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Trouble with Comcast/Xfinity Landline Phone Connection

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moldyoldie
Posts: 1902
Joined: Sat Dec 04, 2004 1:04 am
Location: On that thar' interweb jobber

Trouble with Comcast/Xfinity Landline Phone Connection

Unread post by moldyoldie »

I just installed the new Xfinity Gateway modem. Internet works fine, but the landline phone has no line. I called Comcast and couldn't talk to a person if my life depended on it! All I could get done were three restarts with no luck. I did an internet chat with a Comcast agent and they ultimately said a "dedicated team" would call me within 24 hours to activate my ports. Is there something I should have done beforehand, or should be doing? There's nothing wrong with the power outlets for the phones. The modem is upstairs and the main phone is downstairs, but there was never any problem with the old modem.
"The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure."
- Sydney J. Harris
User avatar
moldyoldie
Posts: 1902
Joined: Sat Dec 04, 2004 1:04 am
Location: On that thar' interweb jobber

Re: Trouble with Comcast/Xfinity Landline Phone Connection

Unread post by moldyoldie »

MWmetalhead wrote: Fri Dec 11, 2020 8:01 pm If you have a smartphone, you can try activating or reactivating your equipment using the Xfinity app.

There is also www.xfinity.com/activate.

My guess is there some process Comcast needs to implement to "port" your information (including phone number) to your new device.

I use my own telephony modem (exact model can be found in the following post:
https://www.mibuzzboard.com/phpBB3/view ... 22#p646022), and fortunately, I did not have any issue activating it myself.

If you call 1-855-652-3446, see if you can say "speak to agent" during the voice prompts. You might also want to try 1-800-COMCAST.

I've had pretty good luck recently getting through to agents promptly. If you call during normal business hours, there's a good chance you'll get someone who speaks English as a first language who is based in the U.S. :)
Thank you for the response, Mr. Metalhead. I've FINALLY gotten the issue resolved after three days and numerous hours on my little emergency cellphone (Tracphone) which was always chirping at me for low battery (LOL), multiple restarts, unfulfilled call-backs, and also my becoming very terse face-to-face with the poor lady at the local Xfinity store who couldn't help one whit. She gave me a replacement modem thinking the one I had may be defective. Apparently getting a technician out to the house is well-nigh impossible in this Covid environment. I don't have a smartphone and apparently it's becoming more and more necessary in this ultra-tech society. After an online chat with a Comcast person who wrote in very broken English, they "paused" my entire internet service thinking some sort of fraud was occurring! >: It can only be "unpaused" with a downloaded app -- and I don't have a smartphone!

What it came down to was I was finally able to talk with a qualified technician who was able to "unpause" my internet and performed a "provisionary restart" thus enabling her to pinpoint the phone issue precisely. None of the eight to ten people I talked or online-chatted with knew enough about this. Apparently my home phone needed to be re-registered with the new modem since it was already registered with the old modem. Everything is working hunky-dory now, though I had to relocate my base phone from the downstairs kitchen wall to an upstairs bedroom to be directly connected to the modem.

Shouldn't a direct connection from the modem to an upstairs phone jack power the base phone and its wireless extension phones throughout the house, even if the base phone was connected to a downstairs phone jack? That's how it worked with the old modem.
"The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure."
- Sydney J. Harris
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