*sigh* You suck, Comcast.

The BBQ Pit
1

I normally enjoy very good cable Internet service with a scant few interruptions every few months, but this time, you blew it.

I wake up and open Mozilla, trying to access the SDMB, only to receive some kind of registration page instead. The graphics don’t come up, and you actually tell me that I’ll have to enter my personal information and password. Remembering all the warnings that Comcast will “never” ask for my personal information, I obviously think this is some kind of spoof. Okay, so I try another website. Same deal. Thinking either this could be legit or some extremely well-designed spoof, I download the program and start it. It has the nerve to ask me to shut down any AV software and/or firewalls I am running. Are you crazy? And then the first thing you ask me for is my Comcast account number. Hell no.

So I call Comcast customer support and the lady on the other line tells me that this is, in fact, legit. According to her, Comcast had all their customers separated on two databases, and they’re trying to merge the databases. While on the phone with her, I enter my account number and get an error. She says that my account is probably being moved as we speak, and my connection should be accessable again in a few days.

“So you shut down my access for a few days, without even giving me some kind of warning email?”

“Yeah, and I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t know what they’re doing up there. It’s a really bad business practice.”

Bad business practice indeed. I’m writing this pitting from my local library. Comcast cut off my access for days and didn’t even give me a heads-up. You suck, Comcast. Bad, bad policy.

Anyone else having Comcast Internet problems right now?

Adam

2

A few weeks ago it stopped working for a day or so…I think that was just a local issue.

Other than that, I have had no problems.

3

We just signed up for Wideopen West precisely because of all the customer service horror stories we’ve heard from friends about Comcast.

4

Oh Comcast is very much on my list right now. Over the last month, I’ve had a reliable internet connection about 20% of the time. I come home, and it’s a crapshoot as to whether it will be up and running. Generally, some point in the night, it will start working again. For about five minutes. And then it runs incredibly slow. At one point I did a speed test to see just how bad it was - 92kps - just barely above dial up.

I’ve called tech support numerous times. They keep trying to send a technician out to my house in “two weeks”. Yesterday, I called them again. “Look,” I said, “I don’t need a technician. Nothing has changed on my line. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. There is just no signal hitting my modem at all. The problem is not on my end, it’s on yours.”

“Yes,” she replies, “We’ve been having a lot of problems in Connecticut. They just switched (something or other, I was too frustrated to care what they switched) and there have been widespread reports of slow or intermittent connections.”

“All the more reason why I don’t need a technician to come out to my house.”

“Well, maybe if we slate enough technicians, they’ll finally take notice and figure out what the problem is?” She was trying to be helpful, and I do appreciate that.

So fine, I schedule a completely non-necessary technician visit, and request a credit for the continued outages. She gives me 4 days, since that is how many times I’ve called them - in the past two weeks! I often need to work from home; waking up to find out I have no way of connecting to my company’s network is not a very good way to start a day.

I switched from DSL to cable because the DSL service in my neighborhood was crappy. And for months, I was thrilled with Comcast. But I am seriously fed up with it right now. I’m paying 50 bucks a month to these people - I think that should get me a little bit more than a 92kps connection rate for 30 minutes out of each day.

5

Comcast is one of the few large services I’ve had very little problems with. So I’d guess it has to do with location, since I’m pretty sure they basically outsource a lot of their services.

An example: soon after Comcast initiated their on-demand service, it never worked for me. But, being lazy, I figured it was more due to my system set-up than anything else. A few weeks later, my Internet went out. They sent someone out two days later, who figured out that the problem was there were squirrels eating through the lining of the cable connection at the street level. So the guy replaced the whole thing, no charge. Everything’s worked like a charm since then.

Not that I don’t believe that large corporations are totally customer-focused, but every time I’ve called they’ve at least tried to help, gratis.

(Of course, the last time my Internet went out, they really didn’t help much at all. One of the east-coast DNS servers went down, and apparently that totally screwed my configuration. It was only after getting off the phone that I tried a simple ipconfig renew that things worked again, no thanks to them).

6

Local Comcast Ops offices employ a lot of full-time technicians for installations and routine maintenance on their outside plant. This work is not outsourced. Only when a large project, such as a system upgrade, rebuild, or even a big plant extension, is to be undertaken do they hire outside contractors.

As you said, it probably has to do more with certain locations, which may be staffed by sub-par technicians, engineers, or managers that results in the poor service and network performance many of you are seeing. Comcast has a lot of regional offices and, in certain operational aspects, they’re permitted to run with great independence. Another reason problems may appear locally is that the plant currently being operated has been assumed by Comcast through a system purchase and it just doesn’t work very well, for whatever technical reason, with new equipment that Comcast may be deploying.

7

Comcast had been having internet service problems all along the East Coast earlier this month. It was probably related to a major storm that had been moving through at the time.

8

I’m leaving a Time Warner-covered area tomorrow and entering a Comcast-covered neighborhood. I’m not too enthusiastic about paying a higher price for Comcast and yet receiving a slower speed, but it’s the only cable game in town, so I’m stuck with 'em.

We’ll see how well it goes.

9

I had a problem with my Comcast cable the other night. It was during the last sixty seconds of 24, just when you know who is in grave danger from the you know who and tries to get a you know what to shoot him. Just at that moment, the TV displayed an emergency broadcast message, so I missed it. On the plus side, the DVR (which I had just gotten a few days before) recorded it just fine.

