#which blocks part of the chat box and thus makes it harder for me to do the job I'm getting paid for

[lananiscorner]

Well, all I can say is thanks staff for letting us opt out of this entire booping BS.

Hopefully it will only last for April Fools, because otherwise I might have to unfollow half the people on my dash.

[xodiumdotnet]

What do I do, Xfinity?

The internet problems saga continues, I suppose.

Back in October or so, I opened up a dialogue with Xfinity (on their official subreddit, which hey, that's kinda nice) concerning their internet in my area going down hard from 7pm to midnight. What I mean by this is that I'll lose a good chunk of my downlink speed and almost all of my uplink, making things like streaming or even uploading pictures in chat apps a bit of a chore.

This began around the time our plan was upgraded from 600/35 (down/up in Mbps, respectively) to 1200/35 in May of 2022. I initially thought it was due to an equipment issue, so I did the financially irresponsible thing and splashed out on a good modem, a Motorola MB8611, which is a modem that received high marks from a friend and Cisco employee who lives and breathes this stuff, so if he says it's good, well...

That unfortunately fixed nothing. Thus, the dialogue was eventually opened.

To their credit, Xfinity did swat down some low-lying issues. They pretty much rewired our house, so the modem now has an entirely new cable run between it and the main splitter that comes off the ground block.

They also did check to make sure the run between the ground block and tap was good. The only interesting thing was that they apparently found something noteworthy with the tap, and filed a mystery ticket against it, a ticket that Xfinity support refuses to elaborate on other than confirming that it exists.

We went back and forth for a bit, and through a couple techs before they eventually fell off and quit responding. Which was fine because at the time this was when the holidays were starting to get into full swing and I was tapped out.

There were still slowdowns, but thankfully things remained somewhat usable, pulling about 400/10. Is that acceptable when you're paying for 1200/35? Not really. But I'll take what I can get at this point.

Everything at this point was pointing to one conclusion: This is a capacity problem. The only variable was that I was using my own equipment that may have some dumb incompatibility. Given how adamant Xfinity support was that this cannot be a capacity issue, maybe they were right?

Some months later, I put it to the test. I went to the Xfinity Store, I rented an xFi XB7, and let 'er rip. It was super nice to be able to take full advantage of our internet connection (as it has a 2.5G Ethernet port), but...as expected, the cursed hour rolled around, and the speeds torpedoed.

I gave it another day, but I was already growing tired of the XB7 because of how dumb the configuration utilities for it were and the UX for advanced users was just utter trash. Upon the second night of it falling on its face at the cursed hour, I put it back in the box and took it back to the store, rolling back to my "old" equipment.

(I've since upgraded routers to be able to take full advantage of my rated internet speeds. I now have an Asus GT-AX11000 Pro, and the thing is gigantic and awesome. The live traffic stats are awesome to have for troubleshooting, too.)

Anyway, up until a couple weeks ago, I kinda just sat with this, with the fact that the speeds are never going to be good during these times. But things began getting worse and that's what prompted me to both reopen dialogue with Xfinity and write about this. Because this service is not cheap, and now our connection is going down harder.

Rather than the not ideal but usable 400/10, now our connection is crashing down to 100/4. Yeah. I'm losing 90% of my downlink, now.

This is not okay, and damn it, I'm not giving up again. This has been going on long enough and I'm not sure what I need to do, but...something's gotta give.

UPDATE 3/20/23: You...you can't be serious, they're literally telling me this is not an Xfinity problem, that my modem is to blame, and I need to call Motorola to fix this as this is their problem. Did they...completely miss the part where I said I had an XB7 and the problem still persisted WITH THEIR OWN EQUIPMENT?

Holy shit. I can't even. I really can't.

UPDATE...a few minutes later: Got swapped to someone a little more understanding, but made it clear there's no way to escalate unless a tech deems it so. You know, the tech who can't be out here past 6pm, before the problem actually occurs. This is going to be a pain.