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Comcast Remains America's Most-Hated Company, Survey Finds (dslreports.com)
What may come as no surprise to cable TV or internet subscribers, Comcast remains among the least-liked companies in American history, according to a new survey from 24/7 Wall Street. From DSL Reports: [The survey] combines data from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, JD Power and Associates and a Zogby Analytics poll, and lists Comcast as the "most hated company in America." Comcast had made some small strides in the ACSI rankings last year, but even with minor improvements still consistently battles Charter for last place in most customer satisfaction and service studies. "The company')s internet services received the fourth worst score out of some 350 companies. In J.D. Power's rating of major wireline services, only Time Warner Cable -- recently subsumed by Charter -- received a worse score in overall satisfaction," notes the report, which adds that Comcast received the worst scores in consumer costs, billing, and reliability. "In 24/7 Wall St.'s annual customer satisfaction poll conducted in partnership with Zogby, nearly 55% of of respondents reported a negative experience with the company, the second worst of any corporation." Comcast finds itself ahead of numerous banks and airlines, but it isn't alone in the rankings among telecom providers. Dish Network is ranked eighth, the report noting that 47% of those polled reported a negative service experience with the company. Also on the list at tenth is Sprint, which had the worst customer service rating out of the more than 100 companies included in the survey. "More than half of Sprint customers polled reported a negative customer service experience with the company," the study found.
City has laid fiber out to the curb and has made it available to residents. I never watch broadcast TV (been 4 years now) so I only had Comcast for high speed; 110 download/26 upload as of the last Speedtest. Honestly though, I've almost never had a problem with Comcast with an outage happening very very seldom in Virginia and Colorado and I've been on Comcast since the mid 90's. The main reason I'm switching is the price for 1G/1G fiber to the house is $50 a month vs the $130 a month for Comcast 'Blast'.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Fortunately for health insurance providers, if you're dead, you can't be surveyed.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I've cracked the puzzle! Never call them! They will literally lie, cheat, and steal! Go to the store instead. It's like birds and angels sing when you walk in. They are smart and helpful and honest. They took all the crap off my account that the call center refused to do! I've used the stores five times now and I really like them! Nicest people! I actually like very much my Comcast services. For 140/mth I get 350mbps speed, x1 DVR with the on demand services. If you have reliability problems, likely it's in your house. Took me years to figure out and 20 tech visits solved nothing! Take your modem outside and plug it in directly. Then you'll know if the service works Replace all your cabling with rg11 and all will be good. You're welcome.
Oh, and get a new freaking modem and wifi router if you want all the speed. Theirs are no good at all.
If they consistently get an awful rating, then imagine how many people they have to regularly piss off, especially if a lot of their customers don't really have much of a problem with them.
Personally, I think that people just tend to hate their own cable provider, and it's been a long time coming. Quality has been declining and prices have been increasing for a while but people feel like they don't have any options, so they take it out on whoever their provider happens to be. I'm one of the cord cutters, but I'm happy to pay for the content I'm consuming if the companies decide that they want to sell me what I'm willing to pay for.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
you don't have to deal with them
I have Charter as the cable/phone/ISP
My vote for most hated company goes to Microsoft
I don't blame the employees. I do blame the company.
Total ripoff and consumer gouging.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
have to stick up for AT&T. for 21 years, they have never "gone down". cable has been interrupted for days. when we had satellite, it would be unstable during most thunderstorms. we've had both dial-up and DSL with no connection problems. ever. tried cable internet on a "deal". failed in so many ways. yes, AT&T is slower. we choose slow service over no service. however, not looking forward to U-verse. neighbors who have tried it don't like it.
Everybody hates the cable company... Trust me.. It doesn't really matter who they are for the most part.
My favorite company I love to hate is Frontier who just purchased all the Verizon FIOS infrastructure and subscribers in my area (including me).
Verizon was bad, but these new folks take the cake. Frontier wasn't even able to muster enough folks to answer the phones and say they couldn't help you, much less actually know what they where talking about or get a service guy out to fix their recently acquired assets. IT took over a MONTH of trying before anybody could even understand that my internet connection was down and it was THEIR equipment at fault (I knew in about 10 min that they had something messed up on their end..)
