Comcast Troubles

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Our internet (via Comcast) has been giving us trouble for close to a week now; it keeps dropping us every ten minutes or so, and a hard reboot gets us back on. Comcast has been kind of opaque, alternating between suggesting rebooting the modem, moving it off the surge protector, and then saying "there's an outage in the area", but I haven't been able to get more details from them.

I'm curious how widespread this is, and if (if other people are suffering from the "outage") anyone else has gotten any estimates of fixing. (We're on Lester Terrace, just behind Seven Hills Park).

Comments

[mjperson.livejournal.com]

We certainly have many troubles Monday night, but things seem fine now...

[pluggz01.livejournal.com]

im actually not even from somerville. im from reading. but on monday night we did have a bit of a problem with our internet too. its fine now though.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Hmm. After more pestering their customer service, I guess maybe the previous outages confused our router, so subsequent problems have been internal rather than Comcast's fault. (Yesterday they were still telling me it was an outage; today the outage is apparently resolved). Anyway, I guess not so widespread now, oops. :)

[mihmo.livejournal.com]

Do you use bittorrent?

I've noticed they cap our bandwidth to something ridiculously slow like 3k/sec downstream if we have bittorrent running. Not that they'll ever admit it if you call them on it.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

I think you must have something misconfigured or two or more things that don't play well with each other. You do need to be careful because many bittorrent clients will do awful things to your own network and some personal routers/firewalls/NAT boxes behave suboptimally with bittorrent running.

The very basis for bittorrent's ability to work so well is that it opens as many connections as possible to as many different people as possible and some network appliances/software just falls over in the face of it.

I use comcast and I can often manage 8mbps down and 40kbps up with my current router. My previous router would just collapse even after I told my bittorrent client to limit the number of simultaneous connections to 50 total (maintaining hundreds per file in progress is not uncommon).

More advanced things you can do include traffic shaping your own network to give priority to non-bittorrent traffic and so even when you are running bittorrent full out, it will have minimal effect on the other things you're doing on your network.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

oops, that's 8mbps down and 400kbps up.

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

Actually, Comcast has been caught choking off BitTorrent. The Electronic Frontier Foundation actually proved it a few months back.

Not that you should be stealing in the first place, which is what BitTorrent exists for (yes, I know you can trade legitimate files over it, but if most BitTorrent traffic is legitimate I'm a leprechaun). But considering Comcast's technique for doing so violates federal anti-hacking laws...

[xuth.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know that they have been shown to insert spurious resets. However even with the extra resets you can still maintain significantly better transfer rates than 3kbps (by orders of magnitude).

And I never suggested that most Bittorrent traffic was "legitimate". That is completely beside the point. Though I prefer to maintain some form of moral high ground and not use it for warez, music, and movies that I don't have rights to.

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

Good, it's highly appreciated. I wasn't suggesting you were doing so, it's just something that sticks in my craw (I read far too much whining about how nobody will seed the latest episode of "Lost" or whatever.)

[mihmo.livejournal.com]

I work on open source software so having access to bittorrent is extremely important to me. My usage of it is also perfectly legit.

[mihmo.livejournal.com]

I really don't think that's the case as I had speakeasy previously in the same apartment and my bittorrent speeds were extremely fast.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

just for giggles, did you have a router now that you didn't use then? Did you change bittorrent software? Operating systems? You may already know this and if so, I'm sorry to waste our time, but to make good use of bittorrent, it has to know what your external IP address is and have a way for people outside of your network to be able to connect to you. Up until fairly recently, if you had a cable/dsl router, you needed to manually configure both the router (to allow the incoming connection) and the bittorrent software (to teach it how to figure out what it's externally facing IP address is) to get reasonable speeds because you wouldn't be able to make connections to all the other people behind routers who didn't know how to configure their systems.

[mihmo.livejournal.com]

same router... same client... i was using fedora 7 and now i'm using fedora 8 so maybe there is some difference but there really shouldn't be.

also, what i've noticed is that i get very, very good speeds in bittorrent... and within maybe 5-10 minutes my entire connection slows to a crawl.

i'm not really a networking person though so maybe something is screwy in my setup or maybe something changed. the only thing actually that i can think changed is that i now have a ps3 and that's on the network...

[teko.livejournal.com]

After months of issues with abysmal upload speeds with Comcast (a 50 MB FTP would take about 1/2 hr to 45 minutes) and lots of my time wasted with Comcast folks saying things like "it's probably because your network cables are backwards" and "it's because you use Vonage", a Comcast tech told me flat out, "we throttle all uploads to 40k after the first ten seconds to discourage piracy".

