Comcast Outage Again

This morning when we got up, the internet was down. Not really a big deal. We can do without it for a bit. Fortunately, I could use the hotspot feature of my phone to get our tablets to have internet, but it would not be the end of the world if that didn’t work. We do get spoiled with our constant connectivity these days.

It is a good example of why apps should be local-first when possible. The internet might not always work. Outages happen.

Comcast requires your service address to check outage status. It’s not a huge deal, I guess, but if you’re just visiting somewhere, you might not know the address. Surprisingly, at first is said there was an outage for “planned maintenance.” Surely it wasn’t planned, but these companies’ status pages tend to default to something like that.

Everything looks good! We couldn’t find any outages or service issues. Try restarting your device to fix slow speeds or other common problems.

Well, I beg to differ with the statement that there are no outages. The modem has been restarted a couple of times, and its status page keeps showing that it has no signal at all. No amount of device reboots would fix that. We have had signal drops for years but again never bothered to call Comcast about that because you would just get someone from India to answer the phone and from everything I have read it is a roll of the dice on whether you actually get a competent tech out to actually fix the problem.

This is pushing us closer to just getting Brightspeed installed. They ran fiber last year. People seemed to have a lot of problems with that service early on, but I have not seen as many complaints recently. Another thing we have considered is trying 5G internet. That could be worth a shot.

We have been holding out for Glofiber. They were supposed to work on our area, but I think the town council screwed around too long approving it, and they got a contract for Lancaster City. I had called them before we knew it was Brightspeed running the fiber, and an actual American answered the phone right away. She was helpful and polite.

The important takeaway from all this is that we have competing ISPs here now and more on the way. Eventually. If Comcast chooses to let its old system continue to degrade, there are options, and we will eventually be switching. The only thing they will have left is the old boomers, who will overpay because they always have and they’re afraid of change.