I honestly don’t know what to make of this.

I’ve been having a lot of problems lately with my internet connection, high-speed cable from Comcast. Since installation two months ago everything has been rock solid, with great speeds:

Then last Saturday at exactly midnight, the connection went dead. I mean completely dead, no way to even access the modem Event Logs or anything … like the connection from outside the house just went kaput. Was off all night, then back up the next day, then back off the next night, etc.

That’s been the ‘pattern’ … not every night, but most nights the connection just dies, and doesn’t come back until morning, regardless of any of the dozens of thing I’ve tried. Technician came out last Thursday, said all signals looked perfect, nothing wrong with the modem, but he replaced it anyway since there were a lot of errors in the Event Log (mostly indicating failure at trying to synch with the outside connection).

New modem worked fine that day, and Friday, then last night it died again. As usual, it was off all night, came back up this morning. I called Comcast yet again, and have an appointment scheduled for Wednesday.

Now here’s where it starts getting weird.

Connection was fine all day today. After supper I came back to the machine, and the connection was dead. I was just so angry! Most things tend to roll off my back, but losing internet connectivity just drives me over the edge (probably something to do with the fact that I never, ever leave the house if I can help it, so losing internet means no chatting with friends, nothing to do, no contact with anyone or anything – sad but true).

Anyway – the connection went down, and I called Comcast quite pissed off. Told the customer service rep that I was getting “sick of these constant outages” and that “DSL is starting to look pretty good”.

Literally 60 seconds after I ended the call my connection came back up.

Okay. That’s just weird, it’s never shown any kind of connectivity that fast after going down for the night. So I tried to load a couple of web pages, but the connection speed was horrific. When I checked a few traceroutes to popular sites, I could see a ton of packet loss – 40% at this hop, 30% here, 60% there, it was a mess.

So I called again, told the rep the situation and asked if he could take a look at the modem from his end and determine why there was such a lousy connection, or at the very least, document some stuff to help the tech coming out on Wednesday. He said he couldn’t see that type of info about the modem (which I think is bullshit, but whatever), but told me I should call back if the packet loss resolved.

Which it did, within about 3 minutes of our phone conversation.

I can see no earthly reason why Comcast would want to be yanking my chain, but I can’t help but find the timing of all this coincidental. It’s just odd.

At the moment my connection isn’t quite as good as it was, but there’s 0% packet loss and the connection seems stable. I really hope this, or the technician’s visit on Wednesday, is the end of this problem. I’ve had enough.

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