Well this has been quite a day for me and Comcast… Three issues, all stupid. Only able to solve one, and only because I figured it out, Comcast was at a loss…
So first issue, friend of mine having issues with her Cable MODEM… Uh yeah, that’s not going to be good…. I pull up the handy dandy speed test site at my house with my laptop to validate how fast it is running at my place… http://www.speedtest.net Not bad, I get 7000Kbs, not the best I have seen but ok. Upload was bad like, 300Kbs. This was about 2PM on a Saturday in Michigan so I am expecting relatively heavy usage. Now at 12:30AM I am seeing 17,000Kbs and 364Kbs. Upload still sucks. I may have to call on that too… Ugh.
So anyway, stop at my friend’s house, try it there… 25Kbs download and 2000Kbs upload… Its like they plugged it in backwards or something… Several tests, fastest was 300Kbs download. Obviously a problem. Comcast shows up, of course looking to blame everything after the parts they own and I shoot the guy down with everything, not his fault, those guys aren’t really trained to respond to people who have a clue what they are talking about. This guy didn’t even know about up arrow to repeat a command at the command prompt. Within 3 minutes or so he gave up trying to blame the computer and the version of IE and Phishing software and actually started testing stuff and realized that wow, it was sucking bad. He does all his tests and apologizes and says he needs a line tech, if it isn’t fixed in a week, give a call back…. Thanks Comcast, great customer service…
So anyway again, I come home, I realize that I haven’t received any email since 3AM Saturday morning. I poke around and notice I can’t send either… Ok, since I don’t use my Exchange server for sending, it means I A) had a miraculous failure on my Exchange server AND on the Comcast Outbound SMTP servers at the same time OR B) Comcast is blocking port 25… So what do I do… yeah you know it, Wireshark baby. Sure enough, I am watching SYNs going out to the Comcast server and nothing back, and not a peep on inbound 25 and that is NEVER quiet. So, blocking port 25. I go into chat and the guy keeps trying to get me to redirect my Outlook Express client to another port because my port 25 was shutdown because I was determined to be dangerous to their network. So I ask for the logs, oops we don’t have those, contact abuse at abuse@comcast.net… I had to reexplain my issue about email not working… I went in circles for a while and finally was told to call the 800 number and they could help me. I had my doubts due to my past experiences with our lovely friends in support at Comcast but did it anyway. Oh, the chat tech kept disappearing for a while so I would repeat questions and he finally came back and said, you have to give me a minute, I am talking to two people, of course how am I supposed to know this??? So anyway to keep everyone honest, I noticed no printed time stamps on the chat window (very annoying) so I started typing in my own. Bryan didn’t appear to like that. He asked me why I did it, I ignored the question the first time. The second time he asked I said my choice. He said “Sweet”, but I’ll be durned if he didn’t respond MUCH faster each time after that. Anyway, he ended up being completely worthless and I had to call. Oh, BTW, the chat window actually is getting the timestamps on the messages sent to it, but there are also control codes to back up over it so you don’t see the stamp, it overwrites the characters. I figured that out when I cut and pasted the chat into notepad and saw the stamps…
Here is a little snippet of that conversation
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:36:08 EST 2008)>Where is the policy documented? Exactly?
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:36:12 EST 2008)>9:36pm
Bryan(Sat Jan 5 21:36:16 EST 2008)>http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=Email118989#25
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:36:21 EST 2008)>Thankyou
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:36:25 EST 2008)>9:36pm
Bryan(Sat Jan 5 21:36:47 EST 2008)>Could I please ask the relevance of the time being posted?
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:36:53 EST 2008)>My choice.
Bryan(Sat Jan 5 21:37:02 EST 2008)>Sweet, just wondered
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:37:16 EST 2008)>Now how was I notified of this issue?
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:37:19 EST 2008)>9:37pm
Bryan(Sat Jan 5 21:38:05 EST 2008)>Checking…
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:38:13 EST 2008)>Thanks
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:38:16 EST 2008)>9:38pm
Bryan(Sat Jan 5 21:40:15 EST 2008)>Basically it’s left up to Outlook telling you by error message
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:40:49 EST 2008)>Excellent.
