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Just moved into a place and I'm told that between the AT&T and Comcast that's available, Comcast is the lesser of two evils so that's what I'll go with. Apparently AT&T here is super unreliable. There's coax connectors on the walls in some of the rooms, so I presume the best way for me to proceed is order it online, then rather than give them $10/mo for a modem to get a docsis 3 wifi router, a splitter, and some coax cables? Or will an engineer generally supply the coax/splitter and be happy to plumb the modem I've bought in whenever they're booked for. If anyone has any tips for dealing with them or good deals to jump on, I'm also all ears. I'll miss my Virgin 200mbit uncapped line but hopefully this won't be too awful.
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Aug 1, 2016 23:23
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| # ? Apr 30, 2024 15:49 |
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Order your own modem. Comcast has a list of compatible modems here: http://mydeviceinfo.xfinity.com/ If the speeds in your area are under, say, 300Mbps, and unlikely to go higher soon, you don't need a top of the line model. The Netgear N300 is a reliable combo modem/router that will get the job done for under $90, so you're in the black after 9 months vs. "renting" a modem from Comcast. Or get a nicer model that supports Wireless AC, etc., your call. I'm assuming AT&T in your area doesn't support fiber/Gigapower. If you have Gigapower available, get it. Otherwise it's plain old poo poo UVerse DSL and even Comcast, bad as they are, is better than that. Also, welcome to hell  If you live in a newer area with fiber deployments and competition, internet service can be both awesome and cheap. Such places are rarer than unicorns in the US (lucky me, I live in Austin, which is unicorn city). Everywhere else there's one incumbent monopoly that will have the best/fastest service and will treat you exactly like you'd think an incumbent monopoly would, and 3 or 4 lovely DSL/Satellite options that are best saved for grandma and her AOL account.
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Aug 2, 2016 17:29
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I feel kind of bad because... I've actually had a not awful experience with Comcast today?! I signed up online while in a library, and within minutes a red flag - they were mailing our starter kit to the billing address for the credit card, not the service address. Not good as that's 4 hours away. We looked online and the Xfinity store here is pretty big, so did what we should've done originally and went over to it. They couldn't see a record of the install kit going through and were like, you just want to pick up the gear from here? So a 5 day wait for it to arrive through the post (to the wrong address) was averted, I went to Best Buy and grabbed the same N300 that you mentioned as in my research it looked the best bang for the buck, and I've never had any major issues with Netgear stuff in the past. So tonight I have working cable internet and TV with pretty little hassle, so I'm quite chuffed. The only thing I need to get working is the little XiD-P box thing that I presume will work wirelessly with the main X1 box, so I can put the main box in our bedroom and have the wireless one in our living room where the cable socket isn't in the most ideal place. Oh, speedtest says I'm only getting ~30mbit over the hoped 75mbit but there's only 2 of us here and if it worked any faster that terabyte cap wouldn't last 5 minutes I expect. As long as it's fast enough for 4K streaming services when I get the TV setup, I'm happy.
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Aug 3, 2016 03:02
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EL BROMANCE posted:I feel kind of bad because... I've actually had a not awful experience with Comcast today?! From the sound of it, the reason you think you didn't have an awful experience with Comcast is because you are pretty low key about it It's not the worst thing in the world or anything, but that sounds pretty lovely. Shipping snafus that had to be corrected with an in-store visit (you were lucky there was one nearby), devices not working yet, getting half the speed you thought (and feeling grateful about that because of their data cap)....sounds like Comcast all right. Sounds like it only works because you made the extra effort. Compared to a life making bricks out of mud and field-stripping AK-47s in some hellhole this isn't terrible as far as problems go, but I'd be pretty pissed at Comcast. I mean, you are paying them for service, right?
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Aug 3, 2016 17:05
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I think it's just because I've had so many issues with comms companies that when I can go from nothing in the morning to everything working by the evening without too much hair pulling, I take it as a victory ha. I'm a pretty patient person by nature most of the time mind. Still not entirely sure if the stuff would've turned up at the previous address or not, it might've just been a weird bug in the email system. I'll let the system settle in over the next few days and see if the speed changes or not, I've plugged the modem into one of the other cable sockets (it could well be due to the internal wiring here, there's 4 cable outlets here in total and maybe that's not for the best) and the upstream/downstream strengths look better now. When I get a device I can wire into the modem rather than go by wifi, I'll see what speed gets registered then. Downstream Bonded Channels Channel Lock Status Modulation Channel ID Frequency Power SNR Correctables Uncorrectables 1 Locked QAM256 5 681000000 Hz -1.1 dBmV 39.9 dB 0 0 2 Locked QAM256 6 687000000 Hz -0.9 dBmV 40.3 dB 0 0 3 Locked QAM256 7 693000000 Hz -0.2 dBmV 40.9 dB 0 0 4 Locked QAM256 8 699000000 Hz 0 dBmV 41.4 dB 0 0 5 Locked QAM256 10 711000000 Hz 0.2 dBmV 41.9 dB 1456 3728 6 Locked QAM256 11 717000000 Hz 0.4 dBmV 41.8 dB 0 0 7 Locked QAM256 12 723000000 Hz 0.3 dBmV 41.3 dB 0 0 8 Locked QAM256 14 735000000 Hz -0.1 dBmV 40.8 dB 0 0 Upstream Bonded Channels Channel Lock Status US Channel Type Channel ID Symbol Rate Frequency Power 1 Locked ATDMA 13 5120 Ksym/sec 36400000 Hz 46.3 dBmV 2 Locked ATDMA 14 5120 Ksym/sec 29500000 Hz 47.3 dBmV 3 Locked ATDMA 15 5120 Ksym/sec 22600000 Hz 48.3 dBmV 4 Not Locked Unknown 0 0 Ksym/sec 0 Hz 0.0 dBmV The downstream channels were at -4dBmV earlier and I know the tolerance should be -8 to +8, so this outlet does seem better at least. I'll check at different times.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:59
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EL BROMANCE posted:When I get a device I can wire into the modem rather than go by wifi, I'll see what speed gets registered then.
