street. They're just a few blocks away. The main reason I'm not too wound up about this is my main use of upload is for work and if my download speed on VPN is any indication I would only gain 10-20Mbps from faster upload speeds even if I had symmetrical gigabit.

Other than that I've had zero issues with them for quite some time. A few months ago my NetGear Nighthawk CM2050V modem had a 200+ day uptime. Now it just says: "System Up Time:-17:-28:-4" It's still working just fine, and as far as I know it still hasn't been rebooted. Apparently Netgear didn't think a cable company could keep a network up for over 200 days straight.
 
Long story short, we are traveling now and in New York City. Yesterday afternoon we could receive but not send email. This problem was on two different laptops running Windows 10 with Outlook and two different older iPhones running iOS 15.something, Web server was normal. So after a few hours, I call a Comcast number and I get routed to a real person.

I tell this person about the problem, and point out that the common element here is the outgoing mail server. So after claiming to run a "diagnostic" what does she tell me? To delete and reinstall my Comcast account on my iPhone!! She claims that this will fix the problem. I tell this agent that I'm not willing to do that, because I can't understand how her instructions would fix the problems with the other iPhone or with Outlook and because of the complexity of my password. She insists, then apologizes. Just at this moment my wife waves to me and tells me that all the outgoing email on her phone and in Outlook, has been sent. I tell this to the agent, who takes credit for this change!!

Why do I stay with Xfinity/Comcast? Mostly inertia. The idea of changing email addresses in a zillion websites and accounts, ugh. Doesn't mean I'm happy with them. And I could be wrong, but I suspect that Verizon and AT&T customers have similar horror stories.
 
philb2 said:
Why do I stay with Xfinity/Comcast? Mostly inertia. The idea of changing email addresses in a zillion websites and accounts, ugh.
Click to expand...

Commiecast allows you to continue to use their email system after you quit their service. I forgot what it costs, but it is low cost.
 
philb2 said:
The idea of changing email addresses in a zillion websites and accounts, ugh. Doesn't mean I'm happy with them. And I could be wrong, but I suspect that Verizon and AT&T customers have similar horror stories.
Click to expand...
Yep, you'll have similar experiences with every isp out there. It's one of the reasons I've never used the included email address with any of our isp accounts except our first one, and that was with a dedicated isdn link so was a different animal too. I do miss pine though--man that was a fast way do deal with email.
 
philb2 said:
Long story short, we are traveling now and in New York City. Yesterday afternoon we could receive but not send email. This problem was on two different laptops running Windows 10 with Outlook and two different older iPhones running iOS 15.something, Web server was normal. So after a few hours, I call a Comcast number and I get routed to a real person.

I tell this person about the problem, and point out that the common element here is the outgoing mail server. So after claiming to run a "diagnostic" what does she tell me? To delete and reinstall my Comcast account on my iPhone!! She claims that this will fix the problem. I tell this agent that I'm not willing to do that, because I can't understand how her instructions would fix the problems with the other iPhone or with Outlook and because of the complexity of my password. She insists, then apologizes. Just at this moment my wife waves to me and tells me that all the outgoing email on her phone and in Outlook, has been sent. I tell this to the agent, who takes credit for this change!!
Click to expand...
Well it's now Wednesday morning in NYC and outgoing mail doesn't work, again. No point to callng Comcast. None. I'd rather enjoy myself. Take a walk. Go out for lunch, Visit some stores or a museum. I'm glad I'm not in the same city as Comcast HQ. But it's less than 90 minutes away on the Acela, so I have to avoid Penn Station here.
 
It's now Thursday evening in NYC, and outgoing Comcast email has been down since early this morning, EDT. However, if I turn off Wi-Fi on my phone, I can send email no problems. After some urging from my wife, and rebooting both the cable modem and the router, I ran a tracert. Note that RCN is the ISP for the place where we are staying.

Looking at this tracert, who is at fault here?


