My rant for comcast today - Also, please help because their customer service reps suck.

[dannyflynn00]

I feel like I'm being throttled. We pay for 30mbps down and 10 up, and we're getting 3mbps down and 10 up.
Everything was working fine yesterday, and we haven't touched a single piece of equipment. Today, I get home and log on, only to see the internet is acting slow. So i head on over to speedtest.net, and I'm getting from .25 to 3mbps down.
So I call the customer service, and what do you know, they say some useless garbage that doesn't help solve the problem. So, now I have someone coming to my house on Thursday and charging me 80 bucks for something that is Comcast's fault.
Oh, and let me make it clear, the guy didn't even solve the problem of the slow download speed. He seemed to avoid the topic, maybe to avoid their throttling being revealed, hmm?
I just need some help to solve this. Additional information can be given if you need it, I am just frusterated because I can't really do anything besides browse the web with this slow speed. I can't use YouTube or Netflix, either. It takes a year to buffer.




< Removed by moderator >

 

[ex_bubblehead]

1. Check your paperwork. You're paying for "Up to" speeds, not guaranteed speeds.

2. You're sharing bandwidth with everyone on your node, and cable companies are notorious for over provisioning, thus leading to reduced speeds.

3. Speed varies with time of day. As people go home from work and start their evening surfing/streaming/whatever speeds will diminish.

4. There may be a problem on your street or with your house wiring, that's what the tech is for.

5. There may be a problem in your own PC.

 

[dannyflynn00]

Issue fixed. At least for now. There were some comcast guys down the street, and they messed with one of those green cable boxes and it fixed our internet. So it was an issue on our street.

 

[USAFRet]

If you're paying for 30, and getting 3, the issue is either within your house wiring or PC...or in their network.

For the initial diagnostic, they should not be charging you $80. Because they don't know what the issue is yet.
A few years ago, I had a long running issue with Cox cable. The internet would die completely 3/4/5 times a week.

It was finally determined, as I had been telling them for more than a month, that one of their upstream boxes was dying. Dependent on temp and humidity.

Document, document, document. Keep logs of time and speed.

I got so where I could predict the dropoff to within 15 minutes. Being able to show them a graph of exactly what was happening helped greatly.