Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

[renderman]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

Damn, Dev, you have my sympathies, although it's nice to know that other people deal with this kind of crap, too. "Best guy?" Yikes; From what you'd said previously about the training, their best guy may just be a chimp in pants who needs a regular reminder to breathe.

My preference would be to get a trained network installer that I trust, and send the bill to the colossal screwup's company.

That works too

[xor]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

Comcast doesn't to VOIP right at all. RCN is a little better. At least they put a cable demarc/nid outside the home similar to what the phone company has. IMHO they should just replace it and it would make wiring much simpler and all the phones in the house would work. But of course you can't do that as the home owners don't own the Telco demarc.

Comcast comes into your home with a modem and hooks one phone up via RJ11 flat cable. People don't realize they are getting ripped off until they want to use more than one phone.

Any who still trying to get them to get my dns records right. They misspelled macserver. What is so hard about a host named called macserver. They spelled it macsevrer or something like that. Still missing my MX records don't know why that is talking so long.

xor

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

to respond to xor, the "single phone" setup isn't all that bad since all a person has to do is take the flat cable and plug it into a wall jack in their house... it makes all the other phones live. of course, it would be nice if the installer did that for them instead of letting people figure it out on their own.

as for everyone else... thank you for the sympathetic words. now, to continue the story...

The tech and his boss (from the third party contracting firm) repeatedly spoke to the woman who is the head of this household. She was livid that they did anything in the first place (as render noted... she didn't want anyone there without her home and i was to be called in to oversee the matter) so she was pissed off to begin with.

Now, they were telling her that the tech would come back that same night and "fix" everything. She told them to fuck off and said that no one from either their company or Comcast was doing anything more there. The repair would be performed by the contractors who originally did the lines (me) and therefore covered by the same warranty and service agreement that she had previously. (I don't have anything so formal with people... but they all know that i'll come back and fix any of the lines, etc. if it was my original work putting them in.)

Now, what was happening was that this company didn't want word getting back to Comcast about how badly they fouled up. (The installer was even calling late that night on his cel phone asking to come back.) The family escalated matters with Comcast through their property damage division. At first i thought it sad that the company messes things up enough to need a whole dedicated property damage department... but then again, they do perform a lot of in-home wiring, particularly as far as TV service is concerned.

The damage division folks came out and took photos of everything. Then I came in, first as an evening emergency call to restore service just enough to keep them running (lots of patch cables snaking around the closet, etc.) and later I came by that weekend and re-ran all the wires, etc.

At first, Comcast was apologetic and understanding. They insisted that they would cover all the costs and assured the family that if they sent my invoices they would be paid quickly. I didn't even ask the family for payment... i said they can hold off until the check from Comcast comes in.

Pity that, since now the whole affair has been turned over to some other department that i'll call "Division Ignore." All calls result in the runaround, and now I think that they are just going to bury the whole matter. So much for that paycheck.

[Ridirich]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

When I was in York County and Indiana County business class cable was offered by both Comcast and Adelphia in residential areas but it cost an arm and a leg. That was back from 2000-2004. Maybe it's a county to county thing?

[Thorn]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

xor, I owe you a beer at shmoocon. The info in this thread about Comcast making the business service with the fixed IPs available to residential/business service seems to have paid off.

[xor]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

Thanks

Yes it has for me so far with no problems. Their web portal needs some work but other than that it's ok.

xor

[DaKahuna]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

Okay - Who at Comcast do I need to talk to?

[xor]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

http://businessclass.comcast.net is the portal but this number should lead you to sales. 1-800-316-1619. If a support issue arises 8am - 8pm m - f ask for the business class support. Don't even waist your time with the residential support unless you want to waist your time :)

xor

Stay away from the Netgear equipment which they offer in certain markets I've heard bad things about it. Go with the SMC 8014, they have a wireless version of the same gateway but not sure whether or not you have have them configure it as a bridge so that you can use your own router/firewall eg cisco, sonicwall, watchguard ...etc without doing double NAT. A, CNAME, MX, TXT(no SPF record however which is a little annoying), & NS records you can setup yourself via the portal. The PTR records you need to call them ask for business class tier 2, and it's no problem; they take about 24 hours to propagate unlike the other DNS records which get picked up almost instantly or at least when I test through DNStuff.com At least if they ever try and give you crap about SPAM, you can say I wanted to use an SPF record but your web portal didn't support it. Don't forget your periods at the end of your DNS records on your MX, NS, and FQDN A record eg mydomain.etc. A or NS, or MX static ip, or nameserver.

