Twitter-Savvy Comcast Support Rules!

The following is a letter I just sent to supervisors in the Comcast Twitter support team:

To: doug_xxxxxx@cable.comcast.com, frank_xxxxxxx@cable.comcast.com

Hello,

I'm a Comcast Cable customer in New Jersey and a bit of a geek. I'm very impressed by the Twitter-savvy customer support Comcast engages in, and especially @ComcastBonnie.

About two weeks ago, I started experiencing extremely frustrating network drops in my apartment. The only recourse was to cycle power on the modem and NAT device. This would happen at extremely frustrating times, while downloading tarballs (read: ZIP files) or right before critical deadlines. In my helplessness, I posted an update to Twitter lamenting about how my network connection was dropping out at home. I think I included the "#" symbol before "comcast" mostly as an afterthought to create a Twitter hashtag so that I could see who else was frustrated.

Little did I know that Comcast has a twitter-enabled and -savvy support team. @ComcastBonnie responded and helped me troubleshoot the problem. I thought it was my surfboard POS modem, but diagnostics on her end (or something) didn't seem to support that. Finally, she showed me to point my browser to 192.168.100.1 and check the upstream power, which was 53.2 dBmV (bad!). Turns out I had about three splitters between the wall and the modem and eliminating even just the first one brought it up to 36.9 dBmV.

And now I have plans to simply run a direct connection from the wall to the modem, as I should have realized with all my education in the first place.

So, thanks to Comcast and @ComcastBonnie for embracing a new technology and staffing it with people that speak geek and know their stuff.

Sincerely, Joe

PS: And @ComcastGeorge helped me too... I couldn't opt-out of the Domain Helper Service using comcast.net as it doesn't let me "edit the device" to opt-out on my own. He was able (via Grand Central or something equally mysterious to me) to get me opted-out.

--
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
ACCURATE Postdoctoral Research Associate
UC Berkeley School of Information
Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
http://josephhall.org/