Tone Parsons

Comcast internet – first impressions are lasting

I have DSL at home from Qwest.  For years, this has been my gateway to the internet, and for the most part, it’s been reliable (if you don’t count the first year and a half).  But lately, I’ve been thinking of mixing things up and finally made the plunge… I ordered Comcast Internet service.

The plan is to dump Qwest completely and go with a cable modem and Vonage for my phone.  I did the math and discovered that the yearly cost is about the same, but I won’t get any long distance charges on calls made to anywhere in the US, Canada, Mexico, or Western Europe.  Since my wife is Canadian, this can save us big money on calls to her Dad and friends up there.

The cable modem showed up yesterday, and after dinner, I started the process of setting it up.  While hooking the modem up to my PC directly was a no-brainer, getting it to work with my routers is a different story (Linksys WRT54G’s).

So, I hopped online to chat with the fine technical support reps at Comcast to see if they could help me out.   They can’t/wont.

The first tech I chatted with disconnected me after rudely stating that what I was asking isn’t supported.  The second was about as helpful.  The third time I joined a chat, I got someone who called himself “Brian” (I have no idea if that’s his real name).  He was actually helpful to a point.

Of course, that’s about the time that my Comcast Internet went down, and stayed down for an hour.  Nice!

I’m going to try it again tonight, but if I still have problems configuring my network to play nice with the Motoroloa Surfboard SB5120 that they sent me (or if it continues to drop the connection), I may just cancel the service and call it good.  I will,  however, contest any charge that Comcast tries to lay on me (other than a pro-rated 2 day fee).

3 comments

3 Comments so far

  1. Dad July 10th, 2007 9:30 am

    I have had Comcast for several years now and it works great, but then I had a Comcast techie come out and set it up. I’ve found that trying to communicate with them over the phone is a lost cause, but the techies out in the field are very helpful and do a very good job. It might be worth the effort to have them send someone out to do the hookup, at least it would relieve the frustration of trying to deal with them over the phone. GOOD LUCK!!!

  2. bugfreezer July 11th, 2007 4:10 pm

    Wow – had no prob getting my wrt54g going with adelphia and Time Warner…. Should have been straightforward with Comcast – need an assist?

  3. Cody July 11th, 2007 10:17 pm

    I have had Comcast for a few years here, like you I had several problems with them when I set my systems up.
    You may want to get a RCA modem from them and not that Motoroloa Surfboard POS. I had 3 of those POS and none of them worked. I went down to the central office and exchanged it for a RCA and was up and running in 4 minutes flat and am running through my Linksys router.

    Good luck.