Comcast Cable: incompetence and blame shifting from my digital dealer

The BBQ Pit
#1

My wife and I moved into a new town house and had our cable service and high speed internet moved to the new digs. I would consider switching providers, but our other option is a dish and DSL and that is not practical for us.
Our trial begins when they come in to hook us up. The cables in the house were old and not adequate for high speed internet, so they ran some new cables. Here is the way they decided would be the most efficient way to run two lines (TV in living room, modem in upstairs office)

  1. For the living room, they com into one wall of the upstairs master bedroom out another into the closet. Out the closet wall, down the face of the house, through the wall into the living room. They ripped both cover plates of the wall in the bedroom, damaging brand new paint and left them off.
  2. For the office, they came up onto a balcony, in front of the sliding door to the baby’s room, in through the wall of the babies room, over a foot, through the same wall into the office.
    When I realize the extent of this, I call them back and have them rerun the cable directly to the office. The second installer is puzzled because this was actually much simpler than what the first installer did. What the hell was the point? Did he think we wanted a coax motif for the babies wall? (I mean that may have been marginally better than the saccharine bunnies and lambs my wife picked, but still :slight_smile: )

Next we get our bill and find out that they decided we needed a service upgrade to go with the new house. Never mind that we hardly watch TV and only had the most basic package because it is cheaper to get that and internet than internet alone. We call to have it downgraded and they say they have to send someone out to do it. Fine, we finally get it scheduled last Friday. Guy comes out does his thing and leaves. I come home to correct cable package but no internet.
Here things get really surreal for me. I call Comcast and tell them the problem. They walk me through the basics, power cycling, removing my router, changing the cable. I had already tried these, but I understand the drill. Finally they tell us that it must be the modem that failed. I bring up the fact that it stopped working after their technician came out, but they insist that cannot be it. They give me the support number for Motorala and tell me to have a nice day.
Motorala tech puts me through the same paces as Comcast, plus a few additional checks and can’t find anything wrong except we have no signal. But, being a better company than Comcast, he checks the warranty and sees that it still has two weeks left on it and sends us a new modem.
So yesterday we get the new modem and lo and behold, the exact same issue. Call Comcast again and finally convince them it probably isn’t two bad modems in a row and they agree to send someone out this Friday.
So to sum up, Camcast has:
[ul]Redecorated our house in cables and broken/crooked cover plates
[/ul]
[ul]Changed us over to a more expensive service because, after all, who can live without Monk and Rachael Ray?
[/ul]
[ul]Disabled our internet access and blamed it on another company
[/ul]

Damn, it must be nice to be a monopoly. How else could you get away with such craptacular customer service? If I didn’t depend on the internet for 90% of my entertainment I tell them to take there cables, their crappy service, and moronic tech support and fuck off. Unfortunately, I am hooked on the digital crack pipe and have to suck up with no options but bitching online, which is of course just feeding my habit.

Jonathan

#2

Wow, I am glad that I no longer work there (I made it about a month out of training). The free internet/cable/Metropass thing was great, but I would get calls like this (and worse) EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. People would understandably be outraged at having thousands of dollars worth of damage done to their house, so they would scream at me. Fun, that was.

I realized that they(the installers) are doing it on purpose, but I haven’t worked out just why.

#3

I’m curious why Dish and DSL are not practical? I mean, how practical was this? And you are still going to pay them every month?

#4

OP lives in a townhouse. There may be restrictions against installing a dish.

#5

Unless it’s a historic building, they are very limited in terms of the restrictions they are allowed to make.

#6

Something to consider, a HUGE portion of the installers are not Comcast employees, at least in my neck of the woods. They are subcontractors who will often come and go very quickly.

#7

Comcast in Memphis is barely competent. Not only can they not reliably deliver the services they promise, they can’t even bill correctly. This month is the first time that I have actually gotten a correct bill. They either totally fuck the bill up, claiming we haven’t paid stuff that we have canceled checks for, or they just neglect to send the bill at all. After the third month in a row we didn’t receive a bill, we had to call them just to get them to send us one. Seriously, how do they run a business?

