A look at business, law and life from a technophile.
Comcast Responds Part 3 – Broken Internet Connnection After telling Comcast You Have a Router
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
I’ve had the same sort of problem with Comcast in CO twice now – the router cannot get an IP with its native MAC (after working for months and months and months) and Comcast swears up and down that it’s MY problem. Eventually we connect another computer and the connections works fine – as will the router once it clones that computer’s MAC.
Googling for banned macs returns a lot of hits for people stealing cable services – so I wonder if some jerks on our nodes are conflicting with our MAC addresses? Pretty strange coincidence in your case, but maybe it’s only a problem when the modem reboots?
Anyway, regardless of what your contacts say – it’s pretty clear that Comcast *DOES* refuse IPs to certain MACs at certain times. It would be darn nice if the tech support folks could see that instead of us poor users having to troubleshoot it!
On one hand, I think that Comcast’s institutional knowledge is pitiful – no one knows what someone else has done or can do. It almost seems like a “need to know” basis, rather than empowering the front line.
On the other hand, I’ve never created such a stir, as I did with the comcast post. Comcast responded in force at higher levels trying to fix my problem, once they discovered that I was really frustrated. It seems like they want to change.
On the other hand, Dell still doesn’t care that they’ve lost my firm’s business.
As to the banned IP issue, the evidence points where it does. I don’t know the end answer, as their system configuration is a black box. Even the router in my house.
–Ben