Hey guys, I’m about 30 hours into my Xfinity experience and not feeling all fuzzy and warm about their service. I’m paying for GIGABIT (they spell it with all caps) service and not only have I been getting about .5 Gb when running speed tests outside of their network, but my connection been bouncing all day. I’m using a personally owned Netgear CM1000 modem connected to an Orbi RBR50 router and two RBS50 satellites via Wi-Fi mesh. I have great Wi-Fi connection throughout the house, but the Internet connection drops about once an hour for about 5 to 10 minutes. In other words, about the time it takes me to recognize I’m down, say a few unkind things about the Comcast management, go upstairs, and see that the little planet icon on my modem is flashing, see the Orbi light showing offline, and think yeah, this ■■■■■ is down. If I wait for a few more minutes or power-cycle the modem, it comes back up - for another hour or so. Then it bites me in the hunkis again. The outages are well timed in that they usually happen at the worst moment. Like working in QuickBooks Online and trying to send a client a big invoice, or in the middle of an OS update for a client’s VoIP system.
Anyway, I spent a couple of hours teaching the Comcast tech the basics of IP networking this afternoon while he sat on my modem telling me that everything looked great. Classically it went down about 10 minutes after he connected, then was rock solid after that. I queried him if my modem’s firmware version was what they considered up to date (customers are not allowed to update their modem’s firmware on their privately owned cable modems I learned ← probably a good thing) to which he said that I shouldn’t worry about that. OK.
I made an agreement to run what he called “hardwired” to my laptop until tomorrow to see if my router was causing an issue. I did this until I realized that Comcast won’t issue more than one IP via DHCP in my configuration. I put a intermediary switch between my modem and my router, then plugged my laptop and router into the switch. I found that the second device would not receive an IP address. Bastages! Which is my question. Should I get more than 1 IP address?
Fortunately, I have access to an endless reasonably deep supply of IPA and Pale Ale.