Comcast "tech support" sucks

[Diabolik]

Internet issue. I was able to ping IPs but not FQDNs. I powercycled my router and modem twice, same issues arose. Everything roses except for no DNS. I decided to call Comcast to see if it was the same issue as last month (cable modems got invalid DNS info from the DHCP servers).

The person on the phone ignored my question and asked me to power cycle my modem. Decided to play along hoping to get my question answered. I asked her if my signal to noise ratio was good. There was a long pause. "Um... it's good." I asked her what it was. She dodged the question. Very fishy.

Again, I wasn't able to ping http://www.yahoo.com (duh). She asked me to ping 66.94.230.41. As expected, it worked. I swear to Geebus... she said "Problem solved! That's Yahoo's IP address!"

I got frustrated. "I didn't memorize the IP addresses of every website I visit! It still doesn't answer my question. Can you get someone who can check what DNS servers I'm supposed to be connecting to so I can see if these are correct, or if they are correct and are just down or slow or something?"

She put me on hold for a minute, then she came back and decided that my issue was definitely a bad NIC driver and that reinstalling my NIC would definitely fix the problem.

I asked her if she ever had a customer who had all the NIC drivers on their LAN workstations go bad all at the same time, because none of us could resolve domain names and I wasn't about to reinstall 3 network cards to get a simple question answered. She promptly informed me that if I did not get my NIC driver disk out and reinstall the drivers, the conversation was over and she would disconnect the call. I asked her to transfer me to someone who knew what they were talking about. She said the only way to do that was to hang up and call back to get somebody else.

I should have gotten her name and complained to her manager. Not the only person with weird Comcast "tech support" run-ins. At work, one of our CCNAs wanted to use his own DOCSIS-compatible modem for web access, couldn't pull an IP, then was told by someone at Comcast that he needed to "leave his cable modem plugged in for up to 3 days" to get an IP address. He laughed heartily, asked to be transferred to a tech and got the same song and dance.

So why am I able to come online now? I dinked around with my router for a bit longer and lo and behold, after the 5th release/renew it got <i>different</i> shitty DNS servers. I'm still getting periodic hiccups. I'm now configuring my router to use DNS servers other than Comcast's.

I wish I lived in a Charter area. Even if I didn't get free cable from them, I would still save $50 a month on a better package than I have right now and I would get tech support that can answer a simple flippin' question or at least would be willing to transfer me to someone that could.

[Tikker]

I don't understand why companies think tech support is an entry level position

[Diekan]

I don't understand why companies think tech support is an entry level position

No shit - imagine being a tech support person for AOL. I almost feel sorry for those poor bastards. The idiocy of an AOL user is unimaginable... I mean these are people who are prone to eat poison (accidently) at least once in their pathetic lives... and these poor bastards [AOL tech support] have to provide them with assistance.

If anyone in tech support deserves 50 grand a year - it's the AOL tech support people.

[Tikker]

Where I work, we're in kind of a unique situation in that we have out of work engineers working as help desk tech support


Lots of folks are willing to take "entry" level positions to get on here

[Tacks]

The people stupid enough to get AOL deserve an equally stupid tech support guy.

[10sun]

BellSouth Dialup tech support is the worst that I've ever seen.

I did a lot of tech support for business level DSL lines a couple years back for McLeodUSA. I also did dialup for McLeod, Illinois Consolidated Telephone Company, and Cable & Wireless USA as well as some residential DSL for each of those.

My favorite story is of some guy in the Chicago area who was complaining about not being able to access his modem/router on his side because he forgot his username/password and that his service had gone down several times in the past couple weeks, he made it a point to tell me he was a Cisco Certified Engineer a half dozen times over. Back to the story though, I was on the phone with him for almost two hours, we were using a high end modem/router with onboard logging and remote backdoor access. I logged into the backdoor with our username/password. At this point he accuses my office of "hacking" him and thus taking down his username/password. I take a look at the logfiles at this point. I saw something like 45 modem restarts in a 5 minute span of time and ask him who has access to the modem/router. He says he is the only one with access to that room. So I inform him of the 45 restarts in a five minute span, he blames my office. I inform him that it takes at least 30 seconds for the modem to synch with the DSL service after each restart, so physically that would be impossible.

Long story short, he wants me to explain this to his boss. I talk to her, he gets fired after I explain that he was fucking around with things and lost his username/password and resetting the modem over and over again at site.

