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Xfinity outage leaves tens of thousands in the Bay Area without internet

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Re: Xfinity outage leaves tens of thousands in the Bay Area without internet

#61

Post by xster »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #20

One nice thing about San Francisco is we have many great alternatives for ISPs. Comcast truly is terrible. Wave Broadband is an excellent competing cable Internet company. Sonic is the best ISP I have ever had or could even imagine; reliable symmetric gigabit fiber, super low latency (4ms to the edge, it's all glass), tech support that knows what they're doing. There's also MonkeyBrains for 100+Mbps fixed wireless. N…

This is true in the city. Unfortunately there aren't any options in the peninsula. When WFH started, I had 1000ms+ pings for over a month and had to have 2 alternate SIM tethering plans to keep working. Comcast acknowledged that they weren't able to handle the surge of traffic but still refused to refund the months long outage.

Re: Xfinity outage leaves tens of thousands in the Bay Area without internet

#62

Post by mjrpes »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #20

One nice thing about San Francisco is we have many great alternatives for ISPs. Comcast truly is terrible. Wave Broadband is an excellent competing cable Internet company. Sonic is the best ISP I have ever had or could even imagine; reliable symmetric gigabit fiber, super low latency (4ms to the edge, it's all glass), tech support that knows what they're doing. There's also MonkeyBrains for 100+Mbps fixed wireless. N…

The few years our small business used Comcast Business were bad. There would be multi-hour outages every other month. It got to the point where I wrote up procedures so an office worker could log into our ASUS router and switch the gateway over to a smartphone hotspot. That got tiring, so I ended up upgrading our router to support automatic failover to an LTE device.

In contrast, AT&T DSL FTTN (Fiber to the Node) and Sonic DSL (not resold) have been rock solid. I am using AT&T for both home and business now and can't remember the last time there was an outage or issues with the modem. For me, a stable connection at 50mbps is preferable to unstable 1gig.

I would rather support Sonic, but they don't have fiber in my area and I had a bad experience with their resold AT&T FTTN service that was beyond their control. Their straight DSL product is solid, as long as you are close to the central office and can get a good speed.

Re: Xfinity outage leaves tens of thousands in the Bay Area without internet

#63

Post by MisterTea »

jordan801 wrote: post #12
savanaly wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's a bit early in the morning to get worked up over something that as of yet took place only in our minds.

Pretty common scenario in tech engineering.

Pretty common scenario in the universe. -FTFY

Re: Xfinity outage leaves tens of thousands in the Bay Area without internet

#64

Post by outworlder »

geocrasher wrote: post #45

I realize that most people view broadband as a utility that should never be down, but are any of us really paying for even three nines of reliability, let alone five nines? Unlikely. Outages happen. This is why having a backup is important.

> This is why having a backup is important.

Which is something that's nearly impossible across most of the US, given the monopoly (or, if you are lucky, duopoly) in ISPs.

Re: Xfinity outage leaves tens of thousands in the Bay Area without internet

#65

Post by outworlder »

stanleydrew wrote: post #28
iso1210 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but if I lived in a place where the power goes off I'd certainly have good torches and non-electric heating. (Of course if internet goes down my phone has tons of spotify tracks downloaded onto it, so I'm sure I'll cope)

Sure, but light and heat are pretty fundamental to meeting a basic level of comfort. Whether or not I can listen to my favorite album without internet access isn't.

> Whether or not I can listen to my favorite album without internet access isn't.

What about being able to work?

Re: Xfinity outage leaves tens of thousands in the Bay Area without internet

#66

Post by to11mtm »

wolverine876 wrote: post #48
richiezc wrote: post #18

Comcast/xfinity is horrible, last month during the atmospheric river my parents lost internet for 4 days. There was no update ever of when it would come back and their CS agent actually suggested that although they are working from home they should go use a public xfinity wifi spot... I suggested to him that he turn off his internet and go work at a public wifi point and tell me if that's a good solution

That's what Comcast told them to say. Don't abuse them; have some empathy - you have to deal with Comcast for a few minutes; they have to deal with it all day every day, and take the bullets from customers for Comcast's support policies and training. > their CS agent actually suggested that although they are working from home they should go use a public xfinity wifi spot That's a reasonable workaround, given that the…

> have some empathy - you have to deal with Comcast for a few minutes; they have to deal with it all day every day, and take the bullets from customers for Comcast's support policies and training.

