| This resonated with me because a few months back I went back and forth with Comcast regarding my shitty Internet speeds. Eventually I gave up, exhausted and unwilling to invest more time into a path I knew would not fix my issue (spoiler: Comcast has over sold our local network) Here's the summary: 1. Notice my Internet speed was especially shitty on Sunday. 2. Run speed test (laughably slow), post to Twitter, tag Comcast. 3. Comcast replies, blaming my wifi and device. 4. Post more speed tests from other devices, within inches of my router. Post speed tests during off hours showing how the speed recovers. 5. Comcast still blames my wifi. How this explains why I get full speeds at 5AM I have no idea. 6. Run speed test (graphed and logged) from a wired PC, send to Comcast. 7. Comcast techs immediately "notice some issues" with my home connection. Why they didn't see this on step 2? No idea. 8. Technician comes, replaces some connections but nothing obvious, we geek out, he's an awesome guy and basically explains that my town got shafted with too few "nodes". He explains in his town, the user to node ratio is much better. His last advice is for me to get a "combo" router/modem from Comcast, instead of my leased modem and third-party (new) router. His explains this might help a tiny bit but has no other advice for me (other than move to his town - hilarious) This final setp would involve me taking my modem (Internet down the whole time) to my local Comcast office (during work hours), and hopefully getting a combo router/modem with no issues. I would then need to setup new combo device, and then graph and log my connection speed on Sunday and engage support again. At this point, there would be nothing they could do for me because I will have already exhausted all options. A new combo router/modem will not improve my speeds of 2 Kbps during peak hours so this is where I gave up! |
I was doing a course, and had to access a Jupyter Notebook that was residing in a different server. When clicking the URL, the page will appear with a loading circle, and would die out after around 5 minutes (I measured it).
I was using my laptop (W7 + Chrome) but have a server also running Debian, with Forefox as browser. Tested in both places before accesing the chat.
I put as much into in the chat before hand.
A person shows up, tells me to "clean cookies and cache".
Tell her about the different test (This was never acknowledged, BTW).
Tells me "must be your connection".
"OK, let me test with my G4 phone"
"That kind of connections can be what is giving you problems, try ADSL"
OK, this is getting funny now.
Tells me to test a different url that she sends me over the chat.
"OK, not working here, let me test in firefox"
"We advise to only use Chrome, our apps might not work in other browsers" (THEIR page stated otherwise, and it was not a browser problem)
Told her nothing works: Tested Chrome on W7 over G4, Firefox in Debian over ADSL, nothing.
"Coursera cannot take responsibility about the content, we can only support the apps" ???
So, I was having a chat with a support tech that couldn't tell one thing form the other, as it was obviously the server (Had tried other notebooks from the same course)
Finally, asked to raise this to 2nd level. Told me not to ask opther people to download the notebook for me, as in that case if I submitted my work this would be taken as if it worked.
A couple of hours later, I notice a "forceRefresh" parameter in the url, changed it's value, app starts working.
As a side note, based in my experience support people are not prepared to deal with people with a certain technical level on the customer end.