-Adam

[Gidan]

Next time this happens and you are forced to call them, When you get an idiot tech who refuses to help, ask to speak with a supervisor. Just keep asking until they do it, eventually they will xfer you to one.

Best bet for comcast though, use someone else DNS servers. Their DNS servers are known to be shit. You might consider telling the tech to get her head out of her ass as well.

I think we have some of the worst techs on the planet here, but at least they are smart enough to diagnose a DNS issue when it hits them across the face.

And I completely agree that tech support should NOT be an entry level position for people who dont know shit about what they are doing. If you dont have some sort of experience in the field, you really need to have extensive training to even understant 1/1000 of the problems customers can have.

[Baile]

In my job, I have to deal with different providers on a daily basis. Comcast has definately been the worst so far. SBC is a steaming pile of crap as well. The only provider I've encountered that is worth a damn is Time Warner. I think they're the only provider out there who's first tier support staff know what the terms DNS and DHCP mean.

[10sun]

Time Warner's service sucks though. At least on the OSU campus area, it was way too overloaded on each node =(

-Adam

[Gidan]

You should try dealing with Alltel. They have dot to have the worst tech support departement I have ever seen.

We had a problem recently with 2 of our DSL customers. They lived in teh same apartment complex, connected throught the same DSLAM, both were dropping packets when packet size hit 578. We reported the problem to alltel and they refused to link the 2 problems because they couldn't prove through their tests that they were the same problem. They sent 2 different techs out to check on the problem, both techs came back and said their connection was just great. It took us 2 weeks to convince them that there was a problem. Turns out they replaced their DSLAM for these 2 customers the same day the problems started but they didn't feel that could have caused the problem. Moved the customer back to the old DSLAM, fixed. They still deny that the 2 customers problems were linked.

This was not just their every day techs. This was the Network ops departemt.

[Donnel]

In between Customer Service at CompUSA and my job as a typist for a Title Insurance company.... yeah....

I worked as tech support for Southwestern Bell Corp. DSL.

Ugh...

Was doing Install work mainly, new customers who were setting up for the first time, but often enough we had people call who had been connected for awhile and moved or needed to install on a different computer or something.

So naturally part of the job in some situations was talking people through installing a NIC.

One lady: Yeah, I see the screws on the back of the computer
Me: Okay, you need to remove those so we can access the case, make sure you only remove the ones on the perimiter of the case, we don't want to accidently loosen the power supply! (chuckle)
Lady: okay give me a second (at which point I muted her and read my Robert Jordan book while she set the phone down).

30 seconds later I hear a crash and "oh crap". She picks up:

Me: What happened?
Her: Well, I took the screws out and this big square thing fell into my computer.
Me: ....



Another lady: Okay, I have the card here.
Me: Okay great, now, on your computers case you see the screws around the outside of the case? The ones holding the case cover on?
Her: Yeah I sure do (imagine a ditzy blonde who could easily have been stoned)
Me: Okay, i need you to remove those screws so we can get inside the computer.
Her: How do I do that?
Me: ...with a screwdriver.
Her: A what?
Me: A screwdriver? You know... a tool... to take out screws?
Her: hrm.....

Amazingly, 2 1/2 hours later (basically after first break all the way to lunch time) we were on the phone working on it. Got the NIC installed, got the software loaded, modem connected, even managed to apply the filters without disconnecting the call (though I tried), managed to reinstall her TCP/IP which had gone skitzy (Windoze 98), and got her completely registered (a 15 minute process with a competent person at times), and surfing the web. I was one shocked tech when I hung up that call and documented it as complete. Chalk it up to a good nights sleep and a healthy dose of patience.

[10sun]

Haha, you work for Calltech?

[araby]

Smells like another Enron to me. How are their stocks doing right now?

No, I saw that movie last night and it seriously just confirms what I said about two weeks ago. We are failing ourselves, when our customer service needs a "customer service" division.

Not only does Comcast have inexperienced, clueless morons working/installing/programming cable/internet services, but Best Buy and a few others have completely failed to satisfy any customer service for SEVERAL people I know and what's so scary is, in a way I guess it really is, there isn't anything you can do about it that doesn't take serious effort on a daily basis for- count on at least months- before you get results.

sucks ass, I hate comcast

[Tacks]

I seriously haven't had any major problems with Comcast in 5+ years. A few times it's been down for a few hours but thats about it.

