[lug] Comcast Business - pretty good short term offer

[Nate Duehr]

Nick Golder wrote:
> On 2007-08-16 17:40 -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:
>> The Comcast Business division (you know, the way you get multiple static 
>> IP's from Comcast and can run servers, etc...) is offering for a very 
>> short time a deal:
>>
>> $59/mo 6m/768k with burst to 12m/1m
>> $89/mo 8m/1m with burst to 16m/1m
>>
>> Static IP's:
>> 1/$4.95
>> 5/$9.95
>> 13/$19.95
> 
> Is the cost of the static IP's a recurring cost?

Yes... unfortunately, but that's about the same with every ISP these 
days... they're paying ARIN, so they pass along the costs associated 
with both the ARIN costs and software/people to manage the IP tracking.

I guess I should send a follow-up to both groups on this conversion 
process.  It's gone better than I expected.

The servers and things are moved over.  The contract was signed and 
faxed Friday after 3PM and the installation happened Monday at 2PM.

Reports from folks out of state and out of country that need to access 
one of my machines daily are all favorable, with latency dropping from 
around 100ms on the DSL circuit to 50ms or LESS on the Comcast circuit. 
  They're very happy with it.

Hard-wired speed tests have typically seen 8-9 Mb/s with numerous times 
that 11 Mb/s was seen, in the downstream direction.  Upstream has never 
been slower than 1.5 Mb/s.  Both speeds are far above my "guaranteed" 
speeds so far.  (In fact, I had to reconfigure the wireless and dump the 
mixed-mode 802.11b/g mode as it was seriously hurting performance now 
that things are consistently running above 3 Mb/s!)

Other observations:

- The installer was a contractor, not a Comcast employee, but he did a 
professional and friendly job.  He was on his cell phone a lot to 
friends, but he was in and out in less than two hours on a fairly 
complex installation since I requested the re-use of some cabling 
already installed in the house.

- At my request, (I received a customer phone call and had to pay 
attention to that) he left without testing the modem.  I said I'd take 
care of it.  Later that night, I fired up the laptop, and found that the 
statics were not routed to the modem properly, and that the modem hadn't 
been factory reset.  Apparently it used to live at Colorado State 
University.  (GRIN)

- This prompted an after 9PM phone call to Comcast on a weeknight. 
Other than their phone system being broken... (the transfer from the 
local Comcast Business PBX/IVR/ACD system to the overnight contractors 
has a problem with answer-supervision and DTMF (touch-tones) don't work 
at ALL in the menu/prompts at the contractor's phone system.  I 
mentioned this twice to two different techs, and they apparently don't 
care.  But if you wait long enough, at least the IVR doesn't hang up on 
you, it eventually takes you to someone.

- And that someone had a clue!  He understood what I was describing as 
the problem, we had a nice chat about working your way up in the tech 
biz (He's new at this but enjoying himself and hoping to better his 
position, he also said he likes working for the Comcast contractor -- 
"best job I've ever had".  That speaks volumes.).  He fixed the static 
IP problem, and made sure the modem was reset and then reloaded with 
appropriate information on their management side of things.  Then he 
understood what I was talking about when I wanted to get reverse DNS 
entries going/set up, and tried to help, but being it was the first day 
my account was active, it wasn't in their Remedy database yet.  He 
couldn't open the ticket properly.  He attempted a blind transfer to 
Tier 2, and they never answered after 30 minutes, so I hung up.  (I just 
had it on speakerphone.)

- Day 2, and I called about the reverses.  My account was now in Remedy, 
and the tech couldn't provide a way for me to send an e-mail to them for 
the purposes of avoiding typos in the DNS... I had to read off manually 
all five reverse PTR records to him, but he got it right, and they were 
active VERY quickly... I think about an hour.

- Finally, my friend that suggested I give them a call is in 
Indianapolis.  Comcast claims that they'll give him $100 per referral 
out there (and they'll supposedly give $50 per referral out here).  So 
far, we haven't been able to convince Comcast that cross-regional 
referrals "count"... at least the local folks here aren't willing to 
have it come out of their budget to pay $100 in Indianapolis.  Once I 
have full details on my account (account number, contract number, 
etc...) I'll forward the information to him and let him beat up his 
local rep from that end.  Different regions within Comcast apparently 
are different business units, and we'll see if they honor their offer or 
not for him.  Shouldn't matter.  He's the one who told me he was 
enjoying his new service from them and convinced me to call.  And he's a 
CCIE, so when he tells me a network is working well... I know he knows 
what he's talking about!

Anyway... that's the update.  The circuit's up, it's running with better 
than a 35% S/N ratio (according to the modem) at -6 dBmV (a nice solid 
signal... they shoot for 0 dBmV, but never quite hit it... but -6 is 
good.

So far, I'm very pleased with the experience and the service.  Nothing 
unexpected and no gotchas I wasn't prepared for.  Not having the statics 
assigned properly at installation seems to be a common problem -- not 
just cable.  And the speeds and latency are excellent so far.

Nate