Comcast - one tiny error

After two years of my family and I getting five-minute internet outages once or two (or three times) a day, I finally decided to put the energy into fixing this problem.

I decided to have Comcast come out until it was fixed.  What happened twice in the preceding two years was a technician would come out, replace a lot of connectors, maybe put in a filter that made things worse, put in a signal booster, measure things, declare it fixed, and leave.  Generally the internet service was great except for these outages.

And now, in July 2022, having made up my mind to just keep calling Comcast until it was fixed ... it was fixed on the first visit.

I believe I mentioned to the Comcast phone rep that I had Starlink as my backup.  Suddenly several people at Comcast were interested in my case and talked to me on the phone.  I talked to a more senior person, and he told me, don't hold back, show the tech everything, walk the neighborhood, whatever.  Normally I feel a little bad telling someone how to do their business, but now I was empowered!

The tech that came out did a terrific job of replacing connectors and simplifying the setup - my MOCA network worked again.  He measured things and showed the measurements to me.  Everything looked great just as it always had.  We walked over to the distribution point down the street a bit, and which doesn't fully close anymore, and is kind of filled with dirt, and talked about how rain affects it.  The tech said he had seen worse and it wasn't the problem.  We went across the street to the look at the new fiber drop, which is a disaster:

and

The tech was pretty sure that wasn't Comcast fiber.  That's another story.

He cleaned up the junction box at the house:

Before

After

That's much nicer than the mess that was in there before.

But I thought ... self, you are empowered.  Maybe ... poke around a bit.

So I traced the cable from that box to where it goes into a big, beautiful conduit that goes under the neighbor's yard and driveway.  The origin of that is another story.

And as I looked ... what to my wondering eyes did appear but another connector that had been there for years!

It had been hidden in these bushes.  I pointed it out to the tech and mentioned that it didn't look like the same waterproofing he had been doing to the other connectors.  He opened it up and said, "Eww."

It was full of ... green stuff.

He replaced it, waterproofed it, and now everything is great.  One frickin' connector.  Auggh!

As to the specific cause of the five-minute outages ...

That is also another story.