Comcast and the Case of the Mysterious Repair

Somehow Comcast seems to have fixed my cable internet service once again without entering my home. The only correlation I can find is that whenever we have a really hard rain or a lightning storm (both fairly common in South Florida in the Summer) my internet connection goes to hell. Within several days of the outage, the service is back up and faster than ever. Here are my speed test results from DSLReports.com for this morning, which I ran while I was on the phone with Comcast customer service cancelling the appointment that I obviously no longer need.

Another Internet Outage

My cable Internet service at home is down again today. I contacted Comcast via phone first this time. My wait time was very short, but after quite awhile talking with the support agent, nothing was resolved. I also Tweeted my frustration to @ComcastCares, but the response was not nearly as fast as last time. In fact, at the time of this writing, I had not received a response.

I’ll be off momentarily to a local Internet cafe, Starbucks or FedEx office to finish some high priority tasks which require Internet connectivity.

A day (two actually) without the intarweb

Tuesday, May 26th was one of those really frustrating days where nothing seemed to go my way. This badness started in the morning when I figured out that something had gone horribly wrong with my high-speed internet connection. I could connect to the internet and every now and then I could open a web page, but I could not send email and most of my IM’s wouldn’t go through. Worse was the fact that my home phone didn’t work, since it is a Vonage phone and depends on my cable modem from Comcast to function.

This is not a situation that I have had to deal with extensively in the past, with only 2-3 days without a network connection in the past 5 years (barring hurricanes where there was no power for multiple days). That’s a pretty good track record and a testament to the general reliability of the cable service in my neighborhood. I am also quite meticulous about having every piece of electronic equipment in my home on either a UPS or a quality surge protector. That includes all of the networking gear, so that I don’t lose network connectivity if the power goes out briefly. In South Florida, a good rain storm will cause brown-outs and brief power outages, and I hear the alarms on my various UPS’s go off about 3 times a week.

What was interesting about this experience (besides scouring Google Maps on my iPhone for a Fedex Office or Starbucks location with Wi-Fi nearby) is that I actually had an opportunity to test out Comcast’s customer service and tech support for myself, after reading about their recent surge in CSAT scores and focus on Twitter as a service channel.

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