Oh yeah, monopoly propped up with bribes.

#8

How do I describe my hatred for Comcast? I can’t really. If I do, I’ll get all worked up and won’t be able to fall asleep tonight. I’ve had plenty of problems with them. The latest was the 2 weeks it took for them to upgrade their system in my area so that they could start offering their triple play VOIP package. The cable quality was horrible and they didn’t warn a soul about the upcoming loss of service. It just went out one day. And 2 friggin weeks? That’s a heck of a long time. Even though I called (twice) and said I wanted the loss of service reflected on my bill, they still billed me for the entire month. It required a third call to fix that.

Of course, if I get the VOIP package, I’ll have to upgrade my existing package to get the premium channels (they’re so greedy they won’t let you simply change your plan over and add the VOIP–you have to actually upgrade the service you have). It’ll still save me 20 or so bucks a month, but the idea of giving them any more of my money grates me down to the bone. :mad: They need a fang-baring, foaming-at-the-mouth mad smiley

#9

We departed Comcast service for Verizon FIOS so fast it would make your head spin because Comcast was expensive, had crappy signal, and was impossible to get decent customer service from. We haven’t regretted it for an instant. We get gorgeous digital service (plus internet and digital phone), with the whole package costing less than we paid Comcast for just their analog service.

But you want service problems? Try Cox. When we moved into our house in New Orleans, it ended up requiring something like 30 service calls to get all the service working in the house. They had to rewire in from the pole and still couldn’t get it right. And of course they tore up walls and all, too, with not a fix to be seen. Once they finally got it working, it was okay, but man oh man, the headaches!

#10

DSL wouldn’t work because we do not have a land line. We both have cell phones and didn’t see the need for one. As for the dish, we could get one, but it would require approval from HOA, and if it is on the roof, which It would have to be due to hills, trees, other buildings, and what not, it would make roof up keep our financial responsibility instead of the HOA as it is now. That would up our insurance as well as having to pay for up keep and repair.

If I had my way, we would ditch Comcast, not get a dish, and get a phone line and DSL. For our area that would be cheaper than cable+internet. But my wife likes having movies on demand and the option of watching cable.

Jonathan

#11

I’ve had the misfortune of living in various residences under the monopolistic thumb of ComAss for a while. During that time I’ve had several instances of what I would characterize as a “profound loss of service.”

Most recently, our service was out for four or five hours. I ignored it up to a point because, hey, the service goes out for an hour or so maybe one night each week. Anyway, I get on the phone with “support” and go through the usual drill:[ul][li]Are all the cables plugged in?[]Do the “power-cycle shuffle”![]Is your computer turned on?[/ul]…onward we went into the script. As the procedures become more esoteric, the voice on the phone became more wary-- we were entering unfamiliar territory. We came to a place where I was interpreting the script second-hand through the phone for the tech. Eventually, we hit the end of the line. The only possible solution according to the tech, was that the network card driver on three separate computers became corrupt at the same time. Naturally, a computer with a corrupted network driver couldn’t communicate with the pristine and highly functional cable internet service provided by ComAss.[/li]Short story long, we went out to a movie and, by the time we returned, all three network card drivers had mysteriously fixed themselves. As it so happens, one of the systems accomplished this feat while powered-off entirely. Remarkable! Did I mention that this level of support is actually included for free as part of nominal $60/month fee I pay for my service?

Also, I had an installer tell me that splitting a cable internet connection between multiple computers simply wasn’t technically feasible at all and that my best bet was to buy an additional line for the second machine.

#12

At our house we decided to downgrade from digital cable to mini-basic to save money - besides, pretty much any TV show we want to see we just download anyway.

Turns out there’s a $50 fee to downgrade the service. WTF?

-Joe

#13

The next time I hear a customer say “Well if your satellite company won’t give me a free service call I will just switch to Comcast” I shall be snickering over this thread. I may even print it out and pass it around to my fellow team members.

Blacking this post out of course. No point in letting them know my Dope name.