WHEN WANES THE WI-FI?

[Dave (***Dave Hill)]

So over the past week or two, we have been running into times at the Consortium when, hey presto, it’s not a matter of various network contention slowing everything, but when our network connection actually seems to come down. It’s Zoomeriffic fun! (Or Teameriffic for Margie.)

This happens for a bit, then things come back after 3, 4, 5 minutes. Enough time to confirm that there are no outages in our area or anything silly like that.

I have also, during such times, unplugged, counted to 15, and replugged in the Netgear router (C6250!).

It never seemed to solve the problem, which usually self-corrected.

So, inspired by Doyce’s example, I have now ordered:

Fun fact: all of Amazon’s offers for it would take a week to arrive. I went to Best Buy, and they offered to have it at the Southglenn store … in a week … or a store 45 miles away … tomorrow … or at my house … Friday. So, logistics!

And, to boot, I’ll be looking to see how I can have it sit on the windowsill – thus avoiding the TV/entertainment center possible interference. I just need to be sure I have appropriate cable lengths, but I can play with that the next couple of days.

Over on the Xfinity side of things, I currently have “Extreme Pro Internet!” which ostensibly offers 500Mbps downloads.

According to Xfinity’s own tests, I’m getting 18-21 down, 12-13 up, latency 23ms.

When I go to the “Change Plan” menu item, I don’t see all the cool options to change my plan. The screen that comes up looks semi-normal – a contact-us link, some offers to upsell some things – but it’s actually got an URl of https://www.xfinity.com/error/buy/sorry?errorCode=DFPLN3002 and a window title of “Sorry | Xfinity”, all of which sounds kinda sketchy.

So I’ll need to contact them by phone or, just maybe, chat, tomorrow. Which would be even better if I weren’t in various back-to-back calls from 8:30 to 1pm. But we’ll make it work.

Bottom line, I have moderate confidence that we should be in good shape for Saturday night. But … who knows what might happen? Stay tuned!

[Dave (***Dave Hill)]

Apparently between Xfinity’s rejiggering of their whole customer support setup during the COVID-19 thing and their long-complained-about (on the support forum) tendency to push people to call Xfinity sales folk for upselling rather than manage their own plans, there is apparently no way, given whatever current plan we have, for me to do anything about this online.

The really funky thing is that there was no reference popping up to the 1-800-XFINITY c/s number, or any sort of phone connection, just chat bots that point me to web pages that throw those same “errors”.

[garrett (Bill Garrett)]

Xfinity has plans the way Indiana Jones has plans.

[Dave (***Dave Hill)]

When the service starts getting rocky:

When Dave tries to find stuff on the Xfinity site:

When Xfinity is encouraging me to contact Customer Service:

When the CSR finally gets on the phone:

When the CSR starts trying to figure out what’s going on:

https://media1.tenor.com/images/581ca369bd54160a3da721f155123132/tenor.gif(image larger than 4096KB)

When the CSR starts describing my current service plan:

When the CSR starts trying to sell me stuff I don’t want:

When the CSR talks me into something:

When I get my next bill:

[Dave (***Dave Hill)]

As it turns out, the difference between my current package (where the discount had expired) and kicking up to 1Gb service was … about $1/mo. So there you go.

Modem should arrive tomorrow. Cables in place appear long enough to do the thing I want to do with them, so I expect all should go well.

[garrett (Bill Garrett)]

Comcast built their empire on acquisitions and mergers, and from experience, they never were able to fully unify the provisioning, billing, and other systems they inherited from that process. The best they could do was a rough federation. So I like to think that they’re not actively incompetent, just hamstrung by a mountain of technical debt left behind by their business unit - which describes a lot of other companies I know.

[insomn14 (Mike)]

This sounds 100% accurate to what I know about Comcast and the cable industry in general.

[insomn14 (Mike)]

@Dave, how fares the cable woes?

[fragolakat (James)]

A bright shiny new box arrived today. @Dave can tell you more lovely specifics.

[Dave (***Dave Hill)]

Well, it took a couple of factory resets, a call to Netgear support, and much frowny-facing, but I am posting this via our shiny new Nighthawk X4S C7800, which, rather than showing 25/10 speed is now testing at 225/30.

So, assuming nothing bursts into flame between now and tomorrow, we should be up for a game. Which makes me happy.