[ale] OT: Change in UI on Xfinity Modem/Router/Wireless AP

[JD]

On 12/26/2014 09:02 AM, Dustin Strickland wrote:
> I do residential. I am not 100% sure, but I do believe policies are
> different for support for business accounts.

Yes, they are.

I have a subnet and business service.  I was told it was mandatory for them to
provide the equipment and manage it - mainly so I didn't accidentally take over
the routing for ... China, Belerus, Iceland,  .... accidentally.

I've heard that some business class people have "gotten" their owned modem to be
used - suspect it was for a single IP, but I don't know.

As said previously, the comcast router (an SMC DOCSIS3) automatically does
bridge mode for any public IPs connected on the LAN side for the subnet being
managed by the router.

I've had both Residential and Business to the same address concurrently. They
were using completely different coax from the street (my area has fibre to the
curb and the box is on my property). TV was NOT available over the business
connection (and would not be provisioned to my address).

On business, I routinely get more, sometimes much more (2-4x) bandwidth than I'm
signed up for. Seems if they have it available, I can use it. Don't know if this
is policy. Seems like they do not oversubscribe the bandwidth.  Any service
interruption gets notified if it is planned.  midnight-4am on Monday is when it
has happened here.  There are 5 min outages about once every quarter - that my
alarms catch.  A few months ago, there was a 630p-345a outage on a Thursday
evening ... that's about it at my place since 2000.  Sometimes bandwidth drops
drastically - usually 3-5 hrs after the last coax was replaced. The last 3
times, larger cables have been used from the street to the demark-point  on the
house.  The cables are never buried deep enough, IMHO.

I've found that getting them to provision voice service forces new cables since
VoIP is picky about the networking and comcast seems to have stricter standards
for those connections.  Though I am not a fan of their VoIP service - always had
weekly outages during a weekly BoD conference call - unacceptable to have an
outage every Thursday at 2p for 6+ months.  Don't have that issue with voip.ms.
 Actually, I don't think I've ever been impacted by any outage from voip.ms and
$5/month is better than .... $30 every day in my book.  OTOH, maybe comcast voip
is better now - but it still isn't worth 5x the cost to me.


Sorry for the ranting.  Sure, I wish comcast were more competitively priced, had
higher bandwidth and their systems weren't so complex that talking with a
different rep gets a different answer almost always.  But I've worked in telco
and understand how hard it is to modify the wheels on a locomotive as it goes
over a bridge at 60 mph. Any hick-up could be disastrous.  You never want the
systems DBA to say "ooops."