Hi, I am located in Sanibel, FL and I've been experiencing network drops for four years. As I read the comments above I have had all those experiences too. In one year I had 22 technicians come to my house. They all did the same thing. They cut all my connectors, put new ones on, tested the levels and said everything was fine. But the problem is intermittent and sometimes 5 minutes later I'd experience another drop in connectivity. They have replaced the underground wire to the house, the amplifier at my house, and every connector. I have purchased all new cable modems and routers and laptops. I even had them install all their own equipment for a month (I paid them to install their equipment so they would stop blaming me.) The problem persisted and continues to persist. Last November I purchased a monitoring software and bought a laptop dedicated to monitor the Xfinity network. The software pings 3 high availability servers every 5 seconds. Google, Level3 and Cloudflare. When the network is up my pings are typically 15-28ms. But intermittently they exceed 200ms and turn red. Then the software quickly checks the other two servers. When all 3 of the servers are unreachable everything goes red and the software logs the date and time of the outage, the duration of the outage, and also logs the local LAN connection to my router. By the way, this is all hard wired (no wifi to blame). The software is called NetUptimeMonitor.com. You can see their website at https://netuptimemonitor.com/. It is only available for a PC. Which prompted me to purchase a dedicated PC laptop from Costco (I'm a MAC guy) to solely run this software.
FEBRUARY 2022 TO DATE
| 2/13/22 |
39 Service Drops |
| 2/12/22 |
25 Service Drops |
| 2/11/22 |
30 Service Drops |
| 2/10/22 |
26 Service Drops |
| 2/9/22 |
6 Service Drops |
| 2/8/22 |
3 Service Drops |
| 2/7/22 |
12 Service Drops |
| 2/6/22 |
1 Service Drop |
| 2/5/22 |
2 Service Drops |
| 2/4/22 |
13 Service Drops |
| 2/3/22 |
4 Service Drops |
| 2/2/22 |
2 Service Drops |
| 2/1/22 |
11 Service Drops |
The above are just a sampling of just this month, February to date.
This is what the monitor looks like when all three of the Internet pings fail as well as if your internal connection to the router has failed. My internal doesn't ever fail so my LAN connection is always a green checkbox but everyone of the logged failures is marked with a big red, "Internet failure!" and X:
The logs of all the outages look like this:
I keep logging tickets and technicians come out and continue to treat the problem as if it is my problem. I have bought and replaced EVERYTHING to the tune of thousands of dollars. Because it is an intermittent problem, techs will put a meter on the demarcation location and say it looks fine and want to close the ticket. Five minutes after they leave the dropouts continue. It is intermittent!
I have had limited temporary help from a bucket truck engineer who found a defective underground cable a year ago (that helped a little) and this year bad amplifier upstream that was throwing very hot signals that were overdriving a pole amplifier downstream. Some of these help a little but they are not getting to the root of the problem. The repairs they are making are like temporary bandaids to owning the problem and really fixing it. Hell, if they give me the amplifiers, I'd do it myself. (I'm a broadcast engineer and software engineer by trade.)
I understand they bought an old Time Warner network but they haven't replaced all of the legacy amplifiers so we are victims of the "weakest link" problem.
Each time I open a case I request a Comcast employee. They send me a contractor who I understand gets paid $35/call. They want to finish and close as many tickets as they can. Sometimes they will involve their manager who has to do gymnastics and even lie to Comcast's Engineering group just for them to send a bucket truck (the people that are employees that can investigate the amplifiers.) The bucket guys can help and can give you hope but it is spotty. One will attempt a fix only to have it affected by another bad amplifier upstream. It's like wack-a-mole. The process continues over and over and over again.
I am at my wits end. All I want is for the internet to be stable. I work from home and so does my wife. Yesterday she and I were on our AT&T phone hotspots because the internet was down. My wife was on a 4 hour zoom call having to use our hotspots because she would start on Xfinity and get dropped. She would fire up her AT&T hotspot and log in again. Now she has tried switching back when Xfinity comes back but Xfinity drops again so she has to stay on her Hotspot for the whole call. By the way we had to increase our AT&T data plan so we could have additional data for the Hotspot functionality. Ahhhhh very frustrating.
