The Comcast story continues...

It took three phone calls to Comcast for me to actually get the upgraded cable modem connection they promised. I was actually thrilled on my most recent call to get somebody in technical support who:

1. Understood the problem.
2. Could fix the problem.
3. Followed-up when she said she would to ensure the problem was actually fixed.

Hats off to Comcast's Heather at extension v58 for such an outstanding job.

Now the ugly details of the problem for those of you who are curious:

1. My D-Link DCM-202 cable modem is now stuck on the Comcast firmware. Apparently Comcast struck a deal with D-Link to make a firmware version that (among other things) disables the telnet server on the modem. That means that once you flash the firmware to the Comcast version, there's no going back since you can no longer get to the interface to flash it again. I found the following post on DSL Reports too late, but hopefully it will help somebody else avoid the same fate.
2. I'm told that the profile on my cable modem hadn't been updated from the Comcast servers, which is why I couldn't see the higher speeds. Heather referred to it having the "silver file." She pushed an updated profile, which took about 15 minutes.
3. My old SMC7004ABR "Barricade" router apparently doesn't like uplink speeds on the WAN port greater than 4.2 Mbps. My download connection speed consistently topped out at that pathetic level. It makes no sense unless the upload port is only 10 Mbps. The switched ports on the router are 10/100 Mbps, so it would follow that the WAN port would be the same. But when the router was manufactured in 2001, it's possible that nobody envisioned that a broadband connection from a cable modem or DSL modem could actually exceed 10 Mbps (including overhead). The Barricade has been replaced with a Linksys BEFSR81, which supports QoS. The QoS should make Vonage VoIP calls slightly more reliable, but we really have not seen many problems with bandwidth and VoIP within the past few months.
4. I now get over 8Mbps download speed, which isn't quite the 16 Mbps they mentioned in the ad, but it's certainly more than the 3-4 Mbps I was seeing before.