I spent 6 and a half years working for what was once the largest privately owned prime contractor that did work for Comcast.

I'll measure my empathy based on the fact that their continuing to agree to work that job is in fact enabling Comcast's abusive/neglectful behaviors towards customers, contractors, hell even non-customers can get caught in the crossfire.

I mean FFS, I made a point to live in areas so that I don't have to get Comcast and they -still- found a way to make my life a living hell a couple years ago. We're talking kafka-esque levels of "You can't speak to a human that will do anything but tell you to fill out this form with information you legally should not have to give." (Yes, I tried filling out the form omitting the information that was not legally required. They rejected it and then asked for even MORE.)

Sadly, the only thing that -did- work in stopping the harassment was to harass back. I would politely argue, ask them to consider a career that wasn't so soul-sucking, and point out at the start and end of every call how much time I had spent on the phone with Comcast, and the resulting number of dollars it was costing them to not just leave me the F alone.

I probably can never get Comcast service at this point, but at least they stopped violating my FDCPA rights and messing with my credit...

Re: Xfinity outage leaves tens of thousands in the Bay Area without internet

#67

Post by BenjiWiebe »

outworlder wrote: post #65
stanleydrew wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but light and heat are pretty fundamental to meeting a basic level of comfort. Whether or not I can listen to my favorite album without internet access isn't.

> Whether or not I can listen to my favorite album without internet access isn't. What about being able to work?

This comment thread is about someone specifically calling out having an offline copy of music and movies.

Re: Xfinity outage leaves tens of thousands in the Bay Area without internet

#68

Post by ohyeshedid »

savanaly wrote: post #6
jes wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meeting where everyone will ignore all of the other forces at play that caused the outcome, and pretend that if only Joe or Mary had been better in some way, the whole disaster never would have happened. Yeah, fuck that shit.

I'd say it's a bit early in the morning to get worked up over something that as of yet took place only in our minds.

I'd be willing to wager there are at least 100 HN members that had that exact meeting, with those exact dynamics, before this thread was even posted this morning.

Re: Xfinity outage leaves tens of thousands in the Bay Area without internet

#69

Post by NelsonMinar »

spike021 wrote: post #42
NelsonMinar wrote: post #20

One nice thing about San Francisco is we have many great alternatives for ISPs. Comcast truly is terrible. Wave Broadband is an excellent competing cable Internet company. Sonic is the best ISP I have ever had or could even imagine; reliable symmetric gigabit fiber, super low latency (4ms to the edge, it's all glass), tech support that knows what they're doing. There's also MonkeyBrains for 100+Mbps fixed wireless. N…

Meh, I'll vote to the contrary; Comcast works roughly 99.95% of the time for me. Obviously that's an approximation, but I rarely experience outages and I've been using them from two apartments in the South Bay for 10 years. The first few years they'd occasionally have local service outages around 2am but since then I rarely have outages of any kind and my speeds are great. Not as high as they say I do but supposedly…

I'm glad Comcast is working well for you. The Bay Area Comcast seems reasonably well provisioned and doesn't suffer the massive evening slowdowns so much of the country does. Comcast still has a history of doing stupid things though, back to the days they injected RST packets to try to stop BitTorrent.

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/11/eff-study-reve...

Re: Xfinity outage leaves tens of thousands in the Bay Area without internet

#70

Post by wolverine876 »

to11mtm wrote: post #66
wolverine876 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what Comcast told them to say. Don't abuse them; have some empathy - you have to deal with Comcast for a few minutes; they have to deal with it all day every day, and take the bullets from customers for Comcast's support policies and training. > their CS agent actually suggested that although they are working from home they should go use a public xfinity wifi spot That's a reasonable workaround, given that the…

> have some empathy - you have to deal with Comcast for a few minutes; they have to deal with it all day every day, and take the bullets from customers for Comcast's support policies and training. I spent 6 and a half years working for what was once the largest privately owned prime contractor that did work for Comcast. I'll measure my empathy based on the fact that their continuing to agree to work that job is in fa…

> I'll measure my empathy based on the fact that their continuing to agree to work that job is in fact enabling Comcast's abusive/neglectful behaviors towards customers, contractors, hell even non-customers can get caught in the crossfire.

Wow. I've seen people say that you shouldn't work for people like NSO, or national security agencies, or Facebook, but you should fall on your sword for Comcast customer service problems? There aren't many jobs left that meet your standards. I think we are taking rationalization way too far.

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