Comcast owns part of my soul, having been a customer for the last 15 years. I wouldn't have stayed without pretty good overall service, i.e., reliability, technicians, value, etc. However, last week, all of our cable services started going down at the same time of day (sunset) for 4 days in row for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. Curious. What changes have we made recently? Well, I got the infamous X1 triple play package installed about a month or two prior to these daily outages, and everything had been fine with that except for an occasional busy dial tone when I picked up the phone. I attributed the phone problem to having switched the phone from a dedicated phone modem to the SMC D3NGV router that I've had for a year. Things came to a head Saturday night when the cable was out the babysitter was freaking out. A call to Comcast unsurprisingly told me that I had no service but that there was no service outage in our area. After scheduling a tech for a couple days later, I decided to cancel the tech visit since they are now charging for service visits if the tech has to enter your house or something. Besides, if the problem wasn’t occurring when he got here, what was he going to do? So after perusing the Comcast forums and seeing anything from nicked cables to cold weather being the problem, I decided to remove the outside splitter from the equation, strengthening the cable signal strength and apparently solving the problem. So either the splitter was faulty, or became faulty when temperatures dropped (which doesn’t make any sense since service came back). I’ll post the before and after router power levels later at a later date.
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