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Comment by samtho | Hacker News Reader

The employees are not to blame here. If he is browsing HN, he knows the pain points with Comcast and is just trying to help.

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No one is blaming individual employees. Quite the opposite, in fact—they're blaming the organization for failing to address issues unless the right individual is reached.

That's been my experience, as well. In two instances (one business class, one residential), I had issues getting their construction department to actually do the work they promised until I was able to get through to the escalation department—once via Twitter, once (IIRC) on dslreports.com back when the Comcast direct forum was monitored. Once the escalation department was engaged, things moved very quickly, with them calling me almost daily with status updates.

There are clearly individuals at Comcast who care about customer service. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be the ones in charge of organizational policies and processes.

Agreed. I recently decided to give Comcast another go because my current provider has some horribly bad upstream speeds, but even with brand new service, I seem to be having issues where my connection drops 4-5 times a day. It is not too big a deal when you're trying to work from home, but it can be a massive pain in the neck when you're trying to play anything online. I've been trying to resolve this issue with their customer support but I've gotten nowhere so far and feel like I'll probably just go ahead and cancel out of the contract before my first month is up.

They do advertise that they spend millions of dollars on improving their customer support, but I've yet to see anything happen on their end. Amusingly, our Comcast business contract at work has at least a couple of issues every week, too. We only don't notice them if they are to happen over the weekend, but when CRON jobs that require internet connection haven't run over the weekend, it's easy to figure out who needs blamed.

I agree with you. I'm troubled though by this new era of customer service where the focus is on having a team of people who monitor social media for the loudest complaints and devote resources to solving those out of fear of bad PR.

I do my best (customer support is not my day job) - if you are having issues I'd encourage you to try out the tool I helped build here: https://speedexperience.xfinity.com/

Ironically on that page the "highly recommended" link to https://speedtest.comcast.net/ times out.

Thanks for catching it! I'll fix it now! (We just did a revamp of the site text this week, must have slipped - we only 2 of us work on it :) )

EDIT: fixed! let me know if you see anything else out of place.

Thank you, it works now. FYI it took everything I had not to post something snarky ;)

Does it ever say anything but chat with an agent?

Some listing of what the actual issue is would be kinda useful, even if you shove it in a collapsible div to hide it away.

I (and most people) are more likely to rage-quit and go do something else than try to navigate three layers of outsourced customer service that is designed and optimized to deflect people, waste their time, and only if they are sufficiently insistent, and border-line belligerent, maybe give them an answer more involved than "unplug your modem and plug it back in"

Yes, it depends what the issue is. We check:

- If your modem is EOL

- If you modem's ethernet port is 100Mbps, and you have >100Mbps service

- If your modem is otherwise capable of providing your speed (i.e. number of DOCSIS channels)

- We check your signal levels to make sure they are in spec

- We check if you have been impacted by our Protocol Agnostic Congestion management system in the past 1 day or 30 days.

If any of these checks are triggered, we show it on the page. If nothing is triggered, we allow you to go straight to a chat.

We'll be adding more checks as time goes on, mostly around Wifi - MCS Index, Link rate, RSSI, etc.

Thanks for the response. If I can keep bothering you, is any of this specific to using Comcast-provided equipment?

Yes, all of the wifi stuff we add in the future will be only possible on comcast-provided wireless gateways (XB2/XB3). We have some other nifty ideas that would use our gateways too. Most of the existing stuff I mentioned is not specific to comcast-provided devices, or wireless gateways.

At least one employee would be to blame, right? Comcast's network hasn't become sentient, and isn't actively rebelling against human businesses by shutting down random ports. At some point, someone either made an explicit decision to do this, or decided to skimp on training.

It could also be an endemic culture problem, where lots of people skimp on lots of tiny things to the point that the final performance goes down the drain. No one to blame, but everyone to blame.

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