I’m undoubtedly tempting the fates by complaining about the very service that’s hosting this site (heh — especially if any tech or other employee reads this, I’m boned), but it needs to be said anyway.

Comcast as a company has a fairly lousy reputation among several different groups of people. I imagine the kind of person who just thinks “oh, they’re a cable company, whatever,” doesn’t have an opinion one way or another about the company, but there’s a whole bunch of people out there who know better. That reputation isn’t malicious or undeserved. Comcast works damned hard to earn its reputation, and these groups of people experience that work every day:

High-Definition Television Owners

Comcast reportedly butchers the unholy hell out of High-Definition broadcasts with excessive compression these days — meaning you’ll see lots of “artifacts” (flaws, defects, and blocky junk in the picture) when you watch Comcast high-def cable on your shiny new 720p or 1020p high-def flatscreen.

I own no high-definition equipment (I suppose my desktop computer counts, but only for 720p — my monitor only groks 900 pixels vertically), so I have to take this one at face-value without seeing it myself. Click that link above though for a very thorough comparison — it’s apparently really, really bad.

DVR Fans

I used to own a Tivo (a series 1). Then I upgraded to a DirecTiVo (also series 1), and enjoyed that machine during Tivo’s shining time where the hardware actually integrated with the satellite receiver (DirecTiVos had two satellite tuners built right in; aim the dish, plug it in, and you were golden), the software was responsive, feature-filled, and devastatingly useful and intuitive. I also hacked that box to increase its capacity, and that’s when I realized DVRs make you stop adjusting your life to fit television, and force television to adapt to you. No more commercials. No more missing shows you like. No more memorizing what times & days shows came on. Hell, no more searching through a gigantic satellite programming guide to find shows you liked — they were just always there.

When circumstances separated me and my beloved Tivo (no, I wasn’t that insane about it, but I really did like it ), I suddenly realized something — I could go without “live broadcast” television just fine. I genuinely didn’t miss it. For years, I didn’t actually subscribe to any kind of television service at all — no satellite, no cable, no FIOS, not even rabbit ears. I just didn’t care about television anymore. Trying to watch a live broadcast is an exercise in frustration, especially when an ad appears and you suddenly realize your only available recourse is to mute the TV, turn it off, change channels, or switch to some other media to make the ad go away. It sucks.

In April of 2008, I decided to give Dish Network a try, and their DVR along with it. I was actually pretty impressed with that little box (the “DVR 642” I believe). It wasn’t TiVo, but it was definitely fast, responsive, and intuitive.

When we started looking for apartments in Tallahassee, the one we narrowed it down to (as far as good location, nice size, decent price, and decent amenities) had a decidedly anti-satellite attitude (and a construction/design to match — no privately-controlled balconies or patios or other outdoor spaces where a dish could be installed). Clearly they get a kickback from the incumbent, Comcast, for bringing the company a captive market. If you want television of any kind in this apartment complex, you buy rabbit ears and cross your fingers, or you call Comcast. Getting a satellite dish to work through a window is a nightmare (and isn’t even always possible), so yeah, good luck with that.

I brought home the (rather large) DVR that Comcast provides — a Motorola 6412 (this one appears to be third-generation hardware), plugged it in, and switched on the television. “One Moment Please…” was all it would display on the screen unless I punched up the setup menu, where it flashed lots of meaningless numbers. Broadband internet wasn’t working either (same connection), so I called Comcast back and asked for an explanation. They sent a technician out the next day, and he announced casually that the apartment wasn’t actually attached to the cable network; he fixed that, and we suddenly had service.

The DVR was nicer when it wasn’t attached to anything. This thing is a monstrosity. It has a downright clunky interface (visually it’s okay, but it does lots of very annoying things, like displaying “This recording has been completed” right in the middle of the screen as you’re watching it and not removing the message until you press a specific button on the remote), it’s slower than a Series 1 standalone TiVo ever was (even when the dreaded “reorganizing season pass priorities could take 2 hours” bug was alive and well), and it is so buggy that the community of “savvy” DVR users stuck with this thing know that power-cycling it is the first (and usually most effective) troubleshooting step.

