I swapped out gateways today. After booting it up, I noticed one of the telephony lights was solid. I plugged a phone into its output port, and sure enough, I had dial-tone. I called my own phone and the call went through. I noticed on my own phone's caller-id, a phone number and name (I assume the previous Comcast customer.)
I called Comcast activation, but it is only automatic menus. So I called the main Comcast help line. I had to go through five people (some were comical, not able to understand what my problem was.)
Finally, upon my request, a tier 2 agent got involved. He understood my problem, and he talked with someone to confirm the telephony was on, and to take it off. He confirmed that my guess was correct, the device was still associated with another customer, and he and the lady, from another department who actually remove it from my device, were glad that I was patient to get through to them because the situation jeopardized another customer's account.
It is a concern that Comcast does not clean the provisioning/MAC registration from a device before giving it out to other customers (I would hope Comcast would test the devices to make sure they operated correctly, much less, unregister them from the previous customers.) Perhaps my situation was a rare incident and not the norm.
It is also questionable that it took so many Comcast agents to figure out what my problem even was.
The first one could not even understand what I describe above. She kept saying that I did not have Comcast telephone service, and that I must be confusing what I thought was telephone through Comcast with streaming phone service. She kept asking if I had streaming phone service. And each time she asked, I said, "no I do not have streaming phone service; my phone service is a landline." She did not know what a landline was, by the way. I told her a landline was physical plant/cable to a premise, when she asked. She just said oh, and asked me again, and again, how I get my phone service. After going round and round, I said, in very loud and slow words, "I literally plugged a phone into the Comcast gateway, got dial tone and made a successful call on it." Her last reply was something along the lines of that is not possible, if you do not have phone service through Comcast.
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