[Baile]

Comcast's stability hasn't ever been a huge issue. The problem I have is their undertrained tier 1 tech support staff that tells me every time that it's my problem and not theirs.

Donnel, are you an Indian man with a generic American name, because I thought that was all that SBC hired for tech support.

[horendus]

I get the same from Sprint DSL techs. "It's a problem with your hardware." because I use my own modem/router so I can actually configure my own network without jumping through hoops.

Well I was down for 3 days due to this crap. Every time I called I was told one of the following:

1) Your account has been switch over to DHCP from PPPoE (I have been out of the loop on DSL tech for a while, but I have never heard of an alternative of PPPoE as being referred to as DHCP... DHCP is a protocol for dynamically assigning an IP address, DNS, etc... not an authentication protocol...)

2) You are using hardware that is not supported by us, therefor it must be a problem with that.

3) Everyone else on your card is working fine, and your equipment is showing as being connected. It must be a problem with your configuration.

Well, let me tell you, I spent 11 hours off an on with tech support the last day insisting that everything on my end is fine and had not changed. I informed them that I recently had my service changed to my main house line. I had rewired the line to my office to compensate and was at this time talking to the support guys on that line. My modem was synced, I had DSL connect, however I did NOT have PPP connect - meaning I was not authenticating. I informed the tech of this multiple times, yet they insisted I had faulty equipment and they could do nothing until I switch to their modem.

So that night I spent an hour reconfiguring my network to use that modem - guess what... no PPP connection. I called back in the morning to inform them what I have found. Of course, this time I get a new guy I had not talked to yet and so I give him the run-down on the days past, he says 'hmmm, hold on...' I say 'ok'. When he comes back he informs me that my account was simply innactive. It had more than likely been deactivated due to changes to my account not being made correctly. The thing is, it says right on the account screen they look at whether an account is active or innactive... how do upwards of 4 or 5 techs miss that an account is innactive and continue to insist that it is my problem.

fucktards.

[Gidan]

Because most techs are trained to say "Its your equipement" if you are not using theirs. Then when you do switch to theres, they fix all problems they see on yoru side and poof you work, changing your equipment works.

I would say that 90% of customers are completely clueless on computers and this tactic works most of the time and makes them money. The other 10% of people get pissed and eventually get their problem fixed but the system will never change as long as people do know know anything about the system they are connecting to.

The there are comapnies like Alltel who will not even run a test on the line if your are not using their equipment which they sell at 200% of the market price. They will not even tell you if DSL is installed on your line if your not using their modem. We have many customer who have 2 DSL modems, the absolute piece of shit alltel sells them for $200 and the $60 version we had them get. When they have a problem, they put the PoS on and we call alltel so that we can get things fixed for them.

[10sun]

I called tech support last night because I purchased another Shuttle Barebones.

Copy and Paste from my RMA:
Issue: Seated all parts of product, plugged power cable in, pressed power button, product did not power up. Red LED light on motherboard was receiving power, however fans/video/other function lights did not receive power. Reset CMOS. Still no power, suspected hardware failure of power button.

I removed faceplate covering power button. Pressed power button directly, no response. I pushed it several times afterwards repeatedly, device booted to post screen.

Adjusted CMOS to reflect processor clock speed(default: 133, needed to be 166 for Sempron 2400 @ 10x Multiplier), IDE device configuration (standard IDE optical drive, SATA HD non-raid), etc. SATA HD was not recognized in CMOS, nor in RAID utility. Powered system down, unplugged power cord, placed standard IDE HD instead of SATA, motherboard did not boot.

End copy and paste.

The fucking tech support dude simply did not listen. He was trying to tell me to flash the bios and that would fix the issues I was having... the computer wouldn't boot, let alone let me flash the bios. I explained to him exactly what was happening and how it was a hardware failure to the best of my determinations... now I have to ship the whole thing out and get it fixed. Hopefully it won't take more than a week to process/ship/get returned, but I have my doubts after that tech support fiasco.

-Adam

[Donnel]

Comcast's stability hasn't ever been a huge issue. The problem I have is their undertrained tier 1 tech support staff that tells me every time that it's my problem and not theirs.

Donnel, are you an Indian man with a generic American name, because I thought that was all that SBC hired for tech support.

