[PLUG-TALK] Comcast intermittent woes

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Mon Oct 30 07:10:47 UTC 2017


On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 03:05:48PM -0700, Dick Steffens wrote:
> ... studied the connections up on the pole. He found that
> the device up there that feeds my house and one or two others
> was very old, probably from before TCI started @Home service
> in the mid '90s. ...

Thanks for that!  Last Friday, Comcast transferred the 
Business Internet account from my wife's office downtown
to our home; her office building is mismanaged and becoming
unusable.  We have new cable connections now, but knowing
what can go wrong will help us in the future.

We still have Frontier FIOS to the house; it was WONDERFUL
when Verizon was operating it, but has become almost
unusable with Frontier's cost-cutting connectivity cutbacks
(full speed to Ookla, as slow as 5 kbps to many websites). 
Moron operators, hidden fees, opaque service offerings,
and they may have sold our information to telemarketers. 
After a few weeks to verify Comcast is working correctly,
we will either add our house phone to the Comcast contract,
or buy an Ooma box for managed VOIP over Comcast internet.

The Frontier fiber coming into our house is single mode
40-year-armored, the good stuff, and might support 100Gbps
with the right equipment at both ends.  So when we cancel
our service from Frontier,  we will ask them to leave the
fiber.  I expect the cheapskates to remove the Optical
Network Terminal (ONT) to replace a broken one elsewhere.

When Frontier goes bankrupt (they are very close) and their
Oregon FIOS assets are bought by a more competent operator,
we might switch service to the new operator.  It would be
great if the new operator was regional or even community
owned, but I expect it will take three years and a billion
dollars of investment in OR/WA to mitigate Frontier's mess.

So far, though, Comcast Business may cost more but they
treat us VERY well.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com



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