I just received this email this morning.  Unfortunately, the comcast technician was probably calling the number that I cancelled in August 2009.

Hi Ben,

My name is Joe, I’m a Senior Technician with Comcast Customer Security Assurance. I just left you a message at the phone number we have listed on your account, but I figured I’d shoot you an email also. Mark Casem forwarded us your email and asked that we reach out to assist. First of all, I’d like to apologize for the problems that you were having. What I see on your account is that when you connected with our Chat Rep, he noticed that on your account we didn’t have it specified that you should have the 12 Meg service. What he did was put in a service order to include that 12 Meg Bootfile, and then requsted you powercycle your modem and router. The notes on the account indicate that the chat rep was waiting for you to reconnect, but you never did. I can assure you that we did not blacklist your router. I imagine there was an issue with the modem not booting up with the correct 12 Meg bootfile, but at this point I cannot be sure.

Right now I see that your modem is online with the correct bootfile, and you should be getting the correct speeds. If not, please let us know and we’ll take whatever action necessary to make sure you get them. And as far as the router issue; yes, you’re right. Typically we don’t support routers, and if we have an issue where someone can’t get online behind a router, we’ll have the customer bypass it, and make sure that they can get online without the router, just to rule that out. If at that point reconnecting the router doesn’t allow you to connect, we usually recommend contacting the router manufacturer to troubleshoot further. Again, I can tell you with certainty that we do not blacklist routers MAC addresses. We understand that a lot (probably most) customers use a router to get on the internet, and the last thing we want is for subscriber’s to not have that option.

If there’s anything else that we can help with, please let us know.

Thanks,

-Joe, Tech # 108
Senior Technician
Comcast Customer Security Assurance

I really appreciate Joe following up with me.  Fortunately, everything seems to be humming along fine right now.  However, I do want to make a couple points that led me to my conclusion (in my defense):

  • The router only worked after I gave it a new MAC address (the same one as my HP computer behind the router that would get an IP address).  Rebooting the cable modem again and power cycling the router did not solve the problem.  It would not renew an IP address.
  • Two computers were able to get IP addresses from the cable modem.
  • The link the chat representative gave me did not work (it is slightly possible that I didn’t copy it down right because their system didn’t allow me to copy and paste from the chat window – which is still bad).  When using the link, I was sent to an error page that asked for an email and something else.
  • When I signed up with comcast in February of ’09, they limited my connection to a single computer – the modem would not connect to any other computer (of course I fixed that by making my router look like that computer by using that computer’s MAC address) – so comcast has at least a history of whitelisting

If I were to request two things – it would be to allow copy and paste in the chatroom AND make the link work more than once.  Perhaps I clicked on the link and “used up” its one time use while trying to copy and paste.

–Ben

Sources:  Email from Joe