My objection to the Triple Play is Comcast Voice, or more specifically, the loss of control over my equipment as a Voice customer. I first got internet from Comcast July 3, 1998 (at a then life-changing download speed of 256 kbps). I quickly understood the economics of renting a cable modem from Comcast and bought my own. I have upgraded several times and worked through several routers as well over the years. Besides saving money, it is nice to control my own upgrade destiny.
A few days after signing up for my new package, I received the "wireless gateway" that Comcast wanted me to use, a Technicolor TC8305C. Technicolor? Really? Not even Arris? I confirmed through Comcast that the device supports DOCSIS 3.0, but was immediately disappointed to see that it does not support IPv6. Powering up the unit and connecting to a laptop only worried me further. Only a 2.4 MHz radio, no guest network and very limited firewall configuration. It was also unclear whether the DHCP server supported address reservation.
Oh well, I figured, I'll just disable the router and use the device as a telephony modem. No such luck. The bridge mode cannot be enabled by the user. Several people reported on Comcast forums or DSL Reports having problems getting Comcast support to enable bridge mode, and that the modem left bridge mode after being power cycled.
Based on posts indicating that Comcast allowed customers to own telephony devices, I ordered an Arris TM822G through Amazon. I took the Technicolor device to my local Comcast office and told them I was going to use my own modem. I was told that, unlike the cable modem, my Comcast franchise did not allow consumers to purchase and use their own telephony device. After some discussion about the inadequacies of the router in the device, the service rep brought out an assortment of telephony modems that Comcast rented. The only one that was DOCSIS 3.0 was a Ubee DVM3203B. Ubee? I thought Technicolor was bad.
My options having run out (other than dropping the Triple Play before even activating it), I took the modem home. I spent a little under an hour trying to activate it at comcast.com/activate. The DNS server Comcast configured did not even resolve comcast.com. Yikes! I tried IP addresses and using curl or telnet to connect, but had no success.
Calling 1-855-OK-BEGIN connected me to a young woman who was confident we'd be up and running in ten minutes. Let me assure you, it was more like thirty minutes. Things started out smoothly, with me reading MAC numbers off the modem and us running through power cycling the modem. Multiple times the modem light sequence never got to the expected state. When we finally got the lights the way they were supposed to be, my phone had no dial tone and my computer could not get initialized via DHCP. The young woman did something to "activate" the phone line, and one last power cycle got me both a dial tone and an internet connection that allowed me to browse.
Before I forget: I had to wade through many posts with incorrect information before I found that the username/password to access the cable modem status (at the standard 192.168.100.1) is admin/cableroot. I was reassured to see that all eight download channels and three of four upload channels were active.
With that done, I expected to swap in my router for my laptop, power cycle the router, and be up and running. No such luck. Only after multiple power cycles of both the modem and the router did the router finally get an IP address. It was a 50.x.x.x instead of the 71.x.x.x that I had had for years, but who cares about the public IP address when you are finally up and running again.
Well, up and running is an overstatement. Browsing felt like I was working on an old dial-up modem. I had trouble even connecting to speedtest.net, and when I did I got 0.3 Mbps download, while the upload test never finished. I checked the modem status and the signals were all good. Download powers were between 2 and 5 dBmV, with SNR over 40 dB.
I power cycled everything again. This time my WAN IP address was back to its old 71.x.x.x, but speedtest readings were still horrible. I kept running about every minute while trying to figure out what could be wrong. Finally, about twenty minutes later, speedtest results were back to about 58 Mbps download and 11 Mbps upload, just what they were before the equipment change. I don't know whether the slowness was coincidental or the result of changing the modem, but I was happy to have my old performance back.
It's about a month later, and the modem has worked without problems, both internet and voice. My WAN IP address switched back to 50.x.x.x soon after the first day, which caused a couple of problems with work connections where IP addresses are white listed, but those issues were quickly resolved.
