Comcast issues.

I moved in October to my new house and I called the usual people for Cable TV and Internet Service. I found out I was too far from the CO to get dsl, and AT&T's UVerse was not avaliable to me. I decided to give Comcast another try. I got service and was hooked up pretty quick, and had a working internet connection for, that was until Dec, 28 2008. At that time My Pix 501 could not route outside my network. I reset my firewall and lost my IP address totally now. Next step was to reset the Cable Modem and my firewall, this gave me the same result. I figured there may be an outage in the area. I called up Comcast to see if there was an outage or if something was wrong with my Modem. They said I was getting a weak signal to the modem, and would send a tech out to see check and see if they could fix it. The soonest appointment was in 2 weeks.

The Tech for Comcast comes out and checks everything. He replaces the outside splitter and a splitter on the inside of my house. Things come back and work for a couple of days, then they fail in the exact same way. I call up Comcast, get a tech and walk him threw what I already have done. As soon as this Tech hears the word Pix 501, he cuts me off and tell me I have to call Cisco for support, and he then spends the next 15 minutes insulting me, belittling me, and almost curing at me. I had missed his info when I got connected (It was cut off), and was asking for it for my records. As soon as this happened the resulting scream was "If you are threatening my job I'm ending this call.. ". I call back and ask to talk to a supervisor right away. I get transfered to someone, and they get a setup to have a couple of tech come out and look at my system again the next day. They check everything and replace my cable modem. They then can not get my firewall to get an IP address. They connect a computer directly to the cable modem and register the modem and I get online. I think all is well hopefully services is restored fully.

Sunday I get up, do some things around the house, and check my mail. I'm online for a while, then I lose my access again. It's the same exact issue as before. So I call in to tech support and get the same treatement of "We will only support you if you are directly connected". I get a supervisor and we run though several test's and checks and push some things around. While on the phone with the "supervisor" and checking she claims to be checking the DHCP servers it suddenly starts routing. I'm thinking ok cool it's working, I may be good now. I lose power last night for several hours and get up this morning with no internet again. Same issue as before.

I know most people would say this is an issue with my firewall, it's not. I had set on of my computers to use the same MAC as my firewall and had the same result. I also connected my PIX to my lan and see if it would pull an IP address properly and route properly, it did. I'm at this time calling AT&T and seeing about U-Verse again.