XFinity issues?

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Barefootgirl
Posts: 2519
Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2009 7:05 pm

XFinity issues?

Post by Barefootgirl »

Over the years, depending on where I lived, I have tried out a number of different ISPs.

Five years ago, I switched from XFinity to Verizon because XFinity had a nasty habit of cutting service off unexpectedly during the work day at approximately the same time each day. As I was working from home, imagine the problem trying to lead a presentation and suddenly the network cuts off.
Five years later, I am using them once again because it is the ISP that comes included with my new home rental.

Now, the last 3 nights, the network has been yanked down at approximately 5:30 PM for nearly an hour without notice.
Seemingly this is not a problem with the router or service to the house - due to the timing and duration pattern.

I am going to ask my landlord if he can find out from XFinity how long these nightly interruptions will last.

At a minimum, a broadcast announcement email or something like that would be helpful.

Has anyone experienced the same with XFinity or maybe this is bad luck for me twice with them?
How many retired people does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Only one, but he takes all day.
erictiger12
Posts: 52
Joined: Wed Jul 10, 2019 11:01 pm

Re: XFinity issues?

Post by erictiger12 »

I have no issues with Xfinity for the last 18 months when I am working at home.
dukeblue219
Posts: 4071
Joined: Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:40 am

Re: XFinity issues?

Post by dukeblue219 »

Are you *absolutely* sure it's not on your end? That's bizarre behavior and while most of my experience is Fios, such a regular outage would be so unacceptable as to be almost unbelievable.

ISPs schedule outages in advance and typically for the late evening or early morning. They're also rare and brief.
Trader Joe
Posts: 2697
Joined: Fri Apr 25, 2014 6:38 pm

Re: XFinity issues?

Post by Trader Joe »

Barefootgirl wrote: Sat Oct 23, 2021 5:29 pm Over the years, depending on where I lived, I have tried out a number of different ISPs.

Five years ago, I switched from XFinity to Verizon because XFinity had a nasty habit of cutting service off unexpectedly during the work day at approximately the same time each day. As I was working from home, imagine the problem trying to lead a presentation and suddenly the network cuts off.
Five years later, I am using them once again because it is the ISP that comes included with my new home rental.

Now, the last 3 nights, the network has been yanked down at approximately 5:30 PM for nearly an hour without notice.
Seemingly this is not a problem with the router or service to the house - due to the timing and duration pattern.

I am going to ask my landlord if he can find out from XFinity how long these nightly interruptions will last.

At a minimum, a broadcast announcement email or something like that would be helpful.

Has anyone experienced the same with XFinity or maybe this is bad luck for me twice with them?
As a decades long customer - no, never.
RetiredAL
Posts: 3513
Joined: Tue Jun 06, 2017 12:09 am
Location: SF Bay Area

Re: XFinity issues?

Post by RetiredAL »

Nothing is perfect so there will be outages. Reference to the Facebook outage. But repeating outages are not normal. Do you have your own individual Internet Modem, or are you using the building's wireless/wired?

To answer you question about reliability. Overall, Both our TV and Internet Comcast services has been fairly reliable. However 6 weeks ago, wife comments to me that one TV had been going off nearly every afternoon for the last several day and sometime a 2nd TV too. My computer connection was staying up, I hardly ever watch real TV, so I was not aware until she mentioned it.

A quick check of my personal (not Comcast's) Internet Modem's stats showed a very low receive signal. That night, the signal level rose significantly but was still somewhat low. When her TV went down the next day, another signal check again showed a very low signal. I placed a service call, the tech came out the next morning confirmed the signal level was lower than normal but still within spec. He replaced the drop to the house which made a small improvement, and said see how it does in the afternoon. Just before lunch, everything went out for about 5 minutes, when it came back up there was a marked signal improvement from very low to just somewhat low. Obviously, someone was working on the distribution system. There were two more outages across the next couple of hours, and after the last, the modem's signal was now above their target level. Everything has worked well since.

At this point my Modem has been up for 40 days and there are only 2 log entries across those 40 days. Both of those log entries suggest link resets of some kind.

For you bit heads out there.....
I was seeing signals levels running down to -16 to -17 DBmv when the TV's were dropping out and -7 to -8 during the evenings. The minimum for the modem is -18, so levels were right on the edge. The tech saw levels of -10 to -12. After whatever they were working on got stable, I was seeing +5 to +6 DBmv, a very decent signal level.
tortoise84
Posts: 463
Joined: Thu Nov 19, 2020 10:03 pm

Re: XFinity issues?

Post by tortoise84 »

I've used Xfinity internet for years, and have only had outages maybe once or twice a year. Whenever there's a problem check https://www.xfinity.com/support/status or login to your account (from a different device like your phone not on your Wi-Fi) to see if there's a known outage on their end. Every time I had a problem, it was already listed there.