This was between dropping out of college and getting married so uh... 2001-2002, back when they outsourced within the US. I worked for a company called Convergys....

[Baile]

I can't help but smile when I call tech support and get a guy with a thick Indian accent that tries to convince me that his name is Tom Smith.

[Arlos]

I used to work Tech Support for many years, and have my own set of horror stories to tell. I've also worked for Mindspring doing business internet installation turnups, and as a result have had to talk to techs at pretty much every single major Telco corporation (AT&T, Sprint, MCI, UUNet, US Worst, NYNEX, Bell South, Pac Bell, etc. etc. etc.)

Some of the people who I've gotten on calls, it surprised me they were able to breathe without outside intervention, they were that stupid. And actually, they're not the worst ones. The WORST ones are the ones that know just enough to be dangerous, but think they're absolute experts. They argue with you at every step, even if you know exactly what the issue is, and often would try and "anticipate" what you were going to tell them to do, and do 3 or 4 steps on their own without saying anything, usually making things worse, and making it impossible to actually fix anything. Not to mention, the problem usually came from them fucking around with something they shouldn't have, and breaking everything.

Of course, some of the times I've called in to an ISP, I've gotten raving idiots too. When I had Cable modem a while back, I was having bad latency, and seeing a lot of packet loss. So, I grabbed my trusty Win-MTR (great program), and documented their network issues, starting with the first box my cable modem connected to. I was averaging 20% packet loss to that first hop router, and ping times to it of > 100 ms, and the tech tried to tell me "Oh, that's normal". Riiiiight.

As for telcos, even when I was placing a call to supposed upper level techs, which I got to do by being a tech at an ISP that was buying circuits from them, I ran into some seriously spectacular idiots. I once spent 2 hours on a phone with someone from Bell South, while trying to turn up a T-3 for a new Internap site, before we finally figured out that Bell South had somehow managed to terminate the T-3 to the wrong *TOWN*. Not the wrong cabinet, not a failed cross-connect at the demarc, the wrong entire TOWN. I can't imagine the level of incompetance their first line tech people must have had, if their techs handling such high end stuff as dedicated T3s are that big of fuckups.

Even at other networking jobs, you can't get away from talking to ISPs and Telcos, unfortunately. Even if you do enough business to get a semi-dedicated account manager assigned to you, trying to get knowledgeable and timely tech help can be iffy at best. And you just TRY and find someone at AT&T/CERFnet at 4 in the morning who can make BGP updates on an emergency basis, cause someone there screwed up and started passing you routing advertisements, while partially blocking yours, with the upshot of anyone trying to reach you from AT&T space can't because the AT&T routers are giving them a route that goes to a black hole, and it needs to work NOW because there's several hundred thousand dollars worth of business from conferences scheduled that morning, starting on the east coast in an hour.... Yeah, that was fun.

How some of these techs stay employed, while I'm sitting here looking for work, I have no goddamn idea. *grumble* heh.

Edit: Oh, and don't get me started on AOL. I once spent > a week straight in 8-10hr a day meetings at their HQ for a project when I worked at Oracle. Their internal network/data center setup was the biggest kludge I have ever seen in my entire life. You just know you're in for a long week when they show you the network diagram, and there are things on it labled (I shit you not) "Tater-TOTs"....

-Arlos

[Jennay]

I'm also really fed up with Comcast. I've been a customer of theirs for.. hmm 6 years now. We use a router to keep all of our computers on, so when our connection drops, we just release and renew the IP or something (I have no idea what all this is technically called btw) I've had to call tech support numberous times, and I finally learned the following things..

If they ask if you're on a router, just say no because otherwise they claim the problem isn't on their side.

Don't fall for the obvious restarting your computer, going into RUN and /or checking, unchecking boxes. I swear, every fucking time I call tech about a connection issue, they have me dick around with settings on my computer.

Now when I call I say straight up, "I'm not messing with the settings or checking anything for you, I just want to know if there is a problem in my area with the connection, and is someone working on it??" because usually it's their problem and the whole neighborhood is affected.

So I know to turn off my computer, go downstairs or go outside and play instead of sitting on my ass in front of my monitor on the phone.

[Diekan]

haha yeah... when ever I call Comcast for connection issues I just ask, "when is the service in my area going to be back up?" right off the bat... so far every single time I have been given a straight answer "about an hour or two..." The problem has NEVER been on my side.