Re: Help needed with intermittent internet

$Bill wrote:
JM wrote:

I asked about this a few days ago, and they told me they do not allow customer-owned cable modems. I pressed the issue with another csr, who insisted they cannot do this, since there is no way for them to provision the service on equipment other than theirs. She asked me, "How in the world would we configure it?"

That's got to be both the funniest and stupidest thing I've heard lately.
Who trains these people ?

You should have told her the same way every other ISP does it. :)


I don't think she meant that it wasn't possible in the global sense, but rather it isn't something that they're allowed to do, and there aren't any work-arounds, either.

I don't know why Comcast requires that those business-class customers use only the modem that they provide, or why they chose that particular modem. I suspect it has to do with an SLA, and their need to minimize the variables out of their control.

But it's not a training issue. The company could provision a customer-owned modem, but they've chosen not to allow the agents that ability. So they, the agents, don't have any way "in the world" to provision it, but that's probably not the best way she could have gotten that point across.

BTW, this brings up another point. Is there an SLA in the contract? The cost of business-class service has gone down considerably in most markets, and that may be because they only include priority support, and not an SLA these days But I suspect that if there is an SLA, it would have something to do with the modem being up, but not necessarily anything beyond. If there's an SLA, they would probably keep records to protect their liability, and those records might also be available to the agent. I'd ask what they show. And if there is no SLA, and they don't keep those kinds of records, there ought to still be a way to escalate the issue to the NOC, and have them do such monitoring.

It would be hard for a customer to do the monitoring themselves. A DOCSIS cable modem has an IP address on it's WAN side. Normally it's a class A private range IP address, so monitoring the modem would require being on their network. And it would also require knowing what the modem's IP address is, and that's not something that there is any way for the customer to discover. Perhaps the CRS is able to see what that IP address is, but it's also possible the tools they have hide that address as well.

I'm also curious about what the modem's indicator lights are indicating during the problems. And I also wonder what the modem logs show. Confirming that it's a TCP/IP problem, and not an RF problem (or vice versa) is an important step that should have already been taken. (And probably was, but, hey, if we're brainstorming...)

--
Warren H.

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