Multiple outages most days, usually ~8 minutes long [SOLVED]

An additional detail - on those occasions that a failure has happen when I've been using UDP based voice/video services, my outbound stream fails several seconds before the incoming stream (i.e. others stop hearing me several seconds before I stop hearing them).

Hi @Comcast_Lizzy and thanks for the prompt response - I'd be happy to contact you via private message but the website's private message function seems to be broken right now on Google Chrome (I see another forum thread about it being broken as well). I see an error in the console, maybe there was a recent update to the forum software containing a bug? (I did restart by browser just in case, and it's running the most recent version).

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The "Peer to Peer Messaging" function is available today, but unfortunately neither Comcast_Lizzie or Comcast_Joseph are available recipients. I'm assuming that's what you mean by private message (I didn't see anything else and there's no message icon on either of your profiles). If i'm looking in the wrong place please let me know where I went wrong.

I'll try the other option at a different time of day otherwise.

I've checked back a few times and none of the folks who've responded to this thread seem to be online when I do so - Should I just pick a random online Comcast_ account to message, or do I need to wait?

Hi Brian, I used to be a Comcast Business Services customer for my home office, and was having exactly the same issue that you are describing for months. The internet would stop all by itself for no reason -- this happened to me dozens of times (not kidding), with the average time between outages being around 1 week (but ranging between 6 hrs and 1 month). Each time I called Comcast to report the problem the agent went through the same drill -- unplug the Comcast router from power, wait 30 seconds, plug it back in, wait 10 minutes for it to reconnect, and magically it would start working all over again. I had Comcast change my router two times (meaning I suffered through 3 routers, although they were all the same model).

In frustration, I finally called Comcast to cancel my service due to the terrible SLA, but they refused to acknowledge the problem and said I would have to have a technician come in to verify the outage when it occurred the next time -- as in intentionally keep my Internet down for a day or two (without doing the unplugging routine), just waiting for a Comcast technician to show up and verify that it was indeed down.

I was so frustrated by this callousness that I chose to cancel my service and paid the early termination fee. I have told all my friends about my experience and recommended that they stay away from Comcast Business Services (at least for their home service).

I'm not presently at a point where I'd walk away (and there aren't necessarily better options in this area without sacrificing some of the capabilities that brought me to Comcast Business in the first place).

I was finally able to contact a representative (At some point recently things changed such that one no longer uses "Direct message" to a specific agent, but instead uses "Peer to Peer Messaging" to the generic "Comcast Business" identity), and the working hypothesis is that my issues are due to a line issue causing signal loss. Their conclusion was that I'd need a tech to come out and specifically look for those issues, including between the property and the street.

I'm still having some challenge getting that to happen though, too often attempts at support get a generic "I tested your service and it is working" response, without any real acknowledgement that this is an intermittent issue and that 99% of the time things are fine (The problem is that the 1% of the time is very disruptive - 8 minutes of outage in the middle of an important 60 minute zoom meeting).

I'll keep this thread updated as this issue works itself out, in the hope that it might help others with similar problems.

(I'll post a second message with some more technical observations).

Since the initial post I was able to set up some more advanced monitoring of the connectivity through the router, and checked some of the statistics from my network.  This is NOT a capacity issue, generally I'm consuming 1.5% of my download and 7.5% of my upload bandwidth (and stability is not affected when there's a spike in usage).

One observation is that when a failure occurs, outbound (uplink) traffic ceases to flow many seconds before inbound (downlink) traffic does - this is consistent with my experiences with VOIP.

Also, I think the apparent correlation between my outages and issues on the Service Status page was an illusion - if i just randomly check the service status page there are enough short outages in my area that it was likely coincidence.

The extended recovery time is still a bit of a mystery - if I power cycle the modem under normal conditions it seems to take about 2-3 minutes before it fully establishes a connection. I've also experienced cases where there's an apparent interruption to service that resolved within about 2 minutes.  However, during the more frequent disruptive events, it's a good 8 to 10 minutes between loss of connectivity and restoration, today there was an outage that did not recover by 9 minutes, and I restarted the modem 10 minutes in and it still took another 9 minutes to come back.   Perhaps this is a defective modem, hard to know.

Finally a breakthrough - I noticed an Xfinity truck by a neighbor, and asked if they were having internet issues - they've been having the same issues as I have, and after comparing notes, at EXACTLY the same time.  Being on the residential service they've had a worse time of it than I am (being told their modem was bad, etc).

With the correlation, both their Xfinity tech and my Comcast Business tech were able to escalate to the network support group, and yesterday morning I'm told they replaced a line amplifier down the street.  There have been no outages since then - I'm not going to declare victory just yet because we've gone 5 days with no outage just to have them reappear.

What I don't understand is why Comcast's monitoring of their infrastructure couldn't detect concurrent failures for multiple adjacent customers happening REPEATEDLY especially when both of those customers have been reporting issues for some time.  I suspect if it wasn't for COVID I'd have found out the neighbors were on Xfinity and having issues before seeing the truck.

Hopefully the next post from me will be in a week with a positive confirmation.

I can confirm that the amplifier replacement solved this issue, it's now been over a week that I've had continuous connectivity.