Comcast problems
April 13, 2005 by Mike Wendland
It’s Comcast deja vu, with howls of complaints about recent service disruptions and slowdowns clogging the broadband chatrooms and my e-mail inbox.
I experienced barely-functioning broadband one night last week and again last night and the boards at Broadband Reports indicate problems more widespread than Michigan.
Some users are sharing some workarounds to the sropped or stalled service.
I’ve asked Comcast folks for an explanation and will report it here but Matt Rousch’s Great Lakes IT Report this morning quotes a company spokesman as saying last night “there were some server-based issues, but we aren’t getting more specific than that.”
Reader Chuck Reti e-mailed me to say:
“Last Thursday 4/7 service was unavailable here in Michigan, and in Colorado, New England, California to name just a few I saw complaining on the forums. Restoration here was not until nearly 4am. Tonight 4/12 service dropped sometime before 9:30p and is still out two hours later. It appears that their Domain Name Server(s) system is failing spectacularly.”
All I know is too many of us work from home these days and broadband service is essential. If this was electricity that was out or barely operating, there would be little tolerance for a “we’re not going to be more specific than that” statement from the provider.
It’s been nuts for Comcast users all over the U.S. this past week– either outages, or serious slowdowns. The DNS problems are fortunately easy to overcome if you are a mid-level user or above. You just have to change the DNS settings on your computer from automatic to manual and put in another ISP’s DNS servers. If you are a Comcast subscriber, you can find the forum posting telling you how to do that at http://forums.comcast.net/thread.jspa?threadID=37099&tstart=0
What has been killing me is that I use Vonage, which until recently worked great. Comcast is experiencing dropped packets like crazy, which blacks out VOIP calls for a few seconds and disconnects IM chats.
I used to highly recommend Comcast Cable modems over Qwest’s DSL in our area, but no more. My clients will get a different story.
T
I wonder if this is just a coincidence with the Major MS DNS vulnerability that was announced a week ago.
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?date=2005-04-07