I am just a SEU (stupid end user). Comcast Performance level 75 MPS and Cable TV at the house and Comcast Bidness (FAS - Fast As S..) here at work.
At both locations things couldn't be better. Internet tech support has been excellent. When I had trouble at the house the tech that came out was WELL qualified and the perfect age, about 37. He walked me through his procedures, tests and results, once he realized that I knew what he was talking about. He was at least equivalent to our (very) nerdy IT cats here at work. When the TV tech came out to the house, same thing..she was very knowledgeable, knew what she was doing, explained what they were testing, etc. and answered my SEU questions. Not disputing y'alls side of the story, but just balancing your derogatory tech comments and telling you how it is from the other side of the Comcast bitcoin. FYI - phone lines are absolute crap in my neighborhood, at least on my block. So my "choice" is Comcast. Sincerely hope your issues all work out, however you wish to solve them. Nothing like not being able to send snippets of technical info to the BVARC reflector HI 73.RH From: BVARC [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bruce via BVARC Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2016 9:27 AM To: BRAZOS VALLEY AMATEUR RADIO CLUB <[email protected]> Cc: Bruce <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [BVARC] RF Power - How to Not spend 3 hours with Comcast level 1 support this was the main reason i got away from comcast. the guy that comes out to fix a problem is lower than level 1 support. he is somewhere between a supermarket sacker and and parking lot shopping cart retriever. they hook up their little box to your connection in the house, look at the signal. then do the same test outside your house and then do the same thing at the pedestal in your backyard somewhere. with those 3 values he comes up with 'the problem is the wiring in your house' or 'you have a bad modem'. at this point he would swap out the modem and then do one test in your house and say its working fine and leave. of course this has not solved anything. or.... he comes up with the next thing... the problem is on the pole and i have to call for a lineman to come out. mind you... you have already waited 3-4 days for this first service call. it will be 3-4 more days for the lineman to come out. the lineman goes to the amplifier up on the pole and says its overheating and tweaks it a bit. then things seem to work fine for awhile until the weather changes and then you go down again. i went with at&t first with adsl and then with uVerse when it came to my area. did it for one reason and one reason only. when you call for tech support and they have to come out, they come out the next day (except sunday). they fix it right then. if your a pair from the pedestal is bad, he hooks you up to another pair in the pedestal. always a fix that can be done and it is done. i am quite happy with 12meg downstream, i would be even happier if it were cheaper for 6meg downstream. 125meg down, take a look at what you are using and i bet you have a ton of bandwidth unused. i think when i looked at walmart's vudu video streaming, they require 3meg down for standard def, 6meg down for high def and 10meg down for super high def. so my 12meg is just fine for most things. i think most people think the faster their speed the better. however, they charge you more and more for the faster speed and try to convince you that it is absolutely necessary to be able to watch tv and surf the internet at the same time. back in the day i had a bonded isdn line to my house. this was when that was as almost not heard of. problem back then was that isdn did not give a line level signal on the line when tested and other repair techs would swap out someone's bad line for your nice clean line. when they installed them back then they had to red tag the line all the way back to the central office so that no one touched it. was a great plan. now-a-days they are a bit more careful as almost everyone has adsl or uVerse on the phone lines and they have a few people out there with a real pots line. 73...bruce On 3/31/2016 8:40 AM, Bill Crowell via BVARC wrote: Hi All, I'm writing this note in the hope that it will help other hams not have to waste hours with the level 1 support people over this issue. Yesterday, my connection was dropping more than usual. I was losing data. And, for those who don't know me, I'm very competent in the ways of networking. We all go to some site like speedtest.net to see what our speed is. I have the Xfinity BLAST service that gives me up to 125Mbps downstream. That doesn't tell the whole story. The upstream speed and reliability are just as important. This is because the protocols used for most traffic are TCP and the link layer is wanting an ACK packet (among others.) If the ACK packet is not received, the link retries. And, when things get bad, the entire channel is spending all of its time thrashing. To test link integrity, I started running a ping to my server in Dallas. You can do this on Mac or Linux rather easily. Windows ping gives you only 4 pings by default. I'm sure that someone who is a Windows person will give the appropriate syntax for a continuous ping. You can ping a DNS server at 4.2.2.1. So, start a ping to a target computer somewhere. THEN do the speed test. If you see "request timed out", you're having an upstream issue. Now to my equipment. I'm running a Motorola 6141 cable modem. This has been the very best modem for a long time. I don't pay Comcast for their piece of junk. The modem connects to a Juniper SSG5 firewall and then to my network. This is a DOCSIS 3.0 modem. What this means is that it gets configuration settings from Comcast. These settings include which channels to bond for the downstream and upstream connections. What I had not realized is that the network sets the TRANSMIT power levels of the modem. During the protocol negotiation and then periodically, the ISP's gear will tell the modem to increase or decrease power. If the receive signal strength is too low, Comcast will tell my modem to "QRO old man". You can see the RF side on the Signal page of the modem. This is the Motorola: I've got one, measly channel and the modem is just below it's absolute maximum power of 57dBmV!!!! Yesterday, it was at 57 dBmV all day. This is when packets are definitely lost. The downstream channels are all fine at 0 dBmV - parity. Now, how to correct this. Ideally, Comcast would deal with the RF link between the modem and their gear. They're sending someone next week. They'll likely say that the splitter should be removed, but then I have to choose between TV and Internet. You know the drill. For those of you not paying attention, the whole system is digital and this issue manifests itself with the digital TV as well. What is needed is to even out the TX/RX levels. I'm not expecting the $15/hour tech to understand this. So, I'm getting an amplifier designed for this purpose. The key here is "active return". That's the part where the amp boosts the upstream signal from the cable modem. The splitter is being replaced with this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003T2SLIO/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?i e=UTF8 <https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003T2SLIO/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00? ie=UTF8&psc=1> &psc=1 I'm expecting the TX power to be a more reasonable 30-40 dBmV and the problems to disappear. 73! Bill Bill Crowell, N4HPG Pearland, TX Text messaging one-handed since 1982 _______________________________________________ BVARC mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://mail.bvarc.org/mailman/listinfo/bvarc_bvarc.org -- Bruce Paige, KK5DO AMSAT Director Contests and Awards AMSAT Board Alternate 2015-2016 ARRL Awards Field Checker (WAS, 5BWAS, VUCC), VE Houston AMSAT Net - Wed 0100z on Echolink - Conference *AMSAT* Also live streaming MP3 at http://www.amsatnet.com Podcast at http://www.amsatnet.com/podcast.xml or iTunes Latest satellite news on the ARRL Audio News http://www.arrl.org AMSAT on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/amsat
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