Bind equivalent:

FQDN. IN [A,NS,MX,] [0-50 for MX] Static IP glue, or hostway-namserver(comcast farms this stuff out to hostway at least in my market)..

You can get 1 5 or with a justification 13 usuable static ip's.

You can't do zone transfers from the hostway name servers(good). Haven't tried to use the comcast.net namervers yet. So if you have a slave or want to set one up it mite be better to make a sub domain and do you own DNS. You could also do your own DNS out right which I will move to over time and then farm out the secondary to some company that does that sort of thing. Of course you still need them to do the PTR records as they own the netblock. Oh they recommend correctly against using CNAME records as apparently they will get you blacklisted these days. Your default web portal domain setup has them but you should get rid of them. No CNAME records is also the recommended action by dnsstuff.com. Wild cards are also allowed in the A records but I don't know if that is such a good idea security wise. Something about wild cards in DNS just doesn't sound like a good idea though I could be wrong.

*.FQDN. IN A IP Address

xor

[Thorn]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

http://businessclass.comcast.net is the portal but this number should lead you to sales. 1-800-316-1619.

Start with that number, but understand that depending on the area, they might shuffle you around to the "localized" marketing unit. I ended up talking to an office in Manchester, NH.

You can get 1 5 or with a justification 13 usuable static ip's.

They told me it was $5 for 1 static IP, $10 for 5, or $15 for 13. They never mentioned "justifying" the number of addresses. That may be something to do with how high the demand is in a given market.

The current prices they told me:

$59 6Mbps down/768kbps up
$89 8Mbps down/1Mbps up

plus the add-on for the static addresses.

[xor]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

Speaking of Bind, I'm sure most people know about this site but for those that don't it's got a lot of good information on it. Lot's of templates for setting up Bind, Cisco, ...etc.

http://www.cymru.com/index.html

xor

[DaKahuna]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

Start with that number, but understand that depending on the area, they might shuffle you around to the "localized" marketing unit. I ended up talking to an office in Manchester, NH.

Thanks. I have come to expect that with Comcast. The only way I have found to avoid it is to drive to their little office about three miles from here (former Adelphia office).

They told me it was $5 for 1 static IP, $10 for 5, or $15 for 13. They never mentioned "justifying" the number of addresses. That may be something to do with how high the demand is in a given market.

The current prices they told me:

$59 6Mbps down/768kbps up
$89 8Mbps down/1Mbps up

plus the add-on for the static addresses.

Is that $59 in addition to what I pay currently or just $59 total? I am paying for a residential service now and it's only $10 cheaper than that, without any discount.

[Thorn]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

Is that $59 in addition to what I pay currently or just $59 total? I am paying for a residential service now and it's only $10 cheaper than that, without any discount.

I have no idea, since I don't use cable for TV. Adelphia dropped a channel we watch a lot (Turner Classic Movies) prompting a switch to Dish. I've never looked back.

[xor]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

I have no idea, since I don't use cable for TV. Adelphia dropped a channel we watch a lot (Turner Classic Movies) prompting a switch to Dish. I've never looked back.

Sat internet is nice if you don't mind the latency. I have a customer that uses it. The connection has been up for like 3 years, and I've never had to reboot the modem which is almost unheard of. It however is expensive. Of course put a dish on top of a mobile home with a motor and a signal strength feed back loop to keep it on target and you could be surfing out in the middle of the Black Rock Desert conceivably. Very cool place by the way, was out there for Burning Man once.

xor

[Thorn]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

Sat internet is nice if you don't mind the latency. I have a customer that uses it. The connection has been up for like 3 years, and I've never had to reboot the modem which is almost unheard of. It however is expensive. Of course put a dish on top of a mobile home with a motor and a signal strength feed back loop to keep it on target and you could be surfing out in the middle of the Black Rock Desert conceivably. Very cool place by the way, was out there for Burning Man once.

xor

Yeah, I've heard about both the expense and the latency of satellite Internet. As for satellite TV, though, I'm generally happy with Dish.

[Samurai Drifter]

Re: Comcast: A Ray of Hope?

I also use Comcast but have no trouble using Bittorrent (or other P2P programs) as long as I forward the right ports. One of my friends in my area is able to run them, but has gotten at least one cut-off notice from Comcast.