The Cynic Says……

Hah yeah… we finally have internet access at home after having to go through some mild crap with Comcast to get it up and running as planned. Basically, our installer showed up on Saturday afternoon and brought the cable box and modem but didn’t really do any installing short of removing the terminator on the cable. Comcast doesn’t activate accounts on weekends anyway so all we had was basic cable for the weekend and no internet. Well, on Monday I hook up the modem (an RCA) and only only the “internet” light is lit up. The cable link and PC link made no acknowledgement of a connection to either despite both cables being connected. I tried everything I could think of and nothing worked. So just for fun I call their tech support and they of course tell me they can’t even see the modem connected. I call the installer back and tell him my modem is dead on arrival and he says he has no more modems and that I might as well go to the main office and swap it out. It was too late to do that Monday so I decided to go Tuesday afternoon and take care of that. I take the stuff in and they give me a brand new Motorola 5101 modem. I get it home and plug it in…. immediately it lights up and appears to be online, so I pull up my web browser, only to be greeted with Comcats’s “walled garden” page for unactivated modems with a link to download their account activation/setup software. I do so and run it to setup my account. Well, the stupid software isn’t even able to detect my ethernet connection to the modem! So at this point I just call Comcast and have them manually provision my account and activate everything. Poof, it’s up and running at a full 8mbps speed. More trouble than it should have been, but worth it in the end I guess. All in all, still better than the alternative (Bellsouth ADSL), which takes 1-2 weeks to setup and get running when you include provisioning the line… plus the fact that we would have to have a landline in order to use it, something we have no desire to have.