Comcast Chaos

We have had continuous conncection issues with Comcast here at the school. The folks at Comcast were very responsive when I called them Wednesday and came out the same day replaced our gateway/modem. Things went swimmingly Thursday and Friday. This morning, however, some serious connection problems arose with inconsistant results loading pages. When I called them, they indicated that there was an outage in our area and that they were working to solve the problem. I was thrilled to know that, at least, I was not OUR equipment.

By 11AM, I decided to reset the modem/gateway by powercycling it. So far, all is well. In fact, as the figure below shows, our speed seems to be reaching previous levels measured after the Boost feature was launched last May. Nice job, Comcast!

What's Happening?

Over the last the days, our internet connection has been spotty. The firewall appears to be handling the load (50 total nodes) with no problem, but at times, webpages fail to load. I powercycled the the cable modem yesterday, which seemed to help but the Internet is still sluggish. I ran another speedtest and came up with the following results...





Compare this to the result I blogged about last May when they launched their Boost feature.



While I realize this is not scientific, at the time I ran today's test all students and teachers were in the mulitpurpose room for an assembly. Only a couple of office staff could have been online at the time. Pings work internally with no problem but sometimes don't hit the internet. Something is fishy. What's up, Comcast?

Comcast Boost Realized

I've been hearing about Comcast business customers getting a speed boost but I hadn't seen that happening on our connection. Today, I received a letter from Comcast indicating that our connection speed, previously 8Mb/1Mb, had been doubled both downstream and up speeds. The letter also indicated that I might need to do a hard reset on the cable modem to see the new speeds. So, I reset the modem and, sure enough, we are getting faster speeds that we were previously set up for, though I have never seen us near the cap from a workstation on our network (but who's complaining). Nice! Great for a school on an ever DECREASING budget.

I had also heard about a Power Boost feature to give you a quick boost on your first 100 MB (or something like that). The letter I received did not go into specifics but did refer to such a feature.

We will be upgrading our servers soon. More posts to come on that. Stay tuned!