UVerse Support Call Running Diary

Question

So after about 2 years of having no real issues other than an occasional reset of my gateway, an installer rewired my entire house a couple months ago.  He removed all the coaxial wiring and switched everything over to ethernet (cool with me).  He also moved the gateway upstairs (it was in the basement) and replaced all my TV boxes with wireless boxes.  Again, I'm cool with it all. The service started randomly resetting approximately 4 times per day.  I work out of my home over a VPN so losing my service gets pretty aggravating.  I ended up having them back at my house 2 more times over the next couple weeks and every technician would tell me that there was nothing wrong with my connection and they couldn't explain why it was resetting.  Interesting how the resets stopped happening after the last visit, but I digress. Fast forward to Thursday (7/23/15) and I notice my wi-fi is really slow.  Wired connections appear to work but wi-fi is almost nonexistent.  I talked with online support on Thursday night and explained to him that I only seem to be able to connect if I used a wired connection and his suggestion was to navigate to their speed test site.  Nevermind that I e-mailed him the tracert and ping statistics that showed > 3000ms over wifi and around 40ms on wired.  I played along and navigated to his speedtest, both on a wired and wifi connection. I tested at 12.5 mbps down on the wired connection, which didn't thrill me because I pay for 18 mbps, and on the wifi connection, the page load finally timed out after about 10 minutes.  At that point he seemed to understand that the issue was only over wifi and said we needed to make a service appointment.  I told him I'd be gone last weekend so it had to be made for Monday (today).  No problem.  We made an appointment for between 8:30 AM and 12:30 PM.  Even though the appointment is during today's first appointment window, I fully expected them to show up at the end of the time block, based on past experience. I have now received two automated phone calls from AT&T:10:08 AM - "This is to notify you that our technician should arrive at or around 12:00 noon.  If you've already been contacted by a technician, please disregard." 12:08 PM - "This is to notify you that our technician will not be able to arrive by 12:00 (notice that the call came in after noon).  We expect a technician to arrive at or around 2:00 PM.  If you've already been contacted by a technician, please disregard."  Now, let me just say this.  I've noticed AT&T making an effort to improve their customer service.  They are light years beyond Time Warner in that sense, which is one of the reasons I stick with UVerse even with all the recent service issues.  However, continuing to send automated messages to your customers and habitually showing up late for appointments makes the company look like they are out of touch and don't care about their customers.  What if I worked out of an office instead of at home and had told them I would be in after lunch?  I would now have to change my entire day because a technician can't make it to my house within a 4 hour timeframe. Why am I posting this here?  Who knows?  Maybe this actually feels like somebody might see it as opposed to sitting on hold for hours on end waiting for somebody to walk me through a script that doesn't help me anyway. I wish Google Fiber would come to Milwaukee.

Answer 1

Good to know.  Thank you for that.  I'll look into it.  I wouldn't think that would cause the issues on wifi only, though, would it? Here is the tracert and ping info from wifi on Thursday:C:\Users\Craig>tracert www.google.com Tracing route to www.google.com [2607:f8b0:400d:c09::68]over a maximum of 30 hops:   1   280 ms     *       97 ms  dsldevice6.attlocal.net [2602:306:3476:1160::1]  2   893 ms     *        *     2602:300:c533:1510::17  3     *        *        *     Request timed out.  4  1218 ms   574 ms  1334 ms  2001:1890:c00:bf00::1123:dab5  5  2519 ms     *        *     2001:4860::1:0:aa7a  6   209 ms   357 ms   172 ms  2001:4860::8:0:833f  7   135 ms   177 ms   198 ms  2001:4860::8:0:8f9e  8  2574 ms     *        *     2001:4860::8:0:93da  9     *     3813 ms  2547 ms  2001:4860::2:0:6dcf10     *        *        *     Request timed out.11  3711 ms     *     2982 ms  qk-in-x68.1e100.net [2607:f8b0:400d:c09::68] Trace complete. C:\Users\Craig>ping 192.168.1.254 Pinging 192.168.1.254 with 32 bytes of data:Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time=630ms TTL=64Request timed out.Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time=2809ms TTL=64Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time=844ms TTL=64 Ping statistics for 192.168.1.254:    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 3, Lost = 1 (25% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:    Minimum = 630ms, Maximum = 2809ms, Average = 1427ms  And from a wired connection:  Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.
C:\Users\Craig>ping 192.168.1.254
Pinging 192.168.1.254 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Ping statistics for 192.168.1.254:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 0ms
C:\Users\Craig>tracert www.google.com
Tracing route to www.google.com [2607:f8b0:400d:c07::69]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  dsldevice6.attlocal.net [2602:306:3476:1160::1]
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3   171 ms   261 ms   354 ms  2001:1890:ff:ffff:12:122:83:40
  4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  5    28 ms    30 ms    29 ms  2001:4860::1:0:aa7a
  6    27 ms    31 ms    29 ms  2001:4860::8:0:8458
  7    69 ms    62 ms    66 ms  2001:4860::8:0:8f9f
  8    63 ms    79 ms    69 ms  2001:4860::8:0:93db
  9    69 ms    63 ms    62 ms  2001:4860::2:0:80a1
 10     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 11    63 ms    62 ms    61 ms  qb-in-x69.1e100.net [2607:f8b0:400d:c07::69]
Trace complete.
 I changed the default network SSID and password a couple months ago but haven't touched anything on the gateway since.  This wifi issue just started happening Thursday morning.  FYI, I just did a wired speed test and I'm getting 21 mbps down so that's looking good again.