Mysteries of Comcast

So last night around 2am I sat down at my computer and…no internet. Called Comcast and accepted the automated system’s offer to reset my modem. When that didn’t work, I asked for a human being. The technician told me there was an outage in the area, but they couldn’t give me anymore information, and they couldn’t take a trouble ticket because their system was down for maintenance.

Woke up this morning, and it was still down, so I called Comcast and went through the automated diagnostic procedure, which gave up and transferred me to a human tech. He poked around from his end and said everything seemed to be up. He could access my modem, but he said my router hadn’t requested an IP address from the modem.

Something didn’t sound right about that…oh yeah, I have a static IP address. My router doesn’t have to ask for an IP address because it already knows one. Once before, some piece of Comcast equipment had forgotten my address and stopped routing my internet traffic. It looked like it was happening again.

I mentioned this to the tech, and he checked my order and proceeded to set up the static IP service again. For some reason, however, he issued me a new IP address instead of giving me the one I had before. He doesn’t know what happened. I don’t know what happened. It’s just one of those mysteries, I guess.

Anyway, I’m back up. For now.