Last week’s email to the CEO’s office generated some communication again. On Friday afternoon, I received a call from a lady in their Executive Customer Relations department letting me know that she had reached out to the engineering team the day before, but still had not heard anything back from them.

Earlier today I got another call from her, relaying their answer: that they had installed a parallel modem in the house and then paid for a replacement modem, and that had exhausted their options. I kid you not. Finally, moments ago I received this in a DM from the Twitter support folks, relaying questions from, I assume, the same engineering team:

Good morning. The engineering team is asking if you see the same results with a wired test during the times shown in the screenshots. They also noted that there are no events shown in the node history corresponding with the dates and times pointed out. They also wanted to know if you changed the location of your modem at all recently. Thank you. -FL

Despite everything they’ve been sent, and the fact that the entire recent discussion was initiated by my frustration that they cannot see anything past the cable modem, they are still fixated on it being a modem problem.

So, given this fixation with the modem, here are my questions back to them:

Dear Comcast Engineering,

There is more to your network than the cable modems & headends. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, that link is pretty short. But given your fixation on the modem, and the wiring in my house, despite several of your techs agreeing that it all seems to be just fine, here are my questions to you:

1. Please explain how my modem here in one house in Alameda can be causing packet loss at the 5th hop of the trace, and only that hop (which has been a reliable symptom of this since I first reported it, despite all the modem swaps). Note: that router is located ~45 miles away in Sunnyvale assuming your hostnames are accurate (the node is 68.86.90.93, which, according to DNS corresponds to be-33651-cr01.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net); it is neither in my house, nor at the end of the wire my modem is connected to.

2. Additionally, please explain how my modem can also be impacting all the other people in Alameda and Oakland who have so far commented on my Nextdoor and Facebook threads sharing the blog post last week confirming they too see the issue with the internet becoming unusable for periods of time during the late evening.

3. Finally, please include in your explanation how this happens only in the late evening, and at other times the same modem, same wiring and same devices are able to get 50 Mbps download speeds reliably.

Thanks in advance,
John