I had a similar problem years before. Roomie and I were watching a made for TV movie. We made it to the last scene, where the jury forman said “Your Honor, we the jury find the defendant to be…” static

Pissed me the hell off. The signal came back on 2 minutes later, but we’d missed the verdict. To this day I have no idea if the bad guy went to prison or not.

10

They’re still a fuck of a lot better than Qwest.

I was talking to a tech that came to replace my modem when mine fried, and I guess they’ve been having a hell of a time with some firmware upgrades to their switches. The first region to upgrade failed to report back to the mothership that they were having a hell of a lot of problems. Hearing nothing negative, Comcast went ahead and slated all the regions to receive the upgrades. As with big lumbering businesses everywhere, when they found out about it, it had too much momentum/everyone was to chickenshit to stop it. The vendor swore they could fix the problems on the fly. The vendor lied.

I see it as but a blip, and hopefully they learned. Qwest, on the other hand, would cut off both hands and a leg before they realized that they were holding a chainsaw backwards.

11

Amen to that!

I’ve had Comcast cable internet for the better part of three years now, and I’ve never had to call them once. It goes out in the middle of the night for a few minutes maybe once a month or so, but that’s literally the only problem I’ve ever had with them.

Qwest, on the other hand, is what you’d get if the devil ran a corporation. It’s one of the few companies where I’ll go out of my way to make sure they don’t get a dime of my money.

12

Thus far (these past two days), their connection’s been fine, but I already had to switch away from their DNS servers. The chances of me actually being able to hit a site from the domain name was about 1 in 3; once I switched over to alternate addresses, everything worked smoothly.

13

I don’t get internet service through Comcast (DSL through Qwest, problem free for over 4 years and happy except for the fact that it is CAP DSL), but I do have digital cable. These guys (Comcast) are assholes.

Story:

So I got the digital cable “silver package” back in 2002. Costs about 80/month. comes with 2 movie channel suites, HBO and Starz. I have been pretty happy with it though I think it’s expensive. Then all of a sudden about 4-5 weeks ago a bunch of the channels stop working. Comedy central, gone. Weather channel, Bravo, TBS, Discovery, all gone. (I only really cared about Comedy central however. Daily show and South Park.) So I give them a call and they reset the system, tell me try this and that and finally send out a repairman.

You know what it turned out to be? They had turned off these channels. Put a block on them out at the street (however this is done). They repairman turned them back on. This seems to be their method of upgrading me to the “gold package”. You see the silver package I have been paying on for 3 years is a much better deal than what they have today. Today the silver package is only one movie channel suite and does not have all those extra channels. Now I have the gold or platinum or somesuch package which costs 100/month. This showed up on my last bill along with a “service discount” of -15/month so I am still paying almost the same amount. I am sure that this discount will disappear sooner or later and I will get shafted with the 100.

Sneaky Rat Ass Bastards. This isn’t the first time they pulled something like this. I am switching to dish network next month. The on-Demand thing is cool, but I have Netflix and don’t really need to order movies on the fly.

14

I’m still slightly cranky about the fact nobody told me they don’t carry Bravo in my neighborhood until the cable was installed, but that’s at least 60% my fault for not asking, and what was I gonna do?

And then there’s that whole thing where my internet didn’t actually work for a month after it was installed, but then it started working, with no explanation, and has worked like a charm ever since (knock on wood).

15

RIght now Comcast is doing a lot of speed upgrades to their system and it has caused some issues here at my house in the last month. A bit frustrating, but since our connection just keeps getting faster and faster I won’t complain.

Sam

16

They bumped it up a little last month. All you have to do is unplug the modem for two minutes and plug it back in an voila!

17

You guys are getting away with very cheap cable service.

I pay almost $100 a month for basic cable television (no HBO) and cable Internet access. There’s no competition here in Baltimore, so they can charge whatever the fuck they want. :mad:

Adam

18

I’m in Baltimore too. $110 for internet and digital cable with HBO. My wife won’t give up the digital and HBO, I won’t give up my cable modem. We are screwed.

I get semi-frequent short outages but I’m generally happy with everything but the price.

19

Actually, it’s not as simple as that. They’re making many server-side and switch-side changes and DNS changes that have had our connections going up and down and being without reliable DNS contact for up to or more than an hour at a time.

It seems to have calmed down with no noticeable episodes over the last 2 weeks or so, but for a while it was almost every day during peak useage. Annoying, but not annoying enough for me to whine terribly.

Sam

20

Re: Baltimore: When I started having to pay for my TV/internet (i.e. moved off campus) here, I was absolutely shocked at the lack of options and the prices for a city of this size. It’s more expensive with the same or less choice than it is for me back in basically rural CT… and there are several hundred times as many people living here as in the town I grew up in. Blows me away.

Service-wise, I have had no problem with TV (we have the pretty basic one - all your standard 70ish cable channels but nothing special), but our internet is kind of sporadic. We won’t have any problems for 2-3 months straight, and then we’ll be out for the better part of a week due to either technical issues or general Comcast stupidity. It’s pretty frustrating, but there’s really nothing we can do, so we keep sending the checks.