In a hilarious twist, apparently TiVo has a contract with Comcast to provide TiVo software that runs on this very equipment. The rollout was meant to be nationwide by now, but it’s really only in Boston for the time being. It is a complete disaster by all accounts, and is widely regarded as TiVo’s worst software rollout ever. People are actually converting back to the crappy-ass stock software on the Motorola 6412 in some cases because their DVRs act so badly with TiVo’s software on them.

The biggest slap in the face is this thing costs $13 per month (above and beyond the cost of your cable subscription, which must be the “digital” version, not the cheaper analog version, or else they won’t let you have a DVR). The TiVo software on this DVR? Tack on an extra $3 per month.

Cable Television Subscribers

Yup, even cable television viewers — a huge demographic — have reason to loathe Comcast. While I don’t think it would make things perfect, I do suspect the Comcast DVR sitting in my living room would be far less flaky if it had a good, reliable cable signal running to it at all times. The outages aren’t as frequent or enduring as the cable modem outages (see below for that debacle ), but the picture quality will spontaneously go from “normal” to “ye gods who’s eating the cable?”, and drop out once or twice per day.

Apart from looking like shit (nothing beats watching a TV show and having it vanish — it never seems to happen during the ads, does it? ), it also causes the DVR to do very silly things. The least annoying thing it will do is split a program that it’s recording into pieces — one extra piece per outage. If the cable signal gets funky three times during a half-hour show, you end up with four copies of the same show, each a couple minutes long except for the one piece that was recorded okay until the outages started. The most annoying things the DVR will start doing include announcing “you must delete saved programs to continue using your DVR!” even though its own “My Recordings” page shows the device is only 25% full, freezing up hard (requiring a power cycle), start slowing down so much that a keypress on the remote isn’t acted upon for up to two minutes (but it does somehow buffer every damned keypress, so two minutes later after you’ve forgotten what sequence you banged out on the remote, the DVR starts acting like you just started mashing keys), and more misadventures.

The picture quality’s not as good as satellite, either, no matter what the dickheads in their marketing department love to claim. Also, they’re quite fond of plopping their own ads on top of ads being broadcast by the different channels, and they make their charming spurious claims, like “satellite dishes suffer from rain fade, man!” (I’ve seen more weather-related failures and picture quality issues in the last week and a half than in four months of using a Dish Network tuner and years of using a DirecTV one) and “Comcast has more HD channels!” (yeah, and they all look like shit because of the excessive compression).

Those ads are the reason I moved off AT&T cable years ago and figured out a way to make my damned satellite dish work even though all I had was a second-story north-facing balcony. They annoyed me that much then, and they still burn me up now — they have to lie to their existing customers (nobody except cable subscribers can actually see these ads) to keep them from looking into better alternatives.

High-Speed Internet Users

Oh, boy, this is where it gets fun. Comcast is, of course, most well-known in recent times for its infamous “fuck with all BitTorrent users so they’ll stop hogging our precious bandwidth!” trick, wherein Comcast actively forged network packets to deliberately interfere with (and screw up) any BitTorrent connection their hardware and software could detect. The behavior was so obnoxious that the FCC has even spanked them for it.

Previously, even before the BitTorrent nonsense started, they had silent “bandwidth caps” that prompted instant disconnection with up to a 1 year suspension if you exceeded it. High-speed unlimited internet access, that was automatically cut off if you used it enough to exceed an invisible limit. No, they wouldn’t tell you what the limit was. No, they wouldn’t tell you what your current usage was. No, they wouldn’t even tell you if you were getting close. Even if you got cut off, called them, had this all explained to you, and got things reactivated after placating them, they still wouldn’t tell you what the actual number was.

Supposedly, the company has stopped doing the BitTorrent thing and they’ve apparently backed down on the caps a little bit, too.

I think they’ve done this because of a newly-devised and well-executed alternative determent against using any of their bandwidth: building an unreliable, frequently-down, flaky-ass network.

The cable modem I brought with me from Melbourne (that my folks gave to me since they didn’t need it anymore) turned out to be a DOCSIS 1.1-compliant modem instead of a DOCSIS 2.0-compliant one, meaning I wouldn’t be getting the highest speeds Comcast’s internet service offers here, so I ended up leasing one of theirs. Curse you, Linksys, for labeling your hardware one way on the chassis, and putting different friggin’ hardware inside that chassis.

