Shawn Posted April 14, 2005 Report Share Posted April 14, 2005 Mine has messed up the last 2 nights in a row.... ANNOYING! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JSngry Posted April 14, 2005 Report Share Posted April 14, 2005 Is it only happening at night? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Dye Posted April 14, 2005 Report Share Posted April 14, 2005 It is for me. I'm sure 6-11 pm is peak bandwidth time. It could be that their domain name servers are screwed up or overloaded or something. It's getting very frustrating, that's for sure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Johnny E Posted April 14, 2005 Report Share Posted April 14, 2005 http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/loca...comcast14m.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Dye Posted April 15, 2005 Report Share Posted April 15, 2005 My suspicions appear to have been correct. DNS problems. MIKE WENDLAND: Comcast has new Internet troubles BY MIKE WENDLAND FREE PRESS COLUMNIST April 15, 2005 For customers of Comcast's high-speed Internet connections, it's deja vu all over again, with complaints about disruptions and slowdowns once more clogging the chat rooms and my e-mail inbox. Remember 2002, when Comcast Internet users encountered widespread problems following the company's takeover of part of the troubled Road Runner network? Back then, it took days for Comcast to concede the magnitude of the issues and its poor response to customers. Now Comcast users say service problems are happening again. The difficulties have been intermittent but nationwide, lasting for several hours Tuesday and Wednesday nights and the night of April 7. They couldn't come at a worse time, striking during prime evening usage hours and resulting in service so slow that dial-up seemed speedy. This time, however, the company is 'fessing up to the troubles. Dave Scott, president of Comcast's Midwest division, told me Thursday that the difficulties trace back to a decision earlier this year to centralize some Internet functions in two national clusters, instead of regional systems. "Part of it is the growth curve," Scott said. Nationwide, he said, Comcast now has more than 7 million broadband subscribers, "and we've been rapidly increasing speed and getting more and more sophisticated with our services." With about 1 million subscribers locally, Comcast is Michigan's largest provider of high-speed Internet connections. Scott said that for unknown reasons, demand during the past couple of weeks has simply overwhelmed the new centralized server locations in New Jersey and Colorado. Although engineers don't believe it is a capacity issue, Scott said he and his team pulled the Detroit service from the national servers early Thursday morning and reverted to local servers until the national issues are resolved. "That seems to have worked," he said. "We're not seeing any more issues. We can't guarantee what will happen tonight or until we get this permanently corrected, but I think we're out of the woods now." Users who called Comcast tech support during the slowdowns said they often encountered terse recordings referring to unspecified service problems. Some users who did get through said Comcast tech support personnel offered no explanation and little help. Chuck Reti, a freelance video editor from Detroit, said he noticed a general slowdown in access speeds several weeks ago. "Then the outages hit, and you'd go to access a site or try to get your e-mail and nothing happens," he said. "It is just a huge frustration." That was the story for days at a time back in 2002, when Comcast had just taken over a poorly maintained Internet system and was trying to integrate it into its network, which was still not complete. This time, however, the responsibility is all Comcast's. One of the most interesting results of this week's service problems, though, has been the way many Comcast users have taken matters into their own hands. They discovered that Comcast's connection to the Internet still worked; the problem was with something called domain name servers, or DNS, which tell computers where to find the Web addresses we type into our browsers. Those DNS settings can loosely be thought of as the traffic directions for the Internet, much as signs along freeways point us to our destination. The failure of Comcast's centralized name servers to direct traffic can be compared to what would happen if signs along the freeway were knocked down: You'd still be on the road, but you wouldn't know where to go. So tech-savvy Comcast users changed the Internet settings on their computers to temporarily use the domain name servers of other providers. Instead of looking to the overloaded Comcast servers to find the Web sites they wanted, they told their computers to look to domain name servers maintained by Verizon, GTE, Level 3 or other major Internet providers. Is that fair? Some say it's ethically questionable to piggyback off someone else's servers, but it's legal, says Tony Robinson, president of Pioneer Technology, a Michigan Internet and networking company. "This is no big deal," he said. "But it has to be embarrassing for a big company like Comcast to not have its own servers reliably working and then see its own customers using another company's servers." Comcast is indeed aware of what's happening. A posting on a Comcast support board this week addressed the issue of the unorthodox workarounds. "If you keep non-Comcast DNS servers entered in your settings, you may experience issues further down the road if the owner of these non-Comcast DNS servers makes any changes to block your usage or decommissions these servers," it said. As of Thursday afternoon, Comcast indeed seemed to have its own name servers back up. But this week's surge of customer activism and complaints shows just how seriously people take their Internet. Comcast had better take notice. For unlike in 2002, there is now lots of competition from satellite Internet and DSL broadband rivals -- and in some markets, like southeastern Michigan with WideOpenWest, other cable companies as well. Contact MIKE WENDLAND at 313-222-8861 or mwendland@freepress.com. Copyright © 2005 Detroit Free Press Inc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soulstation1 Posted September 22, 2005 Report Share Posted September 22, 2005 anyone havin' probs with comcast? off line yesterday, damn near all day Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chalupa Posted September 23, 2005 Report Share Posted September 23, 2005 (edited) I have Comcast and I lost all connectivity around 10:15 this morning. I *just* got back online about 10 minutes ago. I called 1.888.comcast about 20 times today only to get a message that said they were,"performing scheduled maintanence in your area". WTF?? Why wouldn't they schedule that for the middle of the night?? Edited September 23, 2005 by Chalupa Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Alfredson Posted September 23, 2005 Report Share Posted September 23, 2005 Translation: Something got f'd up and we're clamoring to fix it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harold_Z Posted September 23, 2005 Report Share Posted September 23, 2005 I still can't use Mozilla at this site. Can't access the Reply button - it doesn't exist on that browser. It's the only site I have a problem with, so I keep a window open on I.E, just for the BIG O. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christiern Posted September 23, 2005 Report Share Posted September 23, 2005 (edited) No probs on this side. I'm in Safari. Google, Yahoo, et al...work fine. ← Ditto\\Perhaps it's the curse of the bamboozler * *Bill Gates, of course Edited September 23, 2005 by Christiern Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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