tracert smtp.comcast.net

Tracing route to smtp-p.gslb4.comcast.com [96.102.167.162]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 13 ms 13 ms 29 ms 192.168.1.1
2 12 ms 28 ms 9 ms 10.27.196.1
3 10 ms 12 ms 9 ms bdle1-sub203.aggr1.qens.ny.rcn.net [207.237.20.225]
4 13 ms 10 ms 11 ms 207.172.17.44
5 13 ms 14 ms 11 ms 207.172.17.53
6 11 ms 9 ms 10 ms 7-1-4.ear1.NewYork6.Level3.net [4.30.178.41]
7 25 ms 12 ms 13 ms ae1.3511.edge2.NewYork6.level3.net [4.69.209.78]
8 11 ms 15 ms 14 ms Comcast-level3-NewYork6.Level3.net [4.68.72.2]
9 14 ms 14 ms 14 ms be-3311-cs03.newyork.ny.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.34.25]
10 14 ms 12 ms 14 ms be-1311-cr11.newyork.ny.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.35.122]
11 36 ms 33 ms 36 ms be-301-cr22.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.38.65]
12 36 ms * 35 ms be-1422-cs24.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.84.77]
13 * 35 ms 33 ms be-1421-cr21.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.82.254]
14 53 ms 52 ms 59 ms be-301-cr11.1601milehigh.co.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.37.146]
15 54 ms 52 ms 52 ms be-1111-cs01.1601milehigh.co.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.39.65]
16 55 ms 53 ms 51 ms be-1113-cr13.1601milehigh.co.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.39.98]
17 53 ms 53 ms 62 ms be-304-cr13.champa.co.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.36.205]
18 62 ms 55 ms 52 ms be-1313-cs03.champa.co.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.37.233]
19 57 ms 55 ms 53 ms be-1312-cr12.champa.co.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.37.218]
20 82 ms 80 ms 79 ms be-304-cr11.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.39.30]
21 80 ms 80 ms 82 ms be-1311-cs03.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.46.25]
22 97 ms 94 ms 94 ms 68.86.93.154
23 104 ms 135 ms 122 ms et-60-1-sas01-d.hillsboro.or.ndchlsbr.comcast.net [96.110.86.50]
24 97 ms 94 ms 98 ms lo0-t1s9064-d.hillsboro.or.ndchlsbr.comcast.net [96.109.96.162]
25 * 84 ms 88 ms lo0-t2s9027-d.hillsboro.or.ndchlsbr.comcast.net [96.109.96.93]
26 106 ms 98 ms 93 ms lo0-t1s9058-d.hillsboro.or.ndchlsbr.comcast.net [96.109.96.156]
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.

Trace complete.
 
tracert is hardly a definitive test, many many providers will disable ICMP replies on various services. I bet you'd get similar time outs on smtp.google.com.
 
Last night (Thursday) outgoing email was working normally, Now, Friday morning, not, My wife is wondering if this is a "feature" of Comcast email on the East Coast?
 
Eulogy said:
tracert is hardly a definitive test, many many providers will disable ICMP replies on various services. I bet you'd get similar time outs on smtp.google.com.
Click to expand...
So is there a (more) definitive test? I don't know if I should be complaining to RCN, Comcast, Level 3, or someone else. And I'm not even sure that the people I could get on the phone would (a) understand the root cause issue and (b) know how to fix it.

Say what you want about point-to-point T1 lines or SNA with 3270 terminals ...
 
From your own example, you're making it to comcast. From there, it's extremely likely that they're blocking ICMP echo, so none of the ping based tools are going to really help you much. You're going to need to do some basic troubleshooting. Are other outgoing smtp servers operating over the same ports working when comcast isn't? Are you using SSL or TLS? What do logs say when trying to send?
 
I'm just an average Joe here. Only 1 email account, plus Yahoo, which I always access via the web.

I let MS do the account setup when I create a new email account, because why not. Per Windows email account setup, I'm using SMTP on port 465 with "SSL/TLS."
The Windows Applications log shows lots of Information entries. Only error was from Bonjour service:

mDNSCoreReceiveResponse: Unexpected conflict discarding 14 6.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa. PTR HELIOS.local.

I tried unsuccessfully to send Outlook email several times after the Bonjour error message. The log is silent on Outlook send events.
 
bluestang said:
Change Port 465 to 587 and see what happens.
Click to expand...
Yesterday I replied that everything was working fine. TODAY outgoing email isn't. So I changed Port 465 to 587, and Outlook threw an error messsage about 587 not being compatible with my encryption setting.

So just for grins, I unchecked the Advanced Setting in email to require authentication to the outgoing mail server. Still a fail.

No point in me callng Comcast again. They probably have me on their equivalent of a "Do Not Fly" list.
 
And for the third night (EDT) in a row, all the accumulated email goes out at 8 pm.

My wife is now talking about how we need new email accounts.
 
SamirD said:
Ugh what a nightmare. :banghead:
Click to expand...
OK. On the bright side of things, it gives me something to complain about to my wife, without making her mad at me. :ROFLMAO:

OK, so I'm retired but I still get important email where I need to reply promptly, and who know if email is going to work.

Anybody here been to Union of South Africa? I had several business trips there a while ago. They had (and still have) problems with their power grid, So there are regular, scheduled power cuts. When the power is cut, it's hard to get things done, and people are not happy about the situation. People there were showing me their phone apps that show the time of the next power cut in their area. I wonder if Comcast should have a similar app.
 
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