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I thought my experiences with Comcast were bad: frequent outages, technicians who didn’t know how to connect the line to my house, and shotty billing techniques; the following is the worst Comcast story I have hard in a while:

In the spring of 2005, Comcast had a national DNS problem that lasted for a couple of days.

A couple of weeks after that , my own Comcast started disconnecting and reconnecting all by itself. I’d be on one minute and off the next. Sure it would work 90% of the time, but only about 9 out of every 10 minutes.

The outages would be 3 or 4 seconds, or up to a minute or more. working remotely or working on a server became impossible. A constant internet connection for me is just as important as speed. Here’s a sustained ping to Comcast…

Read the rest of this ordeal…

Over a week or more, I did everything I could think of doing, replacing cables, network cards and my router. I verified that the problem was present on different computers. I purchased another brand new router.

Whether I was trying wired or wireless, with a laptop or desktop, with or without a router at all, it didn’t matter. Some days were nearly fine, but others were much worse, being unable to stay on for more than a minute. Although they assured me they were not having problems, I had them come out for a service call.

Over the summer, I eventually had Comcast installers, supervisors, or networking subcontractors here a total of 9 times. They’ve given me 3 new modems, each time leaving saying it was fine now. Within an hour, the problems came back each time. At their suggestion, I moved cordless phones and unplugged electric items from near the router, but they swore it was me.

During their visits, I got all new splitters and other in my house, at my box, and at the main box on the block. Finally, I got one guy to stay 10 extra minutes, and he saw me prove the problem. He reported it as an escalated line issue, and I finally got new cable to the street. Well…that didn’t work either!

Believe it or not, I started testing the connection at a few neighbors homes and it was bad too! That average person though wouldn’t notice, because they don’t use a “constant” connection while surfing and downloading.

The problem was not mine, it was definitely Comcasts. A quick check of the forums onlyine showed me tons of cases just like mine. The solution for some seemed to be changing their own DNS servers, but when I tried in one router I lost all connection, and got fed up.

At this point, I concluded that the only thing I could do was pay Comcast a $200 installation fee, and I’d buy a router/modem combo from Comcast. In doing so, I’d then have to pay $15 more a month for their “home networking” support, but the issue would then be in their laps, making it their problem.

Well…after THREE trips in four days, even they could not make my problem go away so it went back to the line department as a “DNS resolution problem” which it what I’ve been saying all along.

They said it would be fixed in 72 hours, which it never was. Each time I called I got the runaround, with my ticket number finally disappearing! They said they had no record of a “DNS problem”, and couldn’t send anyone without charging me.

They (Comcast) told me that I must have had four, (yes four) bad routers, and the problem was not theirs, and would I like to just quit the service? Well, now my plan was to just research satelite access, so I put back on my original router and decided to live with it a little longer. That was about 3 weeks ago…

After reading an email from someone regarding their problem, it dawned on me that I haven’t noticed it cutting out for over a week! Sure enough - IT’S FIXED! Running a “ping -t www.comcast.net” confirms that my connection is staying on!

I can also see, much to my surprise, that www.comcast.net now resolves to 204.127.195.15. Completely different IP than I was getting all summer. Obviously, someone somewhere fixed this major snafu that they would never admit existed.

So, to summarize, Comcast no only blamed the customer multiple times, they did not even admit fault for the problem.  What a scummy company policy to blame the customer rather than take responsibility for shotty service.  This is one of the main reasons why Comcast is so disliked by the general public.

Tag this at Technorati: comcast, internet, shotty service