If you want to get more technical like the above poster, there could be a problem with the signal strength, which can be checked by a technician. Try to remove any unnecessary signal splitters in the cable because they will reduce the signal strength. If you can login to your cable modem to check the status page, my signal strength is -1.3 to 0.2 dBmV and around 37 dB SNR. Also I have found that certain channels in my area (21-24) have much lower signal strength and SNRs in the 20s, so I try to get the modem to bond to different channels by power cycling it.
suemarkp
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Location: Somewhere in WA State

Re: XFinity issues?

Post by suemarkp »

Make sure someone didn't hack into your router and set disconnect times. I used to have ours disconnect at midnight to 6am to keep the kids from surfing all night.

Next, login to your modem (not router) and check signal strength at various times. Especially at times when it works and doesn't to see if the signal is too strong or to weak. I had a house where the signal was borderline too strong. But the connection would drop for 5 minutes and come back all at random times of they day (but typically later in the day -- not sure if temperature or loading affected it). They finally added an attenuator and that fixed it and was complicated by the fact the TV signal was on the weak side so they couldn't attenuate that side.

Finally, the only issues I've had with Comcast/Xfinity is their DNS going down. When you lose internet connection, see if you can ping things (go get the ip addresses of some things like cnn.com and other sites that are typically always up using the nslookup command from a command prompt). When the DNS goes down, my internet is up but it seems down because you can't go anywhere by name, only by IP. I had to change the DNS address in my router for a while until Xfinity got their act together.
Mark | Somewhere in WA State
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serbeer
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Joined: Fri Dec 28, 2007 1:09 pm

Re: XFinity issues?

Post by serbeer »

XFinity went down more than once on me. But no more than 3 or 4 times in the last 1.5+ years I've been working from home. Of course now that I said it...
madbrain
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Location: San Jose, California

Re: XFinity issues?

Post by madbrain »

I have had Comcast go down on me once for a full week. I had Comcast teleworker service. Had a hell of a time convincing them that I actually had Comcast service at my address. Neither Xfinity nor Comcast Business would admit to having installed service at my address. Just horrible.
After that, I went back to the consumer side (Xfinity). The line went bad many, many times. They always blamed my modem for interruptions. I finally sold my unit, and rented theirs, and then they could no longer blame that, and fixed the line. That took a good 6 months. It happened multiple times. They have replaced the line going inside my home at least 3 times in 10 years. A wiring expert recently told me they are using cheap non-UV rated cables, and they are running it on a south facing wall that gets very hot. If I had any choice at all, I would use someone else.
When it works, it's nice. Currently have a 1.4 Gbps download speed. The other options I have are all a joke - AT&T DSL at 1.5 Mbps. T-mobile at 100 kbps, Verizon at 10 kbps. Those are the network speeds I actually measured for the mobile options.
AT&T has 1 Gbps symmetric fiber about a half mile down the hill, but not here.
IowaFarmBoy
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Joined: Fri Jan 22, 2010 7:19 am

Re: XFinity issues?

Post by IowaFarmBoy »

Have you talked to any neighbors to see if they are down at the same time? Xfinity/Comcast may have some kind of outage map available that you could access through another provider (like your phone) to help see if it is only you or a wider outage.

We've had Comcast/Xfinity for our ISP for around 10 years and have had minimal issues. Probably on the order of 1-2 outages/year that generally last under an hour.
lazydavid
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Joined: Wed Apr 06, 2016 1:37 pm

Re: XFinity issues?

Post by lazydavid »

suemarkp wrote: Sat Oct 23, 2021 11:57 pm Make sure someone didn't hack into your router and set disconnect times. I used to have ours disconnect at midnight to 6am to keep the kids from surfing all night.
Very astute suggestion. Agree that the repetitive nature of this strongly suggests the problem is not at the head end. Could absolutely be a "quiet hours" setting in the router. Or it could be something in the environment, like you have a neighbor who comes home at 5:30, and turns on an appliance that causes a lot of interference.

This reminds me of an old story (likely apocryphal) I had heard from one of my fellow system engineers 20+ years ago, about a server that unexpectedly shut down at around 2am every day, then came back a short time later. After several nights of this, he stayed in the datacenter overnight, and spotted a maintenance worker unplugging it so they could plug in a vacuum, then plugging it back in when they were done. Even if not true, it's a good lesson to always consider the possibility of unexpected externalities when facing a strange problem, particularly if it has a pattern.
gtd98765
Posts: 952
Joined: Sun Jan 08, 2017 3:15 am

Re: XFinity issues?

Post by gtd98765 »

We have had Xfinity internet for the last three years and it has generally been reliable. However, since three of us in the house earn our livings via telework, as soon as T-mobile home internet became available in our area, I subscribed. I figured for $50/month it was cheap insurance for us. So far it has been just as fast as our Xfinity connection (>100 Mbs) and very reliable.
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