So I continue to open tickets, log the failures, get charged for the service calls (because the tech closes the tickets), I spend hours calling back for a credit because the issue continues.
Yesterday I signed up for Century Link DSL. I have to see if I can get something that is stable. I plan to use both for a month and see if I can get along with a slower speed. We'll see.
I have talked with 3 neighbors that have Xfinity and they all experience the same service interruptions that my family does. They've reported it before but they get tired and are accepting this because they don't know what else to do. There are two Century Link customers (the local phone/DSL company) that claim that their internet service is rock solid. I'll see. They are getting 16mps down and 7.9mps up. That is quite a bit slower than the gig I'm supposed to be getting from Xfinity but they claim that it is at least stable.
Anyway, if we don't speak up, they will think it is all working well. Well it isn't and I don't know what else to do.
ewp15
Visitor
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8 Messages
3 years ago
I'm right there with you and just as frustrated. I'm hardwired and my connection from device to pole outside the house is solid. Modem signals are fine. Still a dozen very brief timeouts every day that make video calls / gaming / what-have-you impossible. Every time a tech comes out they notice a section of line between two poles somewhere down the block from my house that needs to be replaced but it's always just this piecemeal fix, if the maintenance crew ever even gets out to replace it at all. They need to update everything all the way to the CMTS to make a difference and I don't think we'll see that happen. My town is rolling out municipal fiber next year so fingers crossed I only have to tear my hair out for another year or so.
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truerock2
Contributor
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225 Messages
3 years ago
Just to give some empathetic feedback...
I had the exact same issue with AT&T about 20 years ago. The problem went on for over a year and I had so many techs come to my house and I had every part of my AT&T CATV system replaced... all the way back to and including the splitters on the telephone pole closest to my house. It turned out to be a "repeater" that was "installed backwards" on a telephone pole a few houses down from my house.
And the way I got AT&T to fix the problem was doing exactly what you are doing, except I was also getting dBmV readings off of my modem. My issue was intermittent weak signal strength.
And, by the way... I purchased a copy Net Uptime Monitor. Thanks for the tip. I was just about to write my own script to do the same thing... but, for $10 it was easier to buy Net Uptime Monitor.
(edited)
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truerock2
Contributor
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225 Messages
3 years ago
I'll suggest every time you have an outage, you check:
https://www.xfinity.com/support/status-map
to determine if the problem is yours or the problem is Comcast's.
If you are surrounded by hundreds or thousands of Comcast customers who are having an outage at the same time you are... you can dispense with technicians visiting your home which would be a complete waste of time.
(edited)
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spacechick
Regular Visitor
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11 Messages
3 years ago
I know your pain. I'm just fed up with Xfinity. I've gone through the same experiences. Have a file 3" thick of tickets filed, repairs, technician notes, supervisors. It's riduculous paying them $250.00/month for sub par and no internet service with intermittent drops.
The last time they left they said the living room wiring was not grounded and that is what the problem is.
I am looking for a law firm so I I can file a class action lawsuit against Xfinity.
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xxtweety83xx
Regular Visitor
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8 Messages
3 years ago
I’m starting to wonder if you’re having the same problem I was.
Can you log into your modem page (usually by typing in 10.0.0.1 if you’re using a Comcast modem)
Scroll down to troubleshooting and click it
Click on Logs and select event logs for the last week.
Do you see any errors that say:
72001011-DHCPv6 - Missing Required Option 82
: 72001011-DHCPv6 - Missing Required Option 24
If you do indeed see this, scroll up on the modem page and click on Gateway
Next, click on Local IP network and scroll down until you see LAN IPv6 Address Assignment.
Immediately under it you’ll see two options: Stateless (auto-config) and Stateful (use dchp server).
The stateful option should not have a check mark in it. If it does, uncheck it and save your settings.
I had issues with my internet all day every day from October until yesterday and Comcast was not helpful at all! I tried this as suggested from a thread on Reddit and my internet hasn’t acted up since. 27h strong and hoping it stays that way.
I hope this works for you. Good luck!
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