Comments

1
10 years ago, back in the old Qwest DSL days, this sort of thing happened ALL THE FUCKING TIME! It was painfully obvious it was a DNS issue, but you call tech support and they have no idea what your talking about, yet alone how to report it, even when you dumb it down to explain it. So frustrating, it was one of the reasons why I left Qwest DSL. While I was affected by the outage last night, its a rare thing to see Comcast have these problems and to be honest, its not a huge problem for those who know how to change their DNS server info.

2
I'm all for a continued push for city sponsored broadband—all cities should, but your "meanwhile" is not a "therefor."
3
Comcast literally goes out a few times a day in 10-15 minute intervals at our house on Queen Anne. We are so fucking tired of it but feel helpless to do anything other than call them and get put on hold for an hour. A fruitless endeavor to say the least. FUCKING hate Comcast!! Far and away the worst company in America!
4
I guess I'll just permanently change the DNS info on my wifi router tonight to two diff public DNS services so that I'm nevermore affected by this kind of outage.

I'm all for municipal broadband -- it's been obvious since at least 1996 that the Internet should be recognized as a necessary utility service for modern life, our information utility...
(much like the information-utility service of France's MiniTel, which was vachement-cool a full decade before the Internet finally surpassed it).

However, municipal broadband is hardly immune to funky DNS errors or gear that goes down temporarily. So rag on Comcast all you want, there are good reasons, (and I have a 9-month tale of bureaucratic morass to tell you if you really care), but outages happen to all networks.
5
@3 - Is it Comcast? Or is it the fact that your Wifi modem is using the same 'channel' (typically 6 or 11) as the dozen or so other Wifi modems surrounding your house? Get a WiFi Analyzer app for your phone, and check it out. A simple channel change makes connectivity a whoooole lot better in many cases.
6
@5 Hey thanks for the tip - I will check that out
7
Not a huge fan of the initiative process, but seems like if ever there was an issue ripe for a vote of the people, it is this issue.
9
@4: As I pointed out in this post, the public utility in Chattanooga which runs their gigabit Internet network offered customers an automatic refund after an outage caused by tornadoes in 2011. Comcast doesn't do that. Outages can always happen, of course, but when they do, there's important differences between the kinds of service offered by a well-managed local public utility versus a corporate monstrosity.
10
CenturyLink is rapidly wiring up much of the city with fiber. They were on my street just a couple weeks ago, and my service should be available soon; up to 1Gig in my home! Looks like they are providing great competition to Comcast. Before we assess ratepayers or taxpayers to support a municipal system, let's be sure the private sector isn't already doing the job, or well underway towards it.
12
I work from home and my internet cuts out constantly. I live in Ballard. It's been like this for the last 4 years. I also tried CenturyLink but it was worse. COMCAST BLOWS.
13
Comcast sucked for me until I replaced their all-in-one router/modem with some stock models from fryes and radio shack. No more problems, and lots of fast internet.
14
I am a Comcast subscriber and have noticed that Fox News video clips have far more buffering issues than MSNBC clips on their respective web sites. Given that Comcast own's MSNBC, that could be planned. You Fox haters are free to rejoice in my conspiracy theory!
15
It isn't that Comcast's junk occasionally locks up, it's what happens when you try to do something about it.
16
Municipal broadband is late because The Stranger and Murray killed Gigabit Seattle. I wish The Stranger had the gumption it used to and admit its failings and shortcomings. Waving your hands in the air while pretending they aren't dripping with blood in this instance is the height of hypocrisy.

Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.