Comcast is the only cable internet service where I live. When it works it’s great, but
the fookers go down as often as a six dollar whore on lumberjack payday! The father in Angela’s Ashes worked more, and their customer service fucking sucks wombats in Beggar’s Canyon! Hate 'em.
Rant out (I told you it was short).
And they don’t notify customers when they’re going to take down the cable modem connection to supposedly improve service.
DICKS.
Not that I know anything about supporting Comcast customers, but do you live in Texas or Tennessee?
Note to mental filing system: Delete old standard phrase, “goes down more often than Madonna on a hot date.”
Of course, they just bought the chunk of Adelphia where I live, so within the year I will be experiencing the joys of Comcast internet, as well.
And every once in a while, they’ll send a guy to your house under the mistaken impression that the account holder cancelled service. We managed to repel boarders but still, Comcast, check these things out a little.
Sure, Comcast has the occasional hiccup, but who else are you going to go to? Qwest?
Bwaa-ha! Bwaahaa!! BWAAHAAAHAHAHAH!!!
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had problems getting to the internet in the past … umm … well, however long I’ve had Comcast. Almost two years, I think. And just today I got an e-mail from them warning me that they’d be performing maintenance this Sunday from midnight-noon, and that I might not be able to connect to the internet during that time period if I reboot my computer or the modem.
I’m sorry that Comcast out your way sucks so bad, Sampiro! 
(Though I do agree with you about their customer service…)
We got back from a weekend trip to find our internet wasn’t working, and I was getting that stupid “Welcome to Comcast High Speed Internet! Download this stupid program to set up your computer!” After spending several minutes on the phone with tech support (and I must say, all the tech support people I’ve ever talked to have been very nice), something comes up about “Billing details needed.” OK, WTF. So I call billing, wait on hold for 20 minutes, to find that they’ve cut us off because our account is past due.
Well. See, we just moved a month ago, only a couple miles away, and had previously had auto-billing. So somehow in transferring the account to the new address, they managed to not only lose the auto-bill but also forgot to send us a paper bill in the mail. And the rep was apparently unable to take my payment over the phone, but was nice enough to restore our service on the promise that we’d pay the past due, so I went online and paid the damn thing, right after I called tech support back to get the connection working again.
Stupid.
And you know what’s REALLY stupid is Verizon did the exact same thing to us when we switched our cell phones from Miami to Georgia numbers. Our service got cut off twice because they never billed us–yeah, we could have been a little more on top of things and noticed that it hadn’t been deducted from the checking account, but for pete’s sake, you’d think big companies like these would be capable of sending a fucking bill. Or even do something radical like give us a call to let us know we’re about to get cut off. Oh, but then they wouldn’t be able to charge a reconnect fee. :rolleyes:
Comcast has a monopoly on cable internet here, and you’re right, they do go down entirely too often. Sometimes daily. We have no alternative. However, I have always got an e-mail about service upgrades.
OTOH, a couple of weeks back, I wrote to support to ask why, since I started getting spam in my primary account, I could report it as spam on their webmail page, but it didn’t block the domains, and why since I started doing that, I’ve got quadruple the spam. The first three responses I got were three to six pages long of form letter, none of which answered any of my questions or addressed any of my comments. I had to send them back all that crap they sent me and tell them I was going to give them one more opportunity to respond to my enquiry, or I was going to call head office to find out why I couldn’t get the support I pay for.
Then I got an e-mail telling me that the only way I could block spam is to go to my account preferences and create a list of only people I will allow to e-mail me. Everything else gets bounced. So I did. But Yahoo Mail filters out domains. One of my accounts there has gone from upwards of 100 pieces of spam daily, to none. It can’t be impossible for them to filter it out.
Wankers.
Oh Sampiro, Comcast here in our fair city (yeah right) smoke money pole. Last year I had a bit of an altercation with them.
I moved across the street last May, middle of the month. Two Comcast service techs came physically to my house to set up the cable, at different times. Neither of them could figure it out (let’s not talk about the two times they skipped out on the appointment without calling to notify me).
Now, this was the very same computer with no modifications that they’d set up previously. We called a phone tech at Comcast, who couldn’t help us either. So I phoned Customer Service directly, told them to shut off my account, because I was frustrated (I’d had other problems with Comcast in the past, before I moved.) Then I switched to Bellsouth DSL. Cheaper, just as fast, and nowhere near as many outages. I also paid Comcast the bill for the middle of April–middle of May.
They kept sending me bills until July, when I informed them that I had requested my service shut off in May. I kept all the bills they sent. They kept sending bills from August to October, then reported me to a credit collections agency. I sent a letter to Comcast, the credit agency, and the Better Business Bureau with copies of all the bills, an account of what happened, and a request that the credit agency subpoena Comcast’s usage records: it should show that I haven’t had the hookup to my computer since May.
The credit agency immediately wrote Comcast and I back, stating that as far as they were concerned, I owed Comcast nothing at all, and advising Comcast to drop the thing entirely. So that’s what happened. For awhile I still got guys coming to my house from Comcast thinking I still had unpaid bills and offering me their “amnesty” program, but I finally got it through to Comcast that I owed them nothing and I would be happy to let my lawyer prove that fact to them in court. They promptly decided the hassle wasn’t worth it, because they would lose, and left me alone.
Comcast sucks. I hope you have a better experience, but after hearing other people from this area’s horror stories, I doubt it.
I used Qwest in the past. The most notable cause of downtime: our neighbor cutting our phone lines.