When I moved to the island compound, I was happy to be free of Comcast after years of suffering under their monopolistic abuse. Alas, while I was visiting my in-laws, the beast returned.
They’re not big internet folks. They mostly use email and look up stuff on the web, and it doesn’t demand a lot of bandwidth or performance. My father-in-law (FIL) decided, however, that he was going to try Linux instead of landfilling his aging laptop now that he is no longer able to upgrade from Windows 8. He tried downloading Ubuntu, and his browser said the download would take 2+ days. I tried it on my laptop, and it wasn’t any better. Visits to fast.com and Speedtest revealed that their “up to 800 Mbps” internet connection from Xfinity was delivering about 8 Mbps. My son provided us with an install stick so we were able to upgrade FIL’s machine (runs great!) but the pokey connection remained.
My FIL visited an Xfinity store, where they said “Everything looks good from here, it must be your (customer-owned) modem” and offered to lease him an Xfinity unit for $15/month. He declined. I checked the cable connections from the street to the modem, reset the modem, and tried turning everything off and on again. The speed stayed abysmal.
I ordered a new, compatible cable modem and installed it. I was able to quickly and efficiently get the local wireless network configured exactly like the old one, so all devices connected without changes. When it came to connecting to the net, however, we were blocked by a captive portal telling us we had to install the Xfinity app. The Xfinity app requested our “Xfinity ID” or an email address or mobile phone. The in-laws are highly organized, and they had two valid email addresses and a mobile number associated with the account, but all returned an “invalid Xfinity ID” error. There was a “find my Xfinity ID” link, but it simply immediately returned an error. We tried contacting Xfinity support, who kept sending text codes to my mother-in-law’s phone as she was trying to talk to her doctors about an upcoming surgery, and we kept having to interrupt her to get the code and then verify with the Xfinity rep who would thank us, have us try one of the ID’s we’d already tried multiple times before, verify that it still failed as it had previously, then he’d text yet another verification code to the wrong phone. This process was repeated about eight times, and it failed exactly the same way just as it had all the other times we’d tried it. I finally had to politely ask the agent to stop asking us to try things that had already failed multiple times.
Then he had us do a password reset, even though we had never gotten as far as having the app ask for a password. Of course, we still couldn’t sign in to the app as it still told us we weren’t using a valid “Xfinity ID.” The agent became completely focused on the password. I finally had to insist that he focus on our actual problem (getting the modem to work) instead of having us act as testers for their obviously pre-alpha defective app.
a three-hour tour
He gave us the phone number of the “Internet repair unit.” More and more and more codes were sent to my mother-in-law’s phone which she patiently relayed to us while going through her own customer support hell.
Eventually, three hours later, the rep told us that she could just set up our account to recognize our new modem’s MAC address. I thought that’s what I had asked for those many long hours ago. She then proceeded to sell FIL on a speed upgrade that came with a price reduction.
All’s well that ends well, I guess, and now the in-laws have gigabit internet (though only the downlink; the uplink is still not up to par). I’m left wondering how such a large company can be so ignorant of the basics of their company’s operation. It’s no surprise; this is the same internet giant that can’t keep their website running. But it’s a miserable indictment of the corporate mindset once they’ve achieved monopoly. “We’re the phone company. We don’t have to care.”
—2p
PS. In retrospect, I probably could have avoided all this hell by simply spoofing the old router’s MAC address with the new router instead of trying to follow Xfinity’s rules. Live and learn.