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:40:53 EST 2008)>9:40pm
Prior to me doing that, it was taking a bit between responses as evidenced here
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:27:48 EST 2008)>Hello?
Bryan(Sat Jan 5 21:28:15 EST 2008)>Joe, you have got to let me have a minute to answer. I do talk to two people at once.
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:28:42 EST 2008)>How am I supposed to know that?
Bryan(Sat Jan 5 21:29:01 EST 2008)>Didn’t expect you to, just explaining to you
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:31:23 EST 2008)>OK so outstanding questions
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:31:31 EST 2008)>1. Where is this policy documented? Exactly.
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:31:50 EST 2008)>2. If I call 1-888-COMCAST, what exactly do I punch in to get to the abuse people and will I actually get them right now?
Joe_(Sat Jan 5 21:32:26 EST 2008)>9:32PM
Bryan(Sat Jan 5 21:33:13 EST 2008)>I am not sure exactly what to punch in Joe. Just follow the prompts.
The first question, where is the policy documented wasn’t answered until 21:36 after I asked yet again.
So I call the 800 number and you get the normal Hi this is Comcast and our call volume is higher than normal and wait time is longer than normal and I am wondering longer than what? Longer than if I had Wide Open West and was calling them which always went very well? Longer than the usual slow long ass time? Be more descriptive here. Finally I get a guy named Gabe, and I have to say I felt bad for the kid, he didn’t know, probably his first day or something and he is trying to handle me after being completely pissed off with a script. Just not going to work. I start talking about network packets and SYN/ACK handshaking and he is asking me to click on the FAQ for repointing OE at another port. I might as well have been speaking Greek for as much as he was absorbing. After he realized I had some sort of clue he started doing the running between his and some “senior” tech’s desk. Finally after a bit of that he just said, let me bring Mike in on this conversation (number 5588 for any Comcast folks keeping score). So Mike is trying to explain to me about repointing my client and I am trying to explain to him why that won’t work for me. He told me of course it will work and I explained again why it won’t work. Then said, just turn on my port 25 inbound and I don’t care about the outbound… I think that caused him to blow a capillary as he tried to grasp the meaning. I don’t think they understand the inbound outbound thing too well over there and what things constitute a danger to their network from me versus someone else. And while Bryan told me that they had the logs, these guys told me they had nothing. Then they gave me the security group’s phone number and were upset when I kept asking will I get to talk to someone and they kept saying, we don’t know. Brilliant. So I call and of course, nope, they don’t have anyone who can help me until like 10AM. So I will be without email for 31 or so hours… Great service Comcast. All because your techs can’t turn on inbound port 25 and your security guys work a 9-5 shift except when turning ports off which they have no problem doing at 3AM.
So now I don’t know if I actually had a SPAM Abuse issue or if Comcast just decided to turn off port 25 because they don’t want to use it anymore. I heard both responses. I expect it is an abuse thing and I expect it is actually an inbound thing, not an outbound and I expect it is some half ass punk doing it. I should know more when I talk to the actual security people and get their logs if they have any. Once I get everything turned back on and get the emails from my mail backup host I will look at some port redirection tricks and set something up to help whomever is causing the issues. Regardless, unless I am spamming out on port 25, Comcast shouldn’t be touching my ports, they shouldn’t punish me for someone spamming me. I don’t run an anonymous relay so I am pretty sure there was nothing coming off of my side. It was all inbound.
And the final problem of the day… the only one that got solved because I figured it out… I tried to pay my bill, you would think this would be an easy thing. I log into my account on Comcast.net, I click on pay bill and it takes me to a create your user screen with most of the info populated. I populate the last few things, click ok and it tells me the account is already in use… Well yes duh, I logged in with the ID that is on the account. I then try it again, same experience, no joy. So I go back into Chat, yes, I love the pain thank you very much… And get some other guy and long story short, he has no clue and tells me to go to the local office and I say, well can they fix the website because that seems to be the problem… Oh nope… I said fine, I wanted to fix it online anyway, I pay online so you should be able to fix it online… Long story short, no joy, you have to call the 800 line. [THUMP!] I wiped the keyboard marks from my forehead and close the chat window. I have done this before, it should work again…
I then think, wow, Comcast is so stupid, I wonder if Comcast.COM accounts and Comcast.NET accounts aren’t tied together for some odd reason. I go to Comcast.COM and sure enough, my Comcast.NET account doesn’t work… but my joe@joe… account works… I log in with that and sure enough, I can pay my bill. Bravo Comcast, well played. Brilliant. You must be proud. Your mother must be proud. Heck even your aunt must be proud.
