After another wasted night fighting with the "quality" internet connection that Comcast has given me, I have sent the following message the sales associate I have dealt with over the last year.

Jeff,

I have been pretty happy with the Insight service over the last year. It has been reliable and I haven't had to place a call ever about the quality of service. However, this last week has been absolutely miserable.

I'm not sure how much of the technical end you are involved in, or how much you know about it, but please allow me to explain my frustration.

My setup here at home hasn't really changed any. I have the Motorola Surfboard modem that I purchased from Insight when I first signed up. Also, I am still using the same Linksys WRT-54GL router that I was using when I first signed up.

Over the last week, my internet connection has been dropping randomly for no reason, even though my router has maintained 100% uptime. Sunday night sometime, my IP address changed from a 74.0.0.0 IP to a 98.0.0.0 IP. With this IP address change, I have noticed increasingly more drops in service, as well as poor transfer speeds.

I called the support line tonight, and after waiting for nearly 20 minutes to speak with someone, I was told that I really should have been assigned the 98.0.0.0 IP, and that with that aside, everything was fine. The technician issued a hard reboot for my modem and told me to try resetting my router as well. I did, and the unstable service has remained.

This is a problem for me, as I rely on a stable internet connection. I have told you about this before; My day job is technical support for web hosting, but I also do server administration and systems development. With this industry, I often work from home in the off hours. When the service drops if I'm shelled into a remote server making configuration changes, I lose a lot of work and can find the server really messed up afterward.

For my job, we have a private IRC server on our office network (not Comcast/Insight related). I will connect to this server from home so I can monitor the happenings at the office, as do several of the other staff members. When my service drops, I notice that their service also drops, suggesting to me that it is an issue with the "node" of the Comcast network we are on.

As I said, I have been pretty satisfied with the Insight service over the past year. I do understand that with changes to such a massive system as a the WAN that composes the Lafayette Comcast network, comes some headache. However, this sort of thing is getting really tiring.

Along with this, the Comcast customer services have been absolutely depressing. When I was finished talking with the technician on the phone, he transferred my call to billing so I could ask about an issue with my invoices for February. After waiting for another 15 minutes on hold, I received a message saying "we can't take your call right now, please try another time." I decided to seek out a contact form on the Comcast website, but to my dismay, the form wouldn't work at all. With that and the technician telling me I shouldn't have the IP address I've been assigned by DHCP, I'm not very impressed.

I have to admit, Jeff, I am actively seeking out alternatives to the Comcast service. I am nearly ready to contact Verizon about their 3Mbps DSL service, as other co-workers have reported nothing but absolute stability with it, even though it is 7Mbps slower than the Comcast offering.

Is there anything you can give me to get through this? I'm not talking about financial compensation necessarily, but something has to give. I can't afford to be without internet service, but I also can't afford to cripple a server or system I'm working on. Even if you can talk with someone about getting me assigned to a different network node somehow (it's a long shot, I know), it would be some sort of progress.

I look forward to your reply.
-Tim