[xuth.livejournal.com]

Yes, this matches exactly with what I've found too (40kBps ~= 400kbps). You'll note that Comcast only ever advertises their download rate. As to the "to discourage piracy" thing this may or may not be the case. It at least used to be that there were technical reasons for giving fairly narrow bands for upstream traffic. And there was little reason to fix it because most people on a cable network were thought to only be consumers of content. This was, of course, self perpetuating so that virtually all content producers from large media houses to the rankest of amateurs uploads their content to data centers. The world would likely be a very different place right now if everyone could just open up large areas of their computers in a meaningful way to the rest of the world. Sadly the 400-500kbps cap seems to be standard in consumer net access until you're spending real money.

The 10 second thing on Comcast is for both uploads and downloads. It is genuinely helpful to consumers in many situations and it has the added benefit of hugely inflating the scores on internet "speed tests" that Comcast marketing likes to point you at without actually mentioning the 10 seconds of inflated bandwidth.

[teko.livejournal.com]

I can see how 10 seconds of inflated bandwidth are great for 95% of folks' downloads of music and movie trailers, but for folks like me who often need to send clients large files, it's useless -- I can go to Starbucks and upload in less than a minute what takes me 45 minutes through Comcast.

Does RCN do this as well? I feel like I'm a bit out of options.

[maelithil.livejournal.com]

No, they don't. At least they don't to me, and I really doubt they cap selectively.

[mihmo.livejournal.com]

Perhaps they only institute this policy on loops with a particular saturation of users on them.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Have had a lot of brief outages in the past few weeks here in North Cambridge. It may be because of power dips.

I'd recommend restarting the modem and router when it happens.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Yup, restarting the modem and router does fix the problem, but it's annoying to have to do every ten to forty-five minutes. (So if it's them, I want them to fix it; if it's my end, I need to figure out if I need to buy a new router. Sadly, while 10-45 minutes is frequent enough to annoy me when it happens, it's infrequent enough to be very tedious to debug. "Did this help? Wait two hours to see...")

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

We had a batch of on-and-off outages this afternoon/early evening, if that's useful data for you.

And we worried about our router and modem until we realized that all of the people with unsecured wireless networks in our neighborhood were losing service at the same time we were.

[xartofnothingx.livejournal.com]

if you have linksys as a router - i would go to www.linksys.com/check and re-install the router then update the software. worked like a charm when ours went out a couple of weeks ago.

[dianamp04.livejournal.com]

I have found that "there may be outages in the area" is comcast speak for "I don't have a clue and don't care." I called them a while ago because my DVR wasn't reading any of my cable channels and the guy tried to tell me that there might be an outage in my area...after I explained to him that my roommate, whose room is like uh...40 feet from me...has perfect service. I seriously had to explain to this man that no, it's not an outage and yes, I have tried restarting. This conversation went on for at LEAST 30 minutes. And the only things this oh-so-useful-customer-service agent said was:
"And your roommate has service?" (Me: "Yes)
"And you've tried restarting and that didn't work?" (Me: "Correct. Several times")
"And your roommate has service" (Me: "...yes")
"And you've tried restarting and that didn't work? (Me: "...correct")
"Let me check if there are any outages in your area" (Me: "........")
(repeat)

I have no useful tips for you, I just wanted another excuse to show my Comcast hate. Maybe try plugging your internet directly into your computer. That might at least let you know if it's you or them. We had issues a week or two ago, but reinstalling the router thing fixed it.

[m00n.livejournal.com]

Does RCN provide service to your area? Because if they do then there is really no good reason to stick with Comcast for your Internet access. While their service may only be marginally more reliable, I've found their technicians to be infinitely more helpful. It's rarely taken more than 15 minutes to either convince me that the problem is mine or get someone to come out to my house.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I certainly can't make any generalized statements about which service is better, but my personal experience with RCN has been worse. The problem the OP describes, ironically, is one we've been having (on and off) since November and their customer service has been useless. It's just anecdotal evidence, but none of us ever had problems back when we had Comcast. (Which doesn't mean it never could.) So frustrating.

I have had this problem and fixed it

[trouble4hire.livejournal.com]

I had a similar problem about a month ago. I would have to replace my router, but it turned out that cable modems only have a shelf life of about a year and a half. I took mine to the comcast office on sherman st in cambridge, and they gave me a new one no questions asked, no paperwork needed. My internet has worked very well ever since.

[duffless2323.livejournal.com]

Hi I haven't had troubles recently, but in the past I had trouble and documented all the days and had them credit me back the dollar amounts I paid each day for the internet and it wasn't usable - you should be recouped for any loss of service that is beyond the normal occasional outage.