Today is the day! I am "installing Internet" in a friend's new city apartment. The goal: great Internet service for a group of young professionals, while keeping the cost as low as possible and the reliability very high. Here is the story of what I did to accomplish that goal.
The overview of the who, what, and where:
- Four professionals, mostly working from home.
- Very densely populated urban environment.
- Comcast Xfinity is the area's wired, high-speed Internet monopoly.
- High reliability and reasonable performance for video chat is critical.
Internet Service Ordering: Don't Over-Do It.
Let's say you want to reduce your daily commute time. Right now you drive a stock Honda Civic that costs $80 a month. How much commuting time will you save by investing $200 a month on turbocharger?
Zero hours and zero minutes.
"Gigabit" download speeds are an extraordinary waste of money. Sure, we'll have four people being busy all day, but busy does not mean there will be any benefit to having a theoretical maximum rate of a gigabit service. The reality is that Xfinity's poor upload performance, their 1200 GB/month
download cap, and server-side throttling means that the Gigabit promise will provide no benefit to most users.
And so we ordered Xfinity's standard 100 Mbit/second Internet service through the Xfinity web site.
We refused all Xfinity package deals and optional services, as they all have high hidden fees attached. In the best case the special deals are cost-neutral with the added risk of future unexpected fees. So we ordered plain Internet, and nothing more.
We also rejected the "Flex box at no extra cost". We rejected it because extra costs do come into play when your kid or friend mistakenly starts watching shows through that box, which could lead to extraordinarily expensive charges. Just say "no" to drugs... and to Flex.
After a few days, Comcast sent us their welcome kit that is meant to help us connect our modem. The old welcome kits used to be a fancy box with a coax cable, a high quality coax splitter and fancy documentation, but now it is only a coax cable and a card that says "use our app", all within a dirty bubble envelope. Customers actually have to pay for this? Yes. Is it useful? For most people, no. But the arrival of our welcome kit let us know that we're really in their system.
Networking Equipment
We bought equipment, as Xfinity charges an outrageous $15+/month to rent their equipment. Plus I had some spare equipment laying around. This is what we ended up with:
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| Modem and Airport Extreme AC |
Modem
We bought an Arris SB6190 Cable Modem. Although the retailer lies and claims that this modem is only for a "maximum of 600 mbps service", in reality the SB6190 modem supports DOCSIS speeds up to 1.4 Gbps and has a 1 Gbit Ethernet interface. Why do retailers lie to their customers? To sell more expensive product, of course.
1.4 Gbps significantly exceeds the 1 Gbps networking capabilities of standard commercial and industrial Ethernet networks, so a modem that is "faster" than our SB6190 would be a waste of money.
WiFi Router
Instead of spending money on a new WiFi router, I decided to use an Apple Airport Extreme AC (v6) that I had in my storage cabinet. This Airport router is very capable, and should be perfect for a 1000 square foot apartment.
Although the Airport Extreme is many years old, they are rock-solid. I'm fairly certain we can get another 5 years out of the AXAC. If I were going to buy something new today, I would likely buy the MikroTik hAP AC2.
Other Bits and Pieces
I also brought along a coax right angle adapter, and a few Ethernet and coax cables of varying length.
Installation Details - hardware install
We get into the new apartment to set up everything. The first challenge is locating the coax cable TV outlet. We poked around and we found just one, along the outside wall. A location on the side wall is not ideal, as we want our WiFi equipment to be closer to the center of the building, but for now we know we can at least get service going and try it out.
The lone Coax wall plate has two connectors on it. Which one is connected? I plug the modem into the bottom jack first. I give it 10 minutes, but nothing interesting happens. Humph. Then I try the top jack and yay, the modem's lights come to life.
Since I am poorly prepared, the only Ethernet device I have is the WiFi router, and so that is the next thing I plug in. Wisely, I pre-configured the WiFi router at home, so it should be "plug-and-play". I plug the router into the modem, and the router's light goes from Amber to Green. Yay! That's a good sign too - it got an IP address.
Now that all the hardware is hooked up with lights a-blazing. it is time to "Activate the modem on Xfinity" and we're in business!
Activation: Comcast Screws Up Again!
To activate the service I go to http://xfinity.com/activate and type in the account credentials. The credentials work, but the app says I need to contact support. What? Painful, but we make the phone call to 800-Xfinity. The robot says that we don't have service. What? We requested service over the Internet two weeks ago, and even received our welcome kit.
So we tell the robot we want to set up service, and the robot puts us in a call queue for about 20 minutes. An operator answers. After passing on basic account information, the operator says that Xfinity mistakenly disconnected our new account's services when the prior residents moved out. Weird, not sure how Comcast is securing their systems but this smells like a major security problem. But whatever, XFinity can reconnect our account and we can move forward immediately! Yes!
The only issue: the same service now costs $30 more per month than the service we ordered. To a multi-billion dollar monopoly, $30 is less than 0.000001% of revenue, but to me it is $360 a year (PLUS perhaps another $30 in "special fees"). This new extra cost is a non-starter for me.
Sadly, after discussion, the operator says that people who can fix this Xfinity error are not available until tomorrow, because Xfinity is too lazy to provide full 24 hour support. ANOTHER XFINITY BOTCHUP! Xfinity retains its title of worst customer service! (And you know what? It isn't the Comcast employees, it is the failed executive team that perpetually give Comcast its bad reputation. Monopolies!)
Getting XFinity to Correct their Mistake
I had to go home, so I left all the equipment set up and ready to go. Now it's up to my friend to call Xfinity and have them correct their error.
The next day, my friend calls up Xfinity to see if they are capable of fixing their error in an efficient way. Some choice words from my friend during the phone call: "how do I talk to a person?", and then later, "this guy is a real a-hole".
But she perseveres on the phone the Xfinity account is corrected. From there she gets transferred to someone who can help "provision" the modem!
Provisioning the modem went poorly, but I'll skip out on the details. The operator told my friend to "unplug everything", which was not very helpful or specific or necessary, so in the end I ended up helping her piece it all back together with the benefit of FaceTime.
In short, after about 90 minutes talking to three Xfinity people, the Xfinity errors are corrected and we have working Internet service!
Service in action!
At this point we had it all working: WiFi with Internet!
We did a speed test and got 120 Mbit download and 5 Mbit upload, which is correct considering our 100 Mbit plan and Xfinity's inherently poor upload technology.
Conclusion
The 100 Mbit service is working perfectly for our apartment of four working-at-home professionals. The 5 Mbit upload, a vestige of Xfinity's ancient technology, is sad... but we have no alternatives.
The Arris modem and wifi router work great. The equipment purchase price was under $90 total, which is far less than the Xfinity rental fee of at least $180 / year plus a host of "special fees".
Setting up the service seemed fine until Xfinity's back office proactively cancelled the service we ordered from our account. Only after hours on the phone over two days, working through Xfinity's poor customer service processes, were we able to get them to correct it.
Update!
It has been about a year. Here is what happened:
- We quickly learned that we needed distinct SSIDs for both 2.4GHz and 5 GHz networks, as the 2.4 GHz band is hyper-saturated. Therefore I defined distinct SSIDs for the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, and everyone uses the 5 GHz band. 2.4GHz is only used for IoT and other low-bandwidth devices.
- The coax right angle adapter between the modem and wall plate broke, because people don't quite understand that coax cables are screwed in place. By yanking the cable, the right angle adapter broke, leading to confusion and an outage.
- Comcast finally improved their insanely poor 5 Mbit upload rate to a slightly better 10 Mbit rate. Even with that doubling of speed, Comcast continues to have one of the lowest broadband upload rates in the world.