Tarkblog

The cable internet at home was a bit flaky over the weekend. This isn’t the first time, but it did it most of the afternoon Saturday and all day Sunday so I figured I should call Comcast and let them know.

The guy on the phone was very apologetic. He ran a trace and sure enough, saw that my modem was trying to connect to their system but wasn’t able to. He ran me through the usual “power it down for 25 seconds and unplug the cable and plug it back in and power it up and maybe it will fix the problem”. No dice.

Now, I don’t claim to know how their system is set up, but years of system administration experience has led me to be somewhat knowledgable about how the internet works and, more specifically, how to use utilities like ping and traceroute to see where network problems are.

Our router, which connects to the cable modem, gets its WAN address via DHCP. There is a web interface in the router that allows me to do this by hand, and see the results. Usually we get assigned some IP address like 69.173.something.something, and it sets the gateway and subnet mask appropriately.

However, during the problems of intermittency, the WAN side of the router would get assigned an address of 192.168.1.100. This 192.168. business, as most networking folks would know, is a reserved block of private addresses you can use for internal networks. Our home network uses 192.168.0.X behind the router, and we don’t use 192.168.1.X anywhere on the network. Yet the router was getting this address assigned to it.

It was not picking up any gateway or subnet mask, however. I was, though, able to ping 192.168.1.1, which I assumed to be the gateway. It responded. No traffic would go out beyond that.

Every few minutes, the DHCP would get the right address. Then it would get the wrong one. Back and forth.

So I explained this to the guy on the phone, but it was way beyond him. He told me we needed to schedule a tech to come out and take a look. Wonderful. This meant I had to be home from 7-9am to meet with him. And I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to find anything wrong on our end.

The internet worked fine again as of late last night, and worked great this morning as well. But since the guy was already scheduled, I figure I’d see what he could do.

He showed up around 8am, and did exactly what I thought he would do: he plugged his equipment into our line and told me the signal looked fine. Of course, our internet was also working fine at this point. He did the same thing again in the attic and also again outside where the cable comes into the house. All times he got a good signal.

I tried to explain my earlier findings and how I thought that the problem wasn’t at the house but wherever the hardware was that we were talking to. This was well beyond him, and his comprehension of Comcast’s internet. He knew how to hook up cable, and run some checks, but he was no internet expert.

So he left after giving me the “everything seems to work”. He also, “graciously”, didn’t charge me for the house call since he didn’t fix anything. Thanks.

I knew this would happen. There was no resolution to this because nobody knew how to accurately diagnose what the problem might be. And why this makes me so mad isn’t because the problem didn’t get fixed - it’s because I’m paying for the inefficient service in the form of the sky-high price of cable and internet. Everytime someone has to schedule this guy to come out and fix something that isn’t even really broken, because they weren’t able to accurately diagnose the problem, it ends up reflecting back into the cable rates that I pay for. And that makes me mad.

I hate knowing that the rate I’m paying for something has to factor in the inefficiencies that they are responsible for. I mean, we routinely buy groceries at Walmart because they have low prices. They’re also notorious for scrutinizing their supply-chain to wrangle out any inefficiencies that may be in it. This keeps the prices low. And I like that.

The icing on the cake was I had to fill out a short questionnaire on how I would rate his service. Of course, it wasn’t a comment card I dropped in the mail. No, he stood there and watched me fill it out, and kept a copy to take back with him. Well, why would I put anything negative down? He knows where I live, and obviously now knows my work schedule.

Someone at the top isn’t thinking very clearly.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 11:02 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.