[I would have posted this on Mediacom's forums but I don't have an account and the activation email never came through.]
After the "help" I got from Mediacom support today -- both a field tech and over the phone -- Mediacom is lucky that they have a monopoly in my area. (I already checked ImOn.) The full story follows, but the TL/DR version is that neither the field tech nor phone support understand the difference between a switch and a router, how enabling/disabling features on their modems works, or that when they make a change and something stops working it's probably because of what they did and not the fault of the customer or their equipment.
Long version...
I'd been having problems with slow internet speeds for a while. (I'm on the 100 Mbps tier but my speeds have consistently been around ~18 Mbps.) After running tests for a couple of weeks at all sorts of different times of day I finally called Mediacom and they sent a tech out. Before he started checking anything, he told me that he turned my WiFi off (remotely) because I wasn't being billed for it. I told him that I was certain that it was already turned off. He insisted it wasn't. I let it go because it didn't seem to matter. I have my WiFi router. I also have a gigabit switch that ties together my home network, and I told the tech about it.
The first thing the tech tried to do was get on my WiFi to check my speeds, but he couldn't get connected and assumed that the router needed to be reset because he'd just reset the modem. He plugged his laptop directly to the modem instead. It showed full speeds (~100 Mbps). We reconnected the modem to my primary PC. 18 Mbps. We checked a secondary PC. 110 Mbps! Primary PC again: no connection at all! I'd also noticed that the web interface for the cable modem wouldn't come up. I mentioned it to the tech several times, but he ignored it. Eventually, we eliminated my switch and wiring as culprits, and though maybe I had a bad NIC in my (new) primary PC. The tech gave up saying that his job ended at seeing the proper speeds at the back side of the modem and left.
The good news: I could see the speeds I pay for from my modem.
The bad news: I'd gone from having a fully working home network with usable if somewhat slow internet speeds to having a secondary PC with with great speeds, a primary PC with no connection, a WiFi router that I couldn't connect to, and a NAS that wasn't reachable. Overall it was a really shitty trade-off.
I called phone support and attempted to describe what had happened. She kept interrupting to say that she could see the modem, everything looked fine, and to contact my router manufacturer. I kept telling her to let me finish telling her about the situation, that I knew my router was fine because it -- and my other PC which isn't connected through the router -- had worked before the field tech came out, and that the tech must have done something to screw up my network. Eventually she put me on hold and contacted the tech who of course told her (as she repeated to me), that the only thing he'd done is turn off WiFi. I asked why I couldn't even connect to the modem's web interface and was told that I had to pay $3.95 a month for WiFi to get that. Huh? $3.95/mo to be able to check power levels and SNRs? We went round and round about this: me trying to explain, me asking to get transferred to tier 2, her trying to tell me it was a problem with my router, me yelling at her to shut up and listen to what I was trying to tell her... (yeah, I got frustrated and lost my cool.) I gave up, hung up, and called back hoping to get someone more clueful. Hearing her voice answer again (what are the odds?) I hung up and didn't call back.
Eventually I was able to figure everything out on my own. The reason I couldn't get my primary PC to connect wasn't because there was anything wrong with the NIC. It was because when the tech turned off "WiFi" he really disabled the built-in router on the cable modem completely. I was using that feature as a DHCP server. (Remember, I have a switch connected after my cable modem, not a router.) I wired my primary PC directly to the modem, rebooted the modem, and had my primary PC back online. (But still nothing else.) The slow speeds I was seeing turned out to be because the driver installation for the embedded NIC on my new motherboard also installed some sort of network traffic management service. After killing it I saw full speeds on my primary PC. My bad. I really regret calling Mediacom support.
I fixed the rest of my network by going out and buying my own cable modem with a router and getting it provisioned. (The woman who helped me with that did a good job although she kept trying to sell me TV service afterward.)
Summary: The poor speeds I was seeing were really a problem on my PC. Apparently I had been getting router functionality for free instead of having to pay extra for it. (Who knew? Mediacom advertises it as "WiFi" which I didn't want or need.) I'm not upset that the tech turned off a service I wasn't being billed for and only slightly annoyed that Mediacom charges extra to enable the router on its cable modems. What I am upset about is that the tech didn't understand the ramifications of what he'd changed. I told him I had a switch. He saw that WiFi wouldn't connect. He saw that one of my PCs wouldn't connect. He knew to reboot the modem every time he changed what was plugged into it. He should have realized that he'd disabled the modem's ability to act as a wired router. (I should have picked up on the clues earlier, but I'm reasonably tech savvy. The average customer wouldn't have had a clue. He should have known what was happening and told me.) I'm also very unhappy with Mediacom's phone support. The woman I talked to refused to listen to what I had to tell her, particularly when I tried to explain that because everything had worked before the tech came out it must have been something he changed. Just "everything's fine" and "contact your router manufacturer."
Everything is finally working properly, but it cost me a new cable modem, the better part of a day, and an enormous amount of frustration.
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