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Comcast, Outages and Why the Digital Divide Still Matters
Redacti|December 15, 2020

Comcast, Outages and Why the Digital Divide Still Matters

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Comcast, Service Outages and The Digital Divide

So, Comcast decides that 8:30 Friday AM is a good time for scheduled maintenance. Apparently, they’re not willing to pay field techs to work 3rd shift. I’m not interested in their problems. They have more money than god.
They finished about noon and since then service has been unusable and I’ve needed to use my phone instead. That is three days without Internet and we’re heading into a fourth.
I have patiently explained to many clueless first line techs that I know exactly what happened and someone needs to revisit Friday’s maintenance. They simply have no way to correlate, which I find stunning. I don’t expect them to care about me but it would clearly be much cheaper to work smarter rather than harder at these things.
The “techs” on the phone don’t know what IP networking, TCP, packets, packet loss or latency are. They don’t understand sources, destinations or routes. They truly know nothing about the field they provide “support” in. Because that is not their job. Their job is to push us off and to try to prevent sending someone to our house. But after a long talk with a manager, it was also clear that no actual trouble report can be generated by anyone other than a tech in the field; the phone people have no ability to do anything other than to dispatch a tech.
Sadly, my experience with Comcast’s field “techs” is not much better. The last time we went through this, the first guy showed up, plugged in and within seconds pronounced it fine. I asked him what he did and he said, “I ran a ping test and it’s fine”. I asked how many pings and he looked confused. I explained that it’s usually about 1/sec and that you can’t tell anything without a reasonable sample, so I figured it should take at least two minutes to render an opinion – a hundred pings is standard.
He looked more confused, poked around in his tester for a bit, texted someone and started over. He then saw that we were losing about 10% of packets, so he said that was “pretty good”. Most of my friends wouldn’t know, but as a “professional” technician, he should have been aware that anything above about 2% packet loss renders a circuit almost useless.
Was this because he was too dumb for the job? Maybe, but I’ll bet he could have easily learned how to do some ACTUAL troubleshooting if anyone had been willing to teach him anything. He certainly knew more by the time he left. You’re welcome Comcast, for my attempt to educate your technician for you.
So think about TV – this is why I would NEVER use anyone’s cloud DVR and am actively researching how to record and save streaming TV in full 1080p. We don’t have ATT fiber or Metronet here. Although there are several wireless operators in the area, there is only one that can even come close to the speed of cable modem service, if we’re even in range, and it’s twice the price.
In 2012, a public-private partnership with the State of Illinois documented that over 90% of the State (geographically) did not have access to broadband, defined as service at 768k or better. However, they expressed it differently. Instead, they announced that 95% of the POPULATION of Illinois DID have access to broadband – at that pathetically low speed, while also documenting in small print that less than half had access to 10Mb or better.
As our project progressed, we paid to conduct a “demand study” to try to prove that there was significant demand that needed to be met by the government. I simply couldn’t get anyone to even phrase the questions correctly. They merely asked people if they were satisfied with their speed and pricing. People can’t adequately express “demand” for something they don’t know is possible unless you help them see it.
Despite being coached on it, they simply couldn’t understand that the correct questions were, “Would you watch a movie at home online instead of on DVD if you could?” or would you stream or share a video of Christmas at home with Grandma?
We even talked about the first bridge over the Chicago River to the West. Proponents were asked “Why bother? There’s nothing over there” and responded, “Sure, not yet, but just wait until the bridge is built” and they were correct.
It was just stunning how little vision the academics behind the demand study had. Well, now we’re “there” and everyone wants that stuff. And it is still the case that 90% of Illinois doesn’t really have access to usable broadband, as generally understood today. People within just a few miles of me have virtually no option to get the cable modem service that many Americans have. And almost no one has three or more choices. There is no “market”.
When we get to the Green New Deal, a noble goal would be to finally run carrier-neutral DUCTS, not fiber, but the underground ducts that fiber runs through, to every address in the United States, with access points for any service provider that wants access to the system.

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