So the world hates Comcast more? My guess is that Comcast isn't all that much worse than any of the other providers, they just have a larger install base and more subscribers which hate the cable company. That means that more folks hate them, but only because they have more customers to tick off.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
the trick is when you don't get what you want on the phone tell them to cancel your account and they will put you on with someone who can help you
love is just extroverted narcissism
totally depends, the office near my house is a couple of laid back bumpkins that can help you with anything, the one near my work makes the call centers look like saints
those are the most ignorant of their function, hateful "humans" I have ever had to deal with
A lot of people have very good reasons to hate AT&T what's yours?
I personally am annoyed by being asked to sign in to look around the store.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
What flavor of U-verse are you getting? AT&T sells a bunch of different things and still calls it U-verse.
In town here they sell the ADSL2+ flavor.
The 6Mbps dsl connection we had before hadn't given us any issue unless the junction boxes were underwater in which case the phone was out too.
When we switched over to uverse they put us on the 12Mbps rate that took several service calls and switching us to another copper pair to get working stable a few months ago it was bumped up to 14Mbps and it went to crap had to have a tech set it back to 12Mbps.
It's stable at 12Mbps but just barely.
It's still having a lot of line errors now but it's back to running normally.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Mostly their billing practices. They kept signing me up for services i didnt ask for & charging me for services i wasnt getting.
For awhile there it was a new thing every month. First some fancy voicemail package for the land line i didnt have, then a 2nd land line i didnt have, then they charged me for a modem upgrade i didnt want, twice, then they signed me up for their DVR whatever service. Every time you turn around theyve found some way to double your bill, and it takes hours and hours to get them to fix it.
I also liked how when you went into their store to pay your bill, none of the 6 employees standing around knew how to do that & would just point at the kiosk... which for some reason is child-sized, forcing you to get down on your knees to pay them.
No one has to go to CNN for news, a lot of people are stuck with Comcast for decent broadband.
After 8 years of not having cable, I broke down and got comcast TV. I had used them for internet and after all the additional services (nextflix, hulu, online dish, etc...) it turned out to be cheaper to just get cable TV then all these services.
I hadn't used them is years for TV and was surprised at how smoothly everything went to get it installed. They came within 2 days of me ordering it, the boxes and software are much better than they were 8 years ago and the customer service was good. I had called about an issue with on demand at 10 PM and they fixed it right then.
I think Comcast has made many improvements in both their customer service and product.
Adobe Systems is not an American company !
Oh right, free market capitalism and competition only applies when normal suckers like you and me try to start a business, not to oligopolies and cronies who seize public spectrum, restrict access to utility poles on public land, and pour hundreds of millions into lobbying and captured politicians to protect their monopoly. Because the first rule of success in a free market system is to make sure there is no free market.
we have the "fake" u-verse.
Does anyone here have any recent experience with Sonic? It used to get great reviews in Yelp. But recently there have been a lot of Yelp reviews by people who had a hard time getting the service set up. DSLReports has better reviews regarding getting the service set up.
Agreed that Comcast is sleazy, but let's keep things in perspective here.
Alright we're talking about the ADSL2+ flavor then it's the crappiest thing they still call u-verse.
The upload speed maxes out at 1Mbps but the other flavours have 1.5Mbps it's the same price either way tho.
When they were initially advertising it they were calling it a fiber optic connection (which is BS) most areas aren't getting that flavor but they were advertising it like it was.
I suppose that's good for them here since the city sells FTTH they can just lie to people and say hey we have FTTH too and sell people ADSL2+ instead it's not like anyone will figure it out.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I think that people just tend to hate their own cable provider, and it's been a long time coming. Quality has been declining and prices have been increasing for a while...
Here's a novel idea: walk away from that junk and forget about it forever. Get 30 hours per week of your life back.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Thanks,
We will being adding a new Most Hated Fee to bill.
I figured every spot would have been occupied by health insurance companies.
