SMC Business Gateways Cannot Upload More than 12 Mbps on a 20/100Mbps Package

Ok so as a business customer with 5 different locations in the Central Illinois area, I am really not happy at this point with Comcast and frankly I'm tired of getting screwed over constantly. Several months ago, I upgraded to the 20/100Mbps package and added phone service to all of them and it has been downhill ever since. I have had major issues running VoIP over their internet in the past and it almost always comes down to crappy business class modems. Not to mention this thread for another day, the fact that as a Business Customer with Static IPs, you are held hostage by being forced to "rent" their business gateways and the cost is always increasing randomly.

In the past, I had the wonderful pleasure of discovering and fighting with their tech support for weeks on end that their Cisco based cable modems, with any decent amount of traffic running on the line, consistently drop out on VoIP and cause latency issues. The only way to fix those issues was to demand that they use the SMC gateways instead and I had them all replaced. Everything worked fine on the 10/50Mbps package on SMC modems and life was good.

Since then, I have upgraded to the 20/100Mbps package and several of my business gateways had been switched out for the Netgear ones. As of right now, I am not having speed problems or VoIP issues whatsoever at 3 of my 5 sites, although I have read lots of complaints about other people having issues with the Netgear modems, perhaps that was with older firmware?

At two of my sites, both still using the SMC gateway, with a laptop plugged directly into them and nothing else connected, neither of them will do more than 12Mbps upload to the speedtest.comcast.net website. One of the sites isn't a major issue at this time because it is only used as a backup connection for my fiber internet at my main site, but the issue still needs addressed.

At the other site, when the service was switched over to the 20/100Mbps package, I addressed this issue with tech support a bunch of times and wasn't getting the speeds I was supposed to and so they switched me out for the latest and greatest Cisco modems of theirs. Once again, with any decent amount of traffic on the line, the Cisco gateways drop packets, cause latency, and ruined our VoIP again. They swapped out multiple Cisco modems and they all had this problem. By the way, during one of my many, many calls later on, I also had one of your tech support people straight up admit that it is a known issue that the Cisco gateways have issues with VoIP. So why the f*ck would you give us that modem in the first place then???

After dozens of tech support calls and onsite technicians/service calls, I can't even get the moronic/worthless local techs to return my calls anymore and there is no such thing as reaching a manager at Comcast or escalating a problem to getting it resolved. It simply does not exist. The amount of times that I've been hung up on, transferred to a dozen people, lied to, been called a liar, told I will get called back by a manager, is astronomical. By the way, don't ever mention the word traceroute to a Comcast tech because they don't know what it means or how to use it or why it is a better test to try pinging your next hop beyond your business gateway rather than pinging www.google.com, they will just be dumbfounded.

I've even had several occasions where the techs that answer the incoming support calls agreed with me and saw packet loss issues and that they see signal to noise ratio issues and then with the local techs on the other line, can't find anything wrong and don't understand where they are seeing that. At one point I had to conference call their two departments together and got to listen to them disagree and be told two different stories by each side. Nothing like quarrels between your own departments, that makes you look really competent.

Part of the problem is that they claim that this particular site's local office doesn't carry any other model of modem other than the SMC and the worthless PoS Cisco with built-in WiFi. So with our business call center in jeopardy, I had to have them put me back on the SMC so that our VoIP would work again, only to go back to not getting the speeds we are paying for. It has even gotten to the point where I thought about taking a modem from one of my working branches to hook it up there to try because that is how desperate I am to get this fixed (but that would only be screwing me over at that other branch). At that time, yet again, I had to prove it to their local techs that there was a problem, and hey oh look, there's like a 30-45 millisecond difference in the ping times from simply swapping out the Cisco to the SMC. The local tech was shocked when I showed him that after all the times he had called me a liar.

So, at this point, I've had my fill and I am just giving Comcast the big f*ck you and moving all of our services elsewhere, but in the meantime, I demand these issues to be resolved in the interim until that happens. Somebody in upper management please contact me immediately to get both of my modems switched over to the Netgear ones. I don't care what it takes, just make it happen.