I'm pretty sure the incompetence here is the fact that the back-end people aren't aware there's an intermittent modem-bricking Arris firmware bug, even while the field techs know about the bug. The field tech who came to my house was like "yeah, this is known issue, see, look here, this is a telltale sign, I could even tell from the line on the street that this was your problem..." etc. Yet, when I talked to the lady in the Comcast office, she said, "We have never heard of a problem with these Arris modems, we ship this particular model to customers all the time and never have problems, they work for years and years with no trouble..." etc.

So it's a problem where the company is too large for its own britches and there's not enough inter-department communication. There is a field problem, but the techs don't have a channel to properly report the bug up the chain to get it fixed.