Or, just maybe:
Comcast Remains America's Most-Hated Company, Survey Finds
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
VRAD is 2 miles from my house
This is weird. At work, we have Comcast Business, and it's IPv6, but at home, I have Comcast Home, and it's IPv4. Go figure. But I agree that Comcast is horrible. I pay $40/month for what's supposed to be 50Mbps, and I actually get somewhere ~5Mbps
I probably shouldn't jinx it, but I think the hate is because they know most people won't try to haggle. If you go to their online chat portal and threaten to go to their competitor, I mean they're not "great," but it's something. They're giving me their $60 a month high speed internet for $10 a month no contract. It took at most 20 minutes while I was probably reading e-mail in another window. The sense of winning made it all the better.
If Comcast would make their specials available online instead of having you call to talk to a representatives and made their special deals permanent, that would go some way to improving my relationship with them.
My cable modem is IPv4, but I turned on IPv6 on my router and DHCP, and it is reporting a IPv6 address on the WAN, so it seems I have an IPv6 internet facing address from them. I just had to work for it and not just assume that the cable modem's IPv4 address meant that Comcast couldn't route IPv6 across thecable modem. I have an Associate's degree in Computer Information Systems, subspecialty networking and as part of my final work, I had to configure CISCO routers to route across devices that had no IP addresses, with devices on each side with IP addresses able to see each other.
I bought separate cable modem and wireless routers from the store. It makes troubleshooting much easier. When I encountered a problem I encountered before, I simply repeated the process that fixed it the last time. When the router goes bad, I just buy a new router. They tend to develop problems after two years and the last one lasted longer than that so maybe that's progress.
Not really any benefit switching at that distance + wire length I figure you can only get up to 6 Mbps max on ADSL or ADSL2+ since att doesn't sell any plans between 6 and 12.
Something important to note while att's dsl uses the standard dsl protocols the uverse flavor of dsl uses a proprietary version of the standard so you can't use 3rd party modems.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
From the cable company to the cable modem the cable is coax. From the cable modem to your home devices is CAT3 or CAT5 or CAT5e and RJ45 jacks. I don't recommend going any lower than CAT5 for your cabling, though I haven't really looked into how much cheaper it might be as they sometimes come with devices like the WiFi router. I don't know the benefits of wired over wireless, but I rent and wired seems impractical.
I get 25Mbps. Absolute minimum necessary for things to feel like they run smooth enough. About once a month the service goes out in the middle of the night for a while, but is back on by the time someone wakes up in the morning.
I can stick up for AT&T also. I had slow but reliable 6mbps DSL for years,went to Comcast for 4 years and hated every minute of it. Now I'm back on AT&T Fiber 1Gbps, didn't have to pay to rent their modem and they charge $70 flat for the service -no extra fees are taxes.
If i did go with their TV package, the first four set top boxes are free. If I went to Comcast, they would have charged $50 for the extra five TVs, cable modem rental, and another $30 in taxes, non government fees, an HD technology fee, a sports access and a network access fee.
I am, unfortunately, a Comcast customer. But my experience hasn't been so bad because I bought the service through Earthlink, about 10 years ago. Earthlink never jacked with my pricing, it stayed exactly the same for all of those 10 years, but the bandwidth kept going up during that time, to about 60 Mbps today.
Unfortunately, Earthlink finally got out of the business, and notified me that I was transferred to Comcast as of January 1. I wonder what methods Comcast will use to turn me sour like the rest of you!
But maybe there's an answer here. Buying cable service through a reseller, such as Earthlink, might provide a better experience, even if they can't run the actual cable themselves.
The thing is everyone bases things on their own anecdotal experience. I hate Comcast (and AT&T) with a passion based on very bad customer experiences.
I'm sure some people manage to have Comcast as their ISP/cable provider and the service works well and they don't think it's that expensive because they can afford it easily enough anyway.
When I was a Comcast customer I had outages all the time both with the cable TV and internet service. Their customer service/repair were always a hassle to deal with.
I've snipped most of my rant here, because it was just ranting about my own problems with Comcast, but CenturyLink's customer service is just as bad, but at least they don't have nearly as many outages in my neighborhood and at least in my area their DSL is as fast as Comcast - and they're cheaper - if you badger them enough about getting a decent price.
