Diagnosing Your Own Connection Problems To Get Results
from the now-there's-an-idea... dept
Over the past few months I’ve had to call Comcast quite often concerning downtime on my home cable modem connection. Every time, they go through the usual script – which is useless – and then agree to send someone out to check it out. Of course, the “earliest possible time” is always about a week forward, and the connection always comes back within a few hours, and I need to call back and cancel the appointment. I could just let the technician come out, but they warn if the technician gets here and doesn’t find a problem, they’ll charge me for it. Considering that Comcast once charged me for “installing a jack” when they simply changed a faceplate, I’m betting I’ll get charged. So, what does it take to get real tech support from Comcast? Apparently, it helps if you write a program to log all the outages of you and your neighbors and then call up Comcast’s president and ask him directly for help. Forget Comcast’s support lines, I’m dialing directly to the president’s office from now on. I’ll bet the hold times are shorter too.
Comments on “Diagnosing Your Own Connection Problems To Get Results”
I'd like to have that software
I’d love to have that software.. anyone have access to it? Post a url for download. Otherwise, maybe I’ll make my own.
Re: I'd like to have that software
You would?
while `sleep 1`
do
fping -qc1 http://www.google.com > /tmp/log
done
Not Hard. Now, for the fun part, get your neighbours in on the game.
Re: Re: I'd like to have that software
sweet! thanks!
Tech support sux
Heh, I did something pretty much identical to get Shaw cable to listen…Altough they never admitted the problem they ended up replacing all the routers in the neibourhood shortly after I contacted their head office with MY test results. Oddly enuf, the problems went away and the speeds became good
I will give em credit thou, their techs just couldn’t do anything…never charged me.
You know....
Next time I have a problem like I did earlier this week, I think I’ll just raise a little hell. The time to get a technician out for me was only two days, but still two days. For a problem that was obviously not my problem.
They are supposed to have better tools than what they are using. If I call in with a problem, he should be able to type in my address, and check my neighbors and see if they are active or not. Or maybe even find that you can’t even get close to my IP address.
No Subject Given
Probably better off with a cron job running every few minutes, otherwise you might get blamed for a ping flood DDoS attack! ;o)
Plus might be useful to record the time. How about:
date; ping -c1 204.127.205.8 > /var/tmp/cable.txt
This way you’re only attacking http://www.comcast.net and getting around their round robin DNS.
Re: No Subject Given
Oops, should be >> /var/tmp/cable.txt otherwise you’ll just overwrite the file instead of appending it.