Sergio is my hero

3 Comments

I wouldn't normally post in the middle of the day, but I gotta say: Comcast tech guy Sergio is my hero.

He arrived on time, and he knew exactly how to fix my slow-downloading problem. He told me that around the time of the service outage a couple weeks ago, Comcast changed something; apparently nobody is entirely sure what happened or why it broke, and only a few customers were affected, but the tech service-call guys eventually figured out a solution. (For the geeks in the audience: it involves setting the MAC address of the router to be 1 higher than the MAC address of the cable modem. Sounds like FM* to me.)

Before he arrived, I went to the Hubris Communications Bandwidth Meter and was seeing speeds around 75kbps. After he left, I tried again and got a speed of over 3100kbps. (Which seems implausibly high, but another tool, Ridge, is showing peak download speeds up to about 500KB/s, which is indeed well over 3000kbps. And Toast.net's performance test is showing nearly 3000kbps. Four seconds to download a 1.4MB image file. As opposed to the several minutes it would've taken this morning.)

It's so nice to have a happy shiny speedy Internet again.

Now I want to call back Comcast and tell them to tell their phone support people that this is a known problem with a known solution and they need to stop telling customers it's their fault.

*My father used to occasionally explain that various things worked by means of "FM." I would ask, "What's that?" He would reply: "Fuckin' magic!"

3 Responses to “Sergio is my hero”

  1. Amy Sisson

    Jed, we read a fascinating book in library school titled “The Social Life of Information”. The bit that stayed with me was about Xerox repairpeople, who used coffee breaks and word-of-mouth to get solutions to each other. If I recall correctly, at first the company couldn’t figure out why, when they reworked schedules, repairpeople suddenly couldn’t fix problems as easily, and their official repair manuals weren’t helping. Then they realized it was all passed around like Jedi wisdom or something, and the Official Company Word was NOT what got things done.

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  2. Lola

    Yay for happy shiny Internet!

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  3. Michael

    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

    The Microsoft version: Any sufficiently rigged demo is indistinguishable from technology.

    A few months back, Comcast broke everybody’s Toshiba modems around here. Tech support had no idea what was going on and spent many hours trying to troubleshoot and then several days trying to schedule appointments (each of which was cancelled shortly after it was made because their system required a phone call to a wrong number before actually dispatching a human being). The repair guy who finally showed up fixed the problem in about 45 seconds by swapping out the modem, and couldn’t believe that phone support was wasting everyone’s time troubleshooting a known problem.

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