I used to rant about Cox Communications too when they were my ISP/cable provider. I actually miss them now.
I use Verizon because I've been a customer of AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile and I had problems with all of those other carriers and VZW has never screwed me over (too much anyway). But I guarantee you there is some AT&T customer out there who will say that AT&T never screwed them and go on to tell you about how bad Verizon was to them.
From my experience Comcast is infinitely better than AT&T. Originally I had @Home Internet service which was great. In the 1990s I was getting 10Mbps full duplex which was unheard of. Later they reduced it to 1Mbps up and 10Mbps down and I was still happy since the alternative was dial-up. Then AT&T took it over as ATTBI. AT&T in their infinite wisdom figured that 1Mbps upstream was too much so they cut the upstream speed to 128Kbps. To make matters worse, they didn't cut each customer's upstream bandwidth to 128kbps, they throttled the AGGREGATE bandwidth of all the customers on a node to 128kbps. In other words, they took all of the customers combined on a segment and throttled the combined bandwidth to 128kbps. That meant that at the best of times (like 3am in the morning) I would only see a 40% packet loss with ping due to the throttling. It was inanely bad. Even email was impossible. With their bad spam filters my email client couldn't even keep up with the load due to the horrible performance. Dialup was much faster because of this. It was like this for around 9 months, then there were the billing problems on top of that. The best that AT&T support could offer was to reboot the computer or claim it was because I wasn't running Windows. As a network engineer it was obvious to me where the problem was. A simple traceroute pointed to exactly where the packet loss was happening.
When Comcast took over it was like a breath of fresh air. As bad as Comcast was they couldn't hold a candle to how bad AT&T was. Comcast ended up upgrading all of the cable infrastructure and immediately fixed the caps and the tech support, while nowhere near as good as it was with @Home when I started with them, was at least an order of magnitude better than AT&T. I don't know if anyone can beat how bad AT&T support and billing was. I will NEVER deal with AT&T again.
I have since switched to a Comcast business account. Other than the high price I'm paying I don't have any complaints over it other than the fact that for IPv6 I can't get anything better than a /64. You can't subnet a /64.
After having designed DSL equipment I'm surprised it works as well as it does, especially when they throw crap like PPPoE at it. The original Redback documentation I had said PPPoE was designed to "preserve the dial-up experience". Then you had companies like Microsoft who would screw up PPPoE (they turned on PPP header compression which is not recommended which would result in unaligned packets which could have a significant performance impact on head-end equipment). The PPP header compression saved 1 byte in the packet, but it was useless because the MTU still remained 1492 bytes and with the overhead of ATM it never saved any bandwidth, but resulted in the payload being unaligned within the Ethernet packet.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
My experience with Comcast vs AT&T is day and night. AT&T took over the cable system and @Home in my area and it became unusable because of AT&T's screwups. They throttled the aggregate upstream bandwidth of all of the customers on a node to 128Kbps. That's like myself and all of my neighbor's traffic combined being limited to 128Kbps upstream bandwidth. Their support would ask me to reboot my computer even though a simple traceroute or ping showed exactly where the problem was, and it was on their network. It was like this for 9 months. Dial-up was faster than AT&T at the best of times.
Having designed DSL head-end equipment I'm surprised it works as well as it does, especially when they throw crap like PPPoE on top of it. Oh, and if you think Comcast support is bad, it doesn't hold a candle to how bad my experience was with AT&T. Hell, I'd pay double the rate on my cell phone than have to give another cent to those incompetent bastards.
Having seen a friend's AT&T DSL (not U-Verse), I wouldn't touch it.
I now have Comcast business... it's like what my original @Home Internet was like, the downside being it's expensive.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
I had @Home cable modem service and it was taken over by AT&T. This was around 1999 and AT&T in their infinite wisdom decided that 1Mbps upstream bandwidth was too much, so instead of programming the modems to throttle lower they decided to do it at the head-end where they throttled the aggregate bandwidth of all of the subscribers on a node down to 128Kbps. This meant that ALL upstream traffic from all customers on the node combined was limited to 128Kbps. At the best of times I only saw 40% packet loss. I couldn't even download email much of the time (and their spam filter was pretty bad). It was like this for 9 months. Calls to support said to reboot the computer and power cycle the modem. A simple traceroute showed exactly where the problem was and it was in their network and had nothing to do with my end.
