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Comment by spike021 | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I've had Comcast nearly 4 years and I'd say 80% of the time, at least, the speed is great and I get more than what I pay for.

Occasionally at really odd times (mostly middle of the night) I'll get a disconnection from service, but that hasn't happened in a long time, and maybe twice in the past 4 months my speed has dropped pretty sharply. But for the latter, when compared to the service I've gotten the entire time, it's just a blip.

The customer service is absolutely awful though, unless by some odd luck I can get forwarded to their corporate offices in the US.

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I work from home, which means I'm hyper-sensitive to my internet quality. I also sometimes work through the night to early in the morning.

I've found that my Comcast connection here in San Francisco fairly reliably drops for a few minutes every day at around 2-3 am. Then it comes back and works find again. I've thought about calling them about this before, but I'm not sure that I want to spend a couple hours on the phone convincing them it's a real issue.

I live near Atlanta and I get the same issue around the same time. It's not reliably every night (thankfully, since I'm on almost every night) but it is at least once or twice a week, sometimes more, for 15-45 minutes. I can see in the modem logs where I'm losing my connection to them and the house phone also gets disconnected.

I'm in the same boat as you where making the phone call feels like a huge hassle. But it's interesting seeing a few other people with this same problem, maybe I should call them after all.

Seems like an E911 issue if your phone is going out almost regularly in the middle of the night. That might get their attention more than anything...

Given the timeframe, it sounds like some sort of maintenance is scheduled around that time- during "off-peak" hours.

That drop is what I was describing in my other comment. Happens generally between 1am-3am.

When I've called about it they say they can't send a tech out at night to test, so nothing has ever officially be done about it.

Sounds like more of a systematic issue though if you're seeing the same thing in SF (I'm in San Jose). But like I said, it's probably been a couple months at least since the last time I had that issue, or noticed it.

I've had the same with Comcast in Boulder, CO for years on both residential and business connections.

I had that happen on my Comcast connection but it was always between 2-3pm. It wouldn't drop completely though it would just suddenly start dropping 95% of the packets and ping times would go up to 2-3 seconds. I pestered them about it for a month and eventually a tech happened to arrive while it was happening, he called their CO and they found they had a network switch that was intermittently malfunctioning. After that it never happened again and for helping them troubleshoot it they gave me 4 years of free HBO and the cell number for one of their engineers so I wouldn't have to sit through tier 1 and 2 support again.

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