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Aug 3, 2016 19:58
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It's definitely a limiting factor hence why I'm not doing anything until I can completely eliminate it. I know most of my gear has to be wireless reliant due to the cable port locations anyway, so as long as nothing gets in the way of streaming, then I'm fine. My laptop doesn't have a ethernet port and I don't have the Apple TV set up yet (which has one, and the speedtest.com app) but I'll give it a whirl on that. I get a Transmission rate of 130mbit/sec to the gateway on my laptop, and cloud check app on my phone reads getting speeds of around 50mbit to and from it.
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Aug 3, 2016 20:59
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Those stats don't look too bad though you should be getting all 4 of your upstream channels. Likely it's WiFi, since the N300 is only does up to N which isn't super speedy even in ideal environments.
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Aug 4, 2016 02:18
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Yeah, I probably should've gone for a more expensive model but the main thing they offered at a chunk higher cost was the increased channel count and with moving home it's been a tight month money wise. I could always sell it in the future and jump on board a higher grade if needed. My wife is generally happy as long as things work fine, and to be honest I'm the same these days. Kinda miss the old setup where we gigabit wired all the house that mattered, but that was a mess of cables and switches that I couldn't get away with here. Thanks everyone for the insight, it's been much appreciated. Looking forward to wiring up the OLED TV tomorrow - the purchase of which is definitely a contributor to 'tight month' ha. Looking forward to seeing the Olympics on X1, although it's a shame there's no 4K feed like DirecTV get.
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Aug 4, 2016 02:30
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EL BROMANCE posted:Yeah, I probably should've gone for a more expensive model but the main thing they offered at a chunk higher cost was the increased channel count and with moving home it's been a tight month money wise. I could always sell it in the future and jump on board a higher grade if needed. My wife is generally happy as long as things work fine, and to be honest I'm the same these days. Kinda miss the old setup where we gigabit wired all the house that mattered, but that was a mess of cables and switches that I couldn't get away with here. If your wireless devices are ac capable you'll see a considerable speed boost even if your modem doesn't use more channels (if you have 300Mbp/s downstream service now, 8 channels is enough). AC is 3x faster than N in the lab and generally 2x faster in real world usage. You can always exchange the N300 for a slightly cheaper modem and hang an AC router off it, if that works out to be cheaper then moving up to the next combo model.
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Aug 4, 2016 18:36
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Only my Apple TV is AC at the moment, my Air is too old and I'm hoping whatever computer I get next will be wired in. I have a Netgear extender/travel router that's got a decent aerial I could always wire up to boost if needed for now.
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Aug 5, 2016 02:20
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The xfinity boxes turned up here today, so was just an email error for the address after all. They're both in retail boxes so might be new (the ones I got from retail store were wrapped and on cardboard) and are slightly different models so I guess I get to pick and choose which ones to keep. As all four are appearing on my account list, I doubt keeping the spares in case of a dead box further down the line would go unnoticed so probably best to return or cost me another $20 a month. The lady in the store couldn't see the ones that we received here today, probably because they hadn't been sent at that point. So I have: Pace X1 Arris X1 (just received) I heard some people say the Arris is the better one for video quality so that might be the keeper Pace XiD Cisco XiD No idea which is the keeper, or if it really matters. Any opinions?
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Aug 6, 2016 02:18
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Ixian posted:Also, welcome to hell They abuse their negotiation power at a very high business level, but the local service has always been great.
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Aug 6, 2016 06:09
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adorai posted:I've had comcast ever since they bought my previous cable company in 2006 or so, and I've never had a bad experience. Further, I use them extensively for metro ethernet at work, and they are probably the most professional, polite, and responsive of all my carriers. You're just lucky. Comcast gets more complaints to the FCC then their next 3 rivals (AT&T, Verizon, and TWC) combined. Their BBB rating is equally bad. We're not talking anecdotal evidence here. In fact, a few years ago when I was in Colorado and had XFinity, I didn't have a particularly bad experience either, other then when I cancelled (because I was moving to an area they didn't have service, also I was out of contract) they gave me an extremely hard time and even called back to "follow up" (check my zip code) a couple weeks later. Also their data cap policy is one of the dumbest in the business. However there's no denying that their corporate policy has a negative effect all the way down to the subscriber level. You are aware they are being sued for $100 million by the AG of Washington State for selling "worthless" service plans to consumers, right? I didn't mean to turn this in to a general "Comcast sucks" thread. I'm sure they provide fine service to many subscribers.
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Aug 6, 2016 15:54
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EL BROMANCE posted:The xfinity boxes turned up here today, so was just an email error for the address after all. The Arris is the (slightly) better DVR, I believe. In that it has a better decoder in it. For the non-DVR XiD extenders, I don't think there is much if any difference. They are pretty much made to standard and work the same way. All they do is feed off the X1 master.
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Aug 6, 2016 15:58
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| # ? Apr 30, 2024 15:49 |
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Thanks, that looks to be the direction I'll head in. Hoping I can keep some of the coax/HDMI cables without them fussing too much now...
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Aug 7, 2016 06:36
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