I was paying somewhere between $60-80/month in 1999 for this crappy service. AOL Dial-up was faster since I often saw 20Kbps or lower downstream bandwidth due to the upstream throttling. Then Comcast took over. Instantly the network was MUCH better. It's been more reliable and they got rid of the ridiculous caps. I also had numerous issues with AT&T billing and their email server was often down or unusable (even not counting the bandwidth cap problem).
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
In 2014, Comcast was selected as worse than Monsanto!
The vast majority of the reasons why Monsanto are regarded as such a boogeyman are complete bullshit.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I find it hard to believe that any ISP out there could possibly be worse than Telstra...
No, he's thinking of RG11. You're thinking that you know better, but you do not.
RG11 would be a bitch to use for inside wiring, and probably unnecessary, but if he wants to put in the work it's not for us to say.
Year after year after year, Comcast remains the most hated company in the US. How do they manage it? I don't think we are talking sheer negligence alone. I think that, for whatever reason, Comcast is actively seeking to stay among the most hated companies in the country. How does that contribute to their bottom line? Free publicity?
Stock is near it's 52-week high.
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
Here's a novel idea: walk away from that junk and forget about it forever. Get 30 hours per week of your life back.
30 hours a week to do what? The things you personally like to do?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
They just happen to be a company that many people interface with and they sell a service that is prone to problems.
- Shared bandwidth which requires intrusive monitoring and limiting in order to be fair for all their users
- Infrastructure that passes over/through several different domains both public and private
- It is an often misunderstood technology and is conflated with other problems. (person is having PC or Netflix or any technology trouble and the blame falls on the internet provider)
- It is seen as expensive for what it provides (especially if there are problems with it).
Due to all of these factors and customer service's inability to deal with a lot of the problems (because they are outside of their control), you have a recipe for a bad reputation.
Still. The electricity or the phone company have a lot of these same issues but seem to do a lot better... maybe because of regulation?
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I know I'm definitely in the minority here but I have Comcast at home and I regularly hit between 85-90Mbps. I've never had an outage, something I could not say about the awful AT&T service I had before and even their cable service has been decent. Having said that, dealing with them on the phone would definitely change my view (I only dealt with them on the phone once and it was as horrible as others say) but there is a customer service center less than 5 miles from my house and they took care of the issue I was having with billing in less than 15 minutes (vs over 45 minutes on the phone with no resolution).
to route across devices that had no IP addresses, with devices on each side with IP addresses able to see each other.
That's switching then, not routing. Please turn in your Associate's degree.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Second to last time I called Comcast I was upset because they lied about a service and its pricing in online chat support. Being quite polite I was hung on up 3 or 4 times, blind transferred repeatedly, had a few reps pretend they were supervisors, and when I finally got a callback from a real superior they demanded I provide the chat transcript or it never happened. When I actually had saved the transcript and provided it the supervisor said they weren't authorized to promise me that and would not amend the bill even historically. This process took three days of calling.
My last experience with Comcast was a business internet account. I called and canceled the service because I was moving, the rep was very helpful and took the date. They didn't ask for the modem back and in the hassle of moving I forgot completely. Several months later I received a bill from comcast at my new address. I thought this must be the final bill, it included a charge for the cost of the modem. I paid it figuring that would settle everything, the rep I spoke to when I called indicated that they had no record of me canceling which is why the charges were higher than expected but that she'd corrected it and this payment would settle everything. Three months later I get another bill which includes a charge for the cost of the modem again. I call and they have no record of me canceling, can't explain why they are charging me for a modem if they don't think I've canceled and or why they are trying to charge it again but the charges have been corrected and the system is updated. A month later another bill, a new charge for the modem, call again and they indicate they are charging me for the modem because it wasn't returned. When I point out that I've now moved and there is no way I could possibly return the modem they indicate they will continue to charge me the full cost of modem every month until it is returned. Finally, I report to the BBB and their response is similar with an additional claim that it doesn't matter if I called and canceled or that their representative indicated the request was submitted, etc because somewhere in the fine print on the agreement it indicated I'd have to cancel in writing. The BBB cleared them automatically because I eventually gave up on going round and round, Comcast can afford to pay drones to auto-reply longer than I can and the BBB is a joke.
