The PaBlog

If you follow me on Twitter you’ve probably seen a number of rants recently from me with the hashtag #comcastdoesn’tcare.

In case you’re wondering, these are plays on the name of another Twitter user, @comcastcares, who is the person at Comcast in charge of mollifying people who are pissed off at them.

My problems with Comcast go back to long before Comcast as we now know it existed, really. The local operation has been headed by the same people through three different acquisition/mergers (Teleprompter to Sammons to Suburban to Comcast). So even though the overall company has changed, nothing locally has really improved. If anything it’s gotten worse because the home office keeps moving further and further away, and the layers of bureaucracy keep growing fatter and fatter.

My current problem has existed for over a year, but has become acute in the last couple months. All traffic will stop and all TCP/IP connections will suddenly reset. My connection is not lost, my IP address is not reset, it’s just that every bit of communication between my machines and the outside world ceases.

Suddenly, at least once an hour, it’s like the internet doesn’t exist for anywhere from five to twenty minutes. Two days ago I was lucky to get three minute windows, followed by a five minute outage. So I started queueing up tweets to be sent whenever my connectivity returned with the “#comcastdoesn’tcare” tag.

That brought me to the attention of @comcastcares, whose very name is a lie.

It’s not my machine, because it happens on both hard-wired computers and on my WiFi connection.

I have replaced my cable modem (which led to Comcast taking the modem I owned and replacing it with one I have to fucking RENT) and it didn’t solve the problem. I replaced my router, my switch, and my WAP. It’s all brand new wire both inside and outside the house. I spent a small fortune in equipment hoping to find the defective little bit that was causing these problems and it’s absolutely nothing on my side.

If I call Comcast “technical support” (ha fucking ha) they tell me to reboot my computer. I explain that the problem is in their network, not mine, so jump ahead in the script or escalate me. They tell me to reboot my computer. If I do that (one time years ago when I did it I had a hard drive failure and lost 100gb of stuff I needed for audio production, too) or pretend to do it and the problem doesn’t clear up, they want me to take my computer down to the basement and plug it right into the modem. They must have a script that they’re forced to follow to try and solve minor problems that are on the user’s end, and if there’s a real problem they have no fucking clue what to do.

And I’m not alone. A while back people discovered that this sort of thing was happening back when Comcast was throttling bittorrent connections. RST packets were being sent to over-active users effectively killing their torrents. When the FCC came down on them, they said that they would stop interfering with specifically bittorrent traffic, and look into more modern “network shaping” efforts.

I will bet that’s exactly what’s going on with me. I have a lot of traffic, mainly VOIP but also video going to our TiVos and public domain video I download to work with for the eventual return of “The Idiot Box.” I’ve never gotten a high-traffic warning or notice from Comcast, so I assume I’m nowhere near their theoretical limit for “unlimited” service. However, my connections keep dying or freezing.

I’m left with no alternative but to assume that the RST floods from Comcast are continuing, and I’m one of the users that they’ve started targetting with them. I’ve seen no evidence to the alternative, and tech support wouldn’t be able to fix it if they could fix their ass with a blowtorch.

So, @comcastcares, if you want to “help” me, you’ll get Verizon to finish wiring our town for FiOS.

UPDATE: November 1, 2009 Got a call from Comcast, insisting that they’ve checked their network and that it’s officially not their fault. I take that as confirmation that this throttling is being done deliberately. Too bad they’re a monopoly, huh? Once more, "Comcast Doesn’t Care."