Monday, February 9, 2015

A Comcast/Xfinity modem upgrade story that doesn’t end in tragedy.

Comcast/Xfinity is working hard to get everyone off Docsis 2 modems and to install Docsis 3 ones. They are so hell bent on it that they have an almost phishing level attack on you, if you click the link in their emails you’re forwarded to a page that automatically sends you a new modem whether you want one or not.

So thats where I started. I have have zero problems with my docsis 2.0 telephone modem through them. It has NEVER needed to be restarted. It’s never hiccuped or dropped a call or a data packet in 4 years. I did not want to replace it. They started sending me letters claiming that if I wanted my full speed that I needed to upgrade. Finally I clicked on one of those links and found myself with a new modem in the mail. OK, whatever, I’ll look into it when it gets here.

What arrived was their standard Technicolor TC8305C modem. Wow, phone lines and built in wifi. I wonder if I could use it to extend my current wifi or something useful or just turn it off? Well no, you can’t do either of those. The whole point of these modems is that they are complete control of XFinity and will always share that “xfinity wifi” signal that you see when you’re wandering around town. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea where people might be walking by your house and can get on the internet through wifi rather than over the phone if they log in. But it doesn’t make sense out here at all and I want to turn it off. You can’t turn it off. You also can’t set the modem in bridge mode and handle the NAT and other sharing things yourself. You have to use the tools built into the modem. I always run an airport for NAT sharing and wifi and I want to continue to do that. You CAN put the modem into bridge mode, but you have to call comcast and ask them to do it remotely! Thats just outrageous to my mind, and after reading the number of horror stories about this modem continually forgetting that setting and having to call in all the time to get it reset not to mention the lousy wifi range and other problems people have had I wanted nothing to do with it.

So I got an xfinity’s chat help person who was very nice and suggested that there was a simpler bridge mode modem they could send me instead. Ah, I would be happy to have that please go ahead and send it to me and I’ll take both other modems to the comcast place in town later.

2 days later A big box arrived with yet another Technicolor TC8305C in it. I now have 2 identical modems that I don’t want. So I decided that I had to do the research after all and got myself an Arris model that does nothing but bridge mode thats on their supported modem list. Telephone and Docsys 3 and NO wifi or NAT stuff, just a bridge to my airport.

Now I had to get it to actually work though, and there are as many horror stories about that out there as anything else. In my case the replacement of the old modem was almost completely painless and worked great. If you can help it do NOT call them at all.

Grab a cable bill or write down your account number before you start this process or you’ll not be able to go online to get it.

Disconnect the old modem and hook up the new modem. You’ll need to have a computer connected directly to the modem for this initial setup. Wait for the lights to come up, it may reboot a couple of times but eventually you’ll have a real routable IP address on your computer and any website you try to bring up will redirect you to comcast’s setup pages. Enter your account number and telephone numbers. The account number needs to be formatted differently in this page than how it was printed in my bill. Leave out all the spaces and dashes and also I had to leave off the trailing 0 in order to get it to go through.

Then it thinks for a while, reboots a couple more times. And in just 15 minutes or so I had the internet back up and running and my phone service was working too. I know they say it can take hours, but it didn’t in my case. I did have to reboot my airport after I connected it to the modem. This isn’t surprising, but my browser was redirecting me to the setup pages again which was alarming. So I just rebooted the airport and everything has been just great since then.

So if you can avoid having to call and talk to their support you might be able to get your upgraded modem working without that much pain or wasted time at all. I was pleasantly surprised that their automatic upgrade stuff actually worked and worked for me. I was not expecting it to go easily.
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