!@#$@ Comcast

[MaryAnn]

I do not have internet options that are workable except Comcast. For a year I had a promo that was slow speed for my wired connection. I don't have wifi and don't want it. That promo ran out, and they forced me into their fancy Xfinity super duper wifi anywhere you want it package, since it was cheaper than the regular package for wired. Since then, every time the computer goes to sleep, the modem does not "wake up" until ten seconds have passed, telling me over and over there is no internet connection. After ten seconds, finally the modem wakes up and it acts normal. It did not do this until exactly when the connection changed from "you have wired internet" to "now you have access to wifi all over creation." All I get on the phone from Comcast is that it is a problem on my end, which I do not think is true.
Any of you out there, suggestions? I'm short on patience having to wait ten seconds every time I want to go online if the computer has been asleep, just because I switched packages from wired to assuming I have wifi. Like I said, I don't have wifi and don't want it.

[Donn]

Sounds like a timeout, right? I know nothing about Comcast, thank heavens, but in principle, a misconfiguration problem where X is looking for A that isn't there, eventually gives up and goes on to B. X could be your computer.

[MaryAnn]

What I can't figure out is why it was instantaneous when the package did not include wifi, and ten seconds now that it does include wifi. Yes I have timed it. They keep trying to tell me it is a problem with my cable. BS.

[thevillagetuba]

It sounds like you are just dealing with the connection registry between your computer and your modem/router. If the computer does not have a dedicated local IP address for the router, then it will have to re-register and configure itself with one and that takes some time as it has to be verified that the desired address is still available. (When I had Comcast the modem was significantly slower for this than I liked and so I set up a gateway/secondary modem that was much quicker). If you configure your computer/modem to have a dedicated IP for your computer, then it should speed up this process considerably as the computer would just need to connect and then you're good to go (no need for the longer process of asking the modem for which IPs are free before it begins the registration process).

Hopefully all of that makes sense logically (as my experience has been that the computer never actually operates logically).

[Donn]

It sounds like you are just dealing with the connection registry between your computer and your modem/router. If the computer does not have a dedicated local IP address for the router, then it will have to re-register and configure itself with one and that takes some time as it has to be verified that the desired address is still available.

DHCP? Should be very fast - if that's really all that happens, but I gather some DHCP configurations also "ping" and/or do DNS queries (that would time out.) Network settings on Mac OS X make DHCP optional ("Configure IPv4 <Manually>"), so I guess that would be an easy one to check out.

[MaryAnn]

Update: after my non-helpful conversation with them in which they insisted it must be a problem with the cord between my modem and my computer (and my telling them that they were basically full of it) suddenly it has worked just fine again for the last week or so. Maybe they finally stopped waiting for a wifi response from my cable-only modem. Maybe the person I talked to escalated the complaint. Who knows. Maybe tomorrow it will go back to ten seconds again.