I’ve experienced at least one outage every day since internet service was activated here back on August 15th. I’ve only had the service 9 days but already I’ve been on the phone with the company at least a half dozen times to report outages or weirdness, and I actually had a service call scheduled for tomorrow but ended up canceling it since things seemed to stabilize a little. Ironically, about an hour after I canceled the service call, the damned modem went offline again for four fucking hours.

In case you think I’m full of shit, I’ve set up Smokeping to pay attention to network performance and to track outages. Have a look at my graphs for my connectivity to Sun Microsystems’ web server. Click the “Last 7 Days” graph and click-n-drag to highlight the section with data to see lots of gaps — three measurable (and sizable) outages just since Thursday night.

People Accustomed to Good Customer Service

The biggest nuisance with all of this is that Comcast doesn’t appear to give a rat’s ass about any of these problems. I level all of the following complaints and accusations at the company and its phone agents:

• No one will ever admit there’s an outage (or even scheduled maintenance), even when there obviously is one
  • To justify this complaint, I started using Smokeping to track outages; every damned night since the 15th of August, the modem has died at 11:00pm (give or take a few minutes). Of course the day I set that up, the outages stopped for a couple of days, then roared back with a vengeance. Outages continue to occur, lasting at least 10 minutes and averaging about 1.5 hours, on average about once every 36 hours.
• Every single phone technician I have spoken to has the same exact troubleshooting steps for my complaint of “the bloody thing won’t connect!” That troubleshooting process always begins the same way. Wait for it, and say it with me: “powercycle the cable modem.” It has failed so many times now that I can tell you what it’ll do next once it starts failing just based on the pattern of the lights.
• The “captive signup” pages that are presented when the modem gets online but hasn’t got any account information assigned to it yet (or, when that information gets lost/destroyed, over and over again like it managed the first day it had a live signal) doesn’t actually work — their own registration server has lots of 404 and 402 (Forbidden) errors on it. Ugh.
• The software CD Comcast includes to “automatically configure your cable modem” is just a bunch of HTML and ActiveX crap (meaning it requires Internet Explorer to even run) that doesn’t actually do anything except try to force you to install a bunch of useless software on the victim machine. It does nothing to actually provision service in the cable modem hardware — if the cable modem can’t connect to the network, the software included on the CD can’t configure or reset the modem to help it along.
• The night-time technicians are among the surliest bunch of bastards I’ve ever had the displeasure of talking to. Guys, I used to work graveyard shifts doing phone-based technical support for Apple Macintosh computers (the trashy, cheap “Performa” line). I get it — it’s a boring, dull shift. Do what my coworkers did — smoke some fucking weed — then ditch the surly attitudes. Scolding me for daring to have the splitter in place that your own field guy installed when he set us up is annoying and stupid. And removing it from the system didn’t fix anything anyway, so “pthbtbtbtbtbt!” to you
• I recognized the crappy hold music my call center used when I did that tech support for the Macintosh line — I think Comcast is using the same crappy-ass outsourcing company, and quite possibly even the same crappy call center. BTW, if I’m right, and anybody in Greeley, Colorado is reading this, “hi! Now go find better support work elsewhere — there are places that’ll pay double what you’re making and won’t treat you like shit!”

“Get On With It!”

Okay, okay, enough whining about Comcast. The fact that you’re even reading this post means that, for the moment, the cable modem remains online and chatty.

If they’d just fix their damned network so things didn’t go down like a fluffer, my complaints would evaporate for the most part. I don’t watch much TV so I can deal with a flaky DVR (which would end up being less flaky if the cable signal would stop vanishing out from under it — that’s gotta make the poor bastard a bit paranoid). Now that they don’t screw with BitTorrent traffic, I get insanely good upload and download speeds (better than I’ve ever seen on any other connection, except for the period back in 2002 when I had willfe.com attached to a friggin’ unmetered 100 megabit full-duplex connection, hehehe). I like the service when it’s up. It just doesn’t stay up for long.

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