Comcast Has gone down twice for us in the last 2 weeks. They really cannot find anything much. They see the drop outs occurring, but not why. So far, they have replaced our Juniper switch as well as the fiber into the building. Personally, I think their network is just taxed beyond its ability to stay up 100% of the time and they are throwing new HW at us just to say “Look! we fixed it!”
Not really blaming them. They admitted years ago they they tailor their nodes on the idea that businesses and homes will not be online at the same time. They simply could not have foreseen a time when both everyone is on at home AND remoted into work making them fully active as well.
Just venting.
24 Spice ups
brianinca
(Brianinca)
2
Interesting, we have a Comcast Ciena switch that’s 1/4 the size of the Ciena AT&T put in. Wonder why they had to replace fiber?
itguytk
(ITGUYTK)
3
To many Chrombooks on the network taxing the system?
10 Spice ups
Jrx1216
(Jrx1216)
4
Man, we’re not ever gonna let this poor guy forget that, are we?.. maybe we should just get his username changed to Chromebook-Greg?
On a serious note, I’m glad to have moved out of Comcast territory. I’ve wasted too much of my life telling Comcast reps that I’ve already rebooted my modem/router/switches/etc. and that it’s something on their end, only for them to come back 45 minutes and say “yeah, there’s a known outage in your area, we’re working on it but don’t have an ETA yet”
7 Spice ups
jeffnoel
(ghijkmnop)
5
If this is an issue at your office (as opposed to at home), it might be time to look at getting a failover ISP connection. It wouldn’t keep your phones running in some cases, but it would at least keep you online.
Knock on wood, but our CenturyLink fiber has been running strong and we haven’t seen any degradation thus far.The one thing we have going in our area is that home users where we are located can’t afford fiber. I can count on my fingers the number of fiber installs currently in our town.
Yeah, I expected that. lol
3 Spice ups
Start auditing the drop outs and bring it to their attention. Request a discount at least stating this meant no work could be completed without being online.
Loss of earnings and all that lol
2 Spice ups
At least you’re better off than most other people, since you got a c…c…certain competence in the field that allows you to track issues and bring them to their attention, in comparison to a regular user who has to believe everything the ISP tells them.
1 Spice up
Steve9603
(Steve9603)
10
That’s why my home connection has monitoring via Opsview Atom. I can tell at a glance if it’s the private side, cable modem (tests inside LAN and public IP for my connection), or first-hop router all on one panel.
1 Spice up
Greg - just wondering what part of the country you are in. No issues in my area (South of Seattle). I’ve seen more ‘slowness’ with the bigger players (MS, Google, etc) With the mass movement to MS’s Teams - I’ve seen some O365 slow downs. Nothing major, but enough to think, ‘must be due to everyone working from home now’.
Also - do you have access to this? https://sevone.comcastbusiness.com/custom/portal54/index.php
Doesn’t give a ton of data, but it’s nice to see when and how much your circuit is doing. Get your account manager to get you a login for your account.
I’d keep on them… no way should they not be able to figure it out. My CC fiber install was new to our building during the remodel we did to it at purchase some 4 years ago. The fiber hasn’t gone down once since.
1 Spice up
We’re outside of PHL, ironically their world HQ. lol Thanks for the link!
james485
(James485)
13
Yep sounds about right even in my office with comcast this week.
2 Spice ups
From many years of experience, Comcast, at least in this area, has been notorious for short outages and even within Metro Little Rock, it is by geographic area. Downtown, is stable. Near the airport is stable on fiber, flaky on Cable, With now nearly 100 folks WFH and 18 remote sites, our 200Mbps Comcast fiber has had zero outages. We aren’t competing with many other users on this equipment.
The key to uptime is multiple ISPs and different media. We have 2 A T & T Fiber circuits, a Comcast Fiber and a Comcast Cable, we used to have a site to site wireless connection in addition that was a stable 2Mpbs up & down, but they went out of business. I know that sounds like a dinky bandwidth, but the warehouse devices are using telnet to connect to a staylink server,so they could still operate if we lost everything else. There were a couple of times when we had fewer locations, that we operated off that wireless circuit for over a day until repairs could be made, but at that point we only had 2 hardline circuits.
I cannot even fathom operating without 2 connections from different suppliers. Nobody is good enough that you don’t need a backup.
Jrx1216
(Jrx1216)
18
@sean-spiceworks , @suzanne-spiceworks ? James has approved… It must be so… Sorry, Greg. 
2 Spice ups