After the BBB request they stopped trying to add charges and a couple years later I successfully booted them from my credit report. Your millage may vary but more likely you've just been beaten down by lousy customer service so hard that you just think this is how it works. Most companies have reps that either say they will do something to resolve issues or won't agree to do something... every so often I have a fluke where something gets messed up but Comcast is only company I've interacted with they consistently lie saying they are resolving the issue and then not.
Yeah, AT&T sucks too if anything goes wrong but in three years of my wife having cell service with them I've never had to call. With comcast it was every couple months.
For what it's worth I've have pretty good experience with their phone support. Actually the only problem I've had with them with support is that during chat with an agent, I was considering one of their offers but hadn't accepted it (she was totally unable to provide a channel listing) but she took the signup far enough through the process that I had some hardware delivered to my house the next day. So I had to drive to the store but they took it back no problem.
Anniston, AL and Sauget, IL, and some forty other past and current Superfund sites would like to have a word with you. Anniston in particular was knowingly polluted for decades:
(source)
Their pollution record is not quite the worst. They probably don't have as many direct deaths on their hands as Union Carbide, but I can't think of a more profound example of "damning with faint praise" than that. Also, their monopoly control over seeds and plant genetics cannot be discounted as "complete bullshit" -- it may be a complicated subject, but there are legitimate concerns. You would be completely correct to say that concerns about health effects of GM foods are greatly overblown, but Monsanto has a black history.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I personally have, and still find a way to watch what I want to watch, but plenty of other people don't know how.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
It sounds like the survey asked if you had a bad customer service experience in the last year. I have. The year started out good enough - they told me my service was being upgraded to 75Mbs without any cost to me; they'd upgrade my modem (I was renting from them), and wouldn't have to do anything else, all I had to do was log in and request the service, so I did. They said I'd get a ship notification for the new modem within 7 (or 10, I forget) business days.
A month later I checked the status and they said I submitted for it, and they said I'd receive a ship notification within 7 days. Then again a month later. So I went and bought a supported modem, called up, and the operator at that point helped get me up and running pretty painlessly, and I was up to 90Mbs peak.
Now, if I got a survey asking if I had a bad customer service problem, what should I respond? Their system for upgrading was terrible - I had to do it on my own. But that's not all - I decided to drop DirecTV and just get basic cable in order to save money, since I was getting internet from Comcast anyway. That was a f@#king nightmare. Not only calls, but I ended up going to the customer service center a half dozen times in addition to spending hours on the phone.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I'm reading the comments (like most I don't bother to RTFA) and thinking where is her picture or the news article when she went on a rampage at a Comcast office after losing her cool with customer service.
mfwright@batnet.com
Which Sovietistan was that? I'm pretty sure that you did not grow up in Sweden, where a doctor visit to my neighbourhood clinic costs me about US$15, and my wife's night in the hospital a few years ago ran us about US$75.
And in the US, you have (at least in theory) a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Which pretty much disqualifies inadequate/inaccessible/prohibitively expensive medical care, since those things are impossible to achieve without being in reasonably good health.
Nor does it make good sense to subject your population to economic enslavement as a condition of maintaining good health. The only reason it's lasted as long as it has in the US is that pharmaceutical/medical/insurance companies are allowed to get away with it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If you're confused about that then just keep watching TV.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
And what do you think the distinction between switching and routing is? Routing involves learning about the other machines in the system and which path to take to get your traffic to its destination. In the demo setup there were only two machines. All the routers need to know is a designation for other routers. That can be achieved with MAC addresses. There is the matter of sharing what subnet(s) is/are on the other side of a router. Various factors dictate where and what information is necessary for successful routing. I have not presented any information that describes switching over routing.