Recently, Comcast has offered to double the internet speed of existing Blast customers on their television advertisements. They say they will increase my speeds to the 105-150 Mbps range They say nothing about the upload speeds being doubled though. Either way I wanted this upgrade so I called.
On the phone the tech said no problem he could do that for me and proceeded to do some things on his end for probably about 45 minutes only to find he was not able to upgrade me. He then told me he could have a tech out to my house to fix this within 2-4 hours. I was shocked. That turned into a guy calling me in that time frame and scheduling an appointment for someone to come out the following day which was Friday.
When that tech arrived he basically sat at my computer with his iPhone 4 and texted his boss for instructions on what to do. He disconnected my router from the modem entirely which I understand as a good troubleshooting practice to rule out as many issues as possible from the start. Then he checked the wiring which consisted of him disconnecting their splitter and reconnecting an old unused splitter in its place. I asked him at that time if it would I needed a dedicated line to go to my modem from the box and he said No. They recently updated their system and that was no longer needed. The old system they said required a fiber optic line to the house and a dedicated line to the modem. I also asked him if having that splitter on the line had any effect on the signal and he replied no as it is only one splitter hooked in the basement and that was standard. Then he was said his boss wanted to swap out my modem for one from his truck. I was not happy with that concept at all as I own all my equipment in this house other then the CableCard I use from them to watch television over my home network. I have a SiliconDust HD HomeRun Prime video gateway. My home network should not be that important as the internet speeds and logs were form the modem connected to only one computer and the incoming cable wire. My computer has a Realtek PCIe GBe family controller. My modem is a Motorola Surfboard 6141 and the product he wanted to replace it with was a Technicolor 105 Gateway. I allowed him to hook it up just for testing as if it turned out to be a problem with my modem I would simply just replace my modem. When he hooked up that gateway he found my speeds actually decreased. I am glad as that gateway was old and outdated technology compared to my current network setup. Before he hooked up that gateway I asked if there was a way to hook it up with its built in wifi disabled he said NO. I guess he had never heard of network bridge mode. I also asked him how many channels the gateway had and he said that was beyond his knowledge level. I know my SB 6141 is an 8x4 modem so I looked up his gateway and it was a 3x3. His gateway only supports 2.4 Ghz on the wireless it is 802.11 g and I am using an 802.11 AC router here so my network would have suffered greatly had that gateway stayed in place here.
Once he realized it was not my modem he was done so he told me he would escalate it to a higher level tech and his supervisor was aware of that as well. However, I would likely not hear from them till Monday as they dont work weekends. I asked him if they would need to come back to the house and he said no that they would troubleshoot and resolve the problem over the phone. I then asked why Comcast had to have him come out at all instead of solving my problem over the phone in the first place. He responded that when the help desk tries to solve a problem and cannot they assume it is a customer owned equipment issue and send a tech out.
Throughout this entire issue I have been in contact with another tech over the phone from Comcast and he actually seems very competent with his job. I believe he has escalated my issue up to a national support level as well.
I have a pretty extensive background in networking myself. I have spent a few hours trying to improve the setup here in my house all along. I have found that My current Motorola firmware is as follows
Model Name: SB6141
Vendor Name: Motorola
Firmware Name: SB_KOMODO-1.0.6.10-SCM00-NOSH
Boot Version: PSPU-Boot(25CLK) 1.0.12.18m3
Hardware Version: 7.0
Firmware Build Time: Oct 29 2012 18:07:13
I also found on DSL reports Motorola released version 1.0.6.13 in May of 2013. When I inquired about having that firmware pushed to my modem I was told that they used to have that ability but since they upgraded their system they no longer can.
It is also my belief that having a dedicated line for the modem as well as for the television would help with the signal levels across the board. At a minimum I may simply swap out the four or six way splitter they installed for a two way splitter or simply add terminating resistors to any unused ports on the splitter. My current setup only needs one television cable and one internet cable because I am streaming all video over my LAN. I have also noticed the following warnings and errors in the log files of my modem.
Warning codes:
Z00.0
MIMO Event MIMO: Stored MIMO=-1 post cfg file MIMO=-1;CM-MAC=;CMTS-MAC=;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
T202.0
Lost MDD Timeout;CM-MAC=;CMTS-MAC=;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
Critical Codes:
T05.0
SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Loss of Sync;CM-MAC=;CMTS-MAC=;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
R04.0
Received Response to Broadcast Maintenance Request, But no Unicast Maintenance opportunities received - T4 time out;CM-MAC=;CMTS-MAC=;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
I have removed the MAC addresses from the error messages for privacy and security.
I hope someone can help me soon.
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