"Comcast Must Die"

pentapenguin's picture

Hi folks. Smiling I'm going to pull up my little soapbox for a minute and chat. I saw this news story on Slashdot tonight about a woman who to put it mildly, was annoyed at Comcast's customer NO service. Be sure to read this article. If nothing else, the reporter really has a good sense of humor. Smiling I especially liked the last few lines:

Police gave her the hammer back, though she swears she's content to ride off into the sunset of True Crime Stories in America, never again to go Com-smash-tic on her local cable provider. She does, however, finally, have phone service. On Verizon.

And hence my blog's title - Comcast Must Die.

Mind you, of course I don't condone violence like that, but I sure have felt tempted to do something like that after getting the run around.

Now in fairness, I do have to admit I've (thankfully!) never have had one of those type experiences. Besides the too frequent (in my humble opinion) outages, problems with the digital cable, and the generally clueless customer service people, I haven't had any other problems with them. {knocks on wood} However, that DOESN'T mean I would recommend them. I really dislike Comcast for a number of reasons and the foremost one is that Comcast really seems to have the worse customer service of any major company in America. And to add to that list is their dislike of Firefox, Linux, and Macs (all horrible things to me! Laughing out loud ) and their arbitrarily cutting off service for too much usage but then refusing to tell you how much is too much.

So, has anybody here had a bad experience with Comcast? If I didn't do some work from home and need my 6mbit connection and if we had competition, I would jump off the Comcast bandwagon in a heartbeat. Sorry, Comcast just isn't all that "Comcastic." Smiling

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Comcast phone sales
Submitted by ptcjenn on Fri, 10/19/2007 - 3:00pm.

Comcast phone salesperson: You can get digital cable for the same price as regular! And no installation costs!

ptcjenn: Sounds great - sign me up!

Installer: Your lines are too old. $125 to drop in new ones.

ptcjenn: Maybe later then.

::next week::

comcast phone sales person: You can get digital cable for the same price as regular! And no installation costs!

ptcjenn: Nope, installer sez $125.

comcast phone salesperson: No, that's a mistake! No installation costs!

ptcjenn: oh, ok then. Sign me up!

Installer: NO. Really. It's $125.

::: repeat 2x:::

comcast phone salesperson: You can get digital cable for the same price as regular! No install
ptcjenn: ARGH! Stop calling me and taunting me with your no installation fee lies!

>click

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I concur with your dislike of Comcast
River's picture
Submitted by River on Fri, 10/19/2007 - 12:52pm.

This year, they have been especially bad. We lost service three times in six weeks. Unfortunately, I got the package where they supply cable TV, internet, and digital phone service, so I lost everything including phone service, and the three outages were for 12 hours, 24 hours, and 2 1/2 days. As others have mentioned, the condescending, mediocre customer support just rubs salt into the wound. You have to go through that annoying automated system, then when you finally get a dispatcher, she goes through a series of questions that imply the problem is your fault, not theirs. One time, it took me two hours and several calls to convince them that it was not just my house, it was my whole neighborhood. I told her that my next-door neighbor had also lost signal, and she told me to check with my other neighbors, and that they would each have to call her separately, to "verify the outage". How insulting!!

Now that AT&T has a similar all-in-one package based on DSL, I'd be tempted to switch back to AT&T for the phone service at least. The problem with that is that AT&T is no better than Comcast. Their poor phone service is what prompted me to go to Comcast in the first place. About a year ago, my phone line got cut by some contractors next door, and AT&T took 2 days to repair it, then left the repaired line above ground for 3 months, where the same contractors drove over it in their trucks every day.

This is what happens when you get a monopoly--the customer gets screwed. Look at how the airlines have gone in the last 20 years. Deregulation usually leads to local monopolies, and once a company has a monopoly in a local market, the service declines while prices go up. That is what's happening with cable TV and land line phone service. By contrast, the competition in cell phone service has led to price cuts and better service.

Competition is what made this country great. If you want to sell mousetraps, you have to build a better one, or go out of business. We need more competition between our information providers--providers of TV, internet, and phone service.


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Different Experiences
Submitted by blazing2006 on Fri, 10/19/2007 - 1:39pm.

We have had Comcast triple package now for about 3 years I guess. Before that we have done the Bellsucks route, Dish and several years ago Newnan Utilities when we lived there for a short time. By far Comcast has been the most reliable for all three, best customer service of any provider, fastest internet. I guess everyone has differing opinions of different services. Our worst experiences have been with Bellsucks. When we need anything from Comcast they are quick and courteous, whether on the phone or when we need to have someone come out. Sorry you are having problems.

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YES!
Submitted by ATLtoPTC on Fri, 10/19/2007 - 1:50pm.

We have Comcast highspeed cable and we use it for our Vonage phone service. One day Comcast started sending "blips" that would disconnect our phone mid-conversation. This went on for several frustrating weeks. We called Vonage, and they said it was a Comcast problem. We called Comcast, and they played stupid and said it must be a Vonage problem, but that we could get our phone through Comcast and we would get more reliable service. So we called Vonage back, and they had to do something that disguised our phone line so that it no longer "looks" like a phone line to Comcast - instead it just "looks" like a computer. Viola - no more disconnects! We haven't had a problem since!

Comcast plays dirty pool!

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No broadband problems here..
Submitted by McDonoughDawg on Fri, 10/19/2007 - 8:09am.

It's much better than the DSL I originally had. And the HiDef I get from Comcast is very stable. Yeah, I wish it was cheaper, but I wish most things were.

I've had dish and it had it's drawbacks too.

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No outages?
River's picture
Submitted by River on Fri, 10/19/2007 - 1:03pm.

That's my big complaint. When we had that last rash of thunderstorms (was that in August?) I kept losing my service, even when it was not that bad a storm.

I agree with you about the broadband. They advertise 6MB/s, but on a good day it's closer to 8MB/s. That's a lot faster than DSL, and I have no complaints in that regard. I just wish they would improve their customer service.


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Hey pentapenguin,
Cyclist's picture
Submitted by Cyclist on Fri, 10/19/2007 - 6:04am.

Ah yes, Comc@rp. See my blog from last week:

Cyclist's Blog - Comcast
-------------------------------------------
Caution - The Surgeon General has determined that constant blogging is an addiction that can cause a sedentary life style.


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comcast
Submitted by teetaw on Fri, 10/19/2007 - 1:09am.

They'll never do anything about it because they have a monopoly on decent speeds. The only time we'll ever see a difference is when verizon shows up with FIOS, and even then they aren't that great of a provider either. It's not like other countries and is pretty bleak looking, hopefully if we have another couple terms of democrats in congress (and they aren't the idiots we have in there now) we'll see some laws made that actually force them to clean up their act but until then theres nothing we can do.

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