So in all total, Comcast probably burned a good 4 or 5 hours of my day today, that could easily pay for 5-6 months of my Comcast service if I could actually charge them my full time employee rate (not to mention my private consultant rate).
All I have to say is this in conclusion. The INSTANT, the VERY SECOND I have a legitimate option outside of Comcast, I will switch and there is nothing Comcast will be able to do to stop me. Just like I switched to Wide Open West before the day it became available. I will pay double for Wide Open West what I pay for Comcast, it is worth it to me. Comcast at half the price I pay right now still wouldn’t be worth it unless I absolutely needed it. The satellite stuff isn’t good for me, no other cable provider, DSL won’t work as I am miles from any telco stuff, heck my back property line is 1/4 mile from my back door to give you an idea of scale. The local party store people know everyone that lives in the area and were mad when I didn’t go down and introduce myself when I moved in. That few people. The whole township is looking at Wireless access, that will be cool, I will test it and if it is even 3Mbs I will take it and go out to the road and cut the Comcast line off completely and mail the 350 feet or so of line to them.
Ok rant off… ;o)
Surprisingly, I am not really in a bad mood. I am kind of chuckling at all of the stupidity. The email thing is a bit annoying but really, I don’t care that much, I need less email anyway as I can’t keep up with the emails from the people I care about and like and are good versus some of the others.
joe
After reading “I will take it and go out to the road and cut the Comcast line off completely and mail the 350 feet or so of line to them.” my cats got quite worried since I burst out laughing after a few hours of silence. That was great. =)
“I think that caused him to blow a capillary as he tried to grasp the meaning.”
Good line, first laugh I’ve had all night here at work.
At some point you are bound to talk to someone at Comcast that wants to advance into AD, security, or exchange work that will know who you are. That should be an interesting blog entry.
They would start quoting lines out of your book to you 🙂
I would love to have someone who has a clue who knows who I am on the inside at Comcast, I would just deal with them. Sure, it isn’t fair to everyone else but it would make me happy. 😎
OMG I started laughing too at the mailing the cable back to them part!! Comcast is available in my area, it’s the only cable option right now (Time Warner is in other nearby areas). I’ve been tempted on occasion, but after hearing about your experiences… I’ll stick with my DSL. 6 Mbps is as fast as I need, even if it would be nice to go faster. So far I’m fairly happy with A&TT U-verse, even though I’ve had to reboot the router twice in the month I’ve had it. Before U-Verse, with SBC/AT&T DSL, in 4 years I had to reboot it once, and as far as I know, it never went down outside that one slowdown. Granted, I don’t have 40 acres and a mule here…
I had not stopped by for a visit in a while, and was on some newsgroup that had your web site linked for some tools. So I dropped by.
The people I work with thought I went crazy as I was sitting at my desk bursting out in laughter as I read this.
Comcast man, get rid of um, they are bad news. WoW if you can get it.
Joe
Like you, I’m a Comcast victim in SE MI with no alternative.
You might want to drop a line to the senior VP of customer operations Rick Germano (it’s an option off https://www.comcast.com/corporate/customers/contactus/contactus.html).
A local line tech cut my service at the tap last week without telling anyone! It took 4 days to get it fixed – no TV, Internet, phones over the week-end.
With that in mind, and accepting the fact that Comcast service is not service as defined by the rest of the human race, I surprised even myself by eventually …
wait for it…
… sending a thank you note for the superior service I received from a young customer service tech who spent 6 hours at my house on Monday checking every connection and length of cable to prove that I needed the amplifier that the line tech objected to.
I also e-mailed that senior VP asking him to reward the guy for doing a good job, and criticizing an idiot I spoke to on the phone.
They guarantee a 24 hour response to your e-mail, and my response was from a drone in the ‘Office of Rick Germano’, but the drone had actually read the e-mail.
You never know if your notoriety (? :-)) might help get a better response.