So I’m going to make a set of blog posts cataloguing trying to get xfinity/Comcast to do something, anything to fix my ongoing internet issues. This is the first of those.
Where this starts is in April, 2022. Our contract with xfinity is up, so as such we give them a call and ask them what they can do for us and they’ll stick us on a new promo plan in exchange for three years of loyalty. Fair enough. This year they opted to put us on a plan that included spiffy 1.2Gbps internet! Nice.
Initially my plan was to just ride it out with my old modem (SB6183) and enjoy the boosted upstream speeds, but we quickly found out things weren’t exactly right: At around 7pm each night and going on until up to 2am the next morning, upstream would stall out hard, crashing from 42Mbps to 5-7Mbps. In this state, the upstream became extremely frail–putting any kind of load on it (like streaming!) would grind the connection to a halt.
I initially took this as a sign to just bite the bullet and upgrade my modem, so I did. I considered going to one of xfinity’s gateways, but the current XB7 (XB8s are affected by stock shortages) has two manufacturers, and one of said manufacturers uses the extremely troubled Puma 6 chipset. No thanks.
Thus, on the recommendation of one of my friends who works in networking, I sprung for a Motorola MB8611. Not cheap, but I figure it should last a while.
This seemed to fix the issue…for a minute. It wasn’t long before the problem reared its ugly head again. I made a note to reach out to xfinity and get this looked at, but unfortunately COVID ran rampant through our house around this time (end of May to the beginning of June) so those plans got delayed pretty good.
July is when I finally reached out. Given that I’ve had good luck with xfinity’s social media support in the past (on Google+ even), I opted to try their Twitter account.
I initially got someone very sympathetic so the situation and was in the middle of troubleshooting, but then they had to go home so I was handed over to someone else who said there was ongoing work in my area and that I would be issued bill credits. That’d be quite awesome.
Of course, were any of that true, I wouldn’t be here writing this, would I?
Little did I know a ticking time bomb was set on our account, and all hell was about to break loose.
Come midnight, everything and I mean everything goes down hard. Including the TVs. I figure hey, they’re working on things and thought nothing of it. I just threw down my phone’s hotspot, logged into Steam, and did some rounds of Risk of Rain 2 to pass the time.
It was getting close to 2am, and everything was still down hard. I thought this was odd, so I opened the xfinity app on my phone. It said something strange: You no longer have xfinity service. Also, the bill that would have been due next month was now considered past due. Huh. I figured xfinity’s systems must be having a field day and went back to gaming. But still, something bothered me.
You no longer have xfinity service.
That seems like such an odd thing to say in the event of an outage, no?
I decided to try looking at the billing information in an actual web browser rather than through an app and a lot of the same flags were raised: Your service has been canceled. I tried reaching out to customer support again to ask what the hell is going on with their billing system. Despite their Twitter account saying they’re here 24/7, nothing but crickets.
I dig a bit further and get into the email inbox for the account. We never use it because we all have our own emails and have no need for it. And right there we have the cause of our problem:
“Account cancellation request received.”
I open the email. The timestamp claimed it was received at 10pm. Cross referencing my time stamps, that’s the exact time the rep on Twitter claimed to be giving me bill credits.
Aw, shit.
I sat back in silent panic, because I just knew this was 1. going to be an unholy mess to clean up, and 2. this being my roommate’s account, she was going to murder me if she woke up to see this mess.
I ended up making a post on another social media site asking for help and thankfully I got the ears of another xfinity rep who WAS awake at this unholy hour. Unfortunately, that got me nowhere: They claimed they absolutely needed my roommate to reinstate the account and that I wasn’t allowed to do it myself. (WTF? You mean I can get the account canceled but I can’t restore it? What the hell, xfinity?)
Around this time, the roommate woke up and as expected she was pissed. Upon reading me the riot act, she got on my phone, messaged the rep on the other social media site and tore into them. Of course, they claimed they couldn’t verify her identity over text so…give us a call, please?
Except the number they gave us didn’t work.
It went to customer care, who claimed sales needed to fix this problem, and sales wouldn’t open for another few hours. We tried to escalate, and eventually got someone who had no idea what they were doing and said that xfinity had no such thing as social media support and proceeded to berate us for using an “unofficial support channel”.
I dunno about you, but that looks pretty damn official.
This only served to enrage my roommate more, especially since the rep on the phone just threw me under the bus. She already killed me once, now she looked like she was going to kill me again.
Thankfully, as if on cue, the person I first spoke to last night on Twitter came back online and messaged me, saying she just saw the whole call just go down in her notes and apologized profusely.
She also stated she determined what happened and thankfully can reinstate the account, but she just needed to verify my roommate was nearby and had her phone. Both were true, so with a little bit of difficulty, the account was reinstated (and with hefty bill credits for the next year).
I also learned from this whole kerfluffle and made myself an account admin so if–Jobs forbid–this ever, EVER happens again, I actually have the power to undo the damage.
So while the damage caused that night was fixed thankfully, the core problem itself (my upstream speeds being hot garbage at night) wasn’t yet fixed.
We’ll deal with that part in the second installment. Until then…