[NCLUG] my cable modem is still not working :-(

[Daniel Herrington]

Well, I have three solid green lights on my RCA DCM-215 cable modem,
which usually means it's connected and working.  But I can't even ping
the DNS servers:

216.148.227.68
204.127.202.4
12.242.19.50
12.242.19.34

Does anyone else have this same model of cable modem?  Last week there
was some talk about the DCM-235 having problems, and it was related to
MAC address starting with 001095.  Well, mine is a DCM-215, but it has
the same MAC address prefix.

I'm getting really frustrated.  I spent over six hours on hold this
weekend:

I called yesterday at 2:30pm and held for an hour, decided no one was
ever going to pick up, so I hung up.  I called back, and the second
time I waited just over an hour.  (While I was on hold, another call
beeped in, and it was the automated call telling me my service was
up.)  Anyway, "Ernie" finally picked up.  He had me try my (wife's)
Win98 pc directly connected to the cable modem.  I did the "release
all," "renew all" in winipcfg.  It didn't help.  He said his tool
wasn't working to allow him to write me a trouble ticket, but that he
would transfer me to senior tech support anyway.  He transferred me,
and I got an automated message saying, "We're sorry, we cannot
transfer your call at this time... click."

I called back and selected "sales," and surprise, surprise... they
answered immediately!  I asked the person to transfer me directly to
tech support, but when she did, it was just back out to the main menu.

I called again and spoke with a second person in sales, and told him I
was upset that they could answer their sales phone lines immediately
but that it took an hour or more for them to answer their tech support
line.  He made some excuse about not being able to train people in
three days to do tech support, and I told him to tell his supervisor
that I was upset about this inconsistency in service.

I called back at 9:30pm last night, waited for two hours and 15
minutes (until 11:45pm), and finally gave up for the night.

This morning, I still don't have anything good to report.  No change
in symptoms after power cycling the cable modem and the Windows PC
directly connected to it.

I'm on hold right now (15 min).  Will it ever end?

Daniel

P.S.  Are there reports of _anyone_ being more pleased with the new
"optimized" 1.5MB/s downstream bandwidth?  The only reports I've heard
are negative.  (Of course)

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