Fun with Comcast
Today my internet connection went down.
I tried all the usual things: asking Comcast to refresh the signal, disconnecting and reconnecting the modem, calling and speaking to customer service.
It was the latter that really got my goat. First the usual—being put on hold. Then, the robotic person on the other end with the requisite accent that made her hard to understand, who read from a script and could only be pried from it with great difficulty.
“Go to the modem and unplug the thing under the black thing,” she said (or something to that effect; she didn’t actually use the word “thing”).
“But there’s no ‘under’,” I protested. “They’re in a horizontal row.”
And on and on and on, where her standard map was not my particular territory, and every little thing had to be explained and explained and explained—and then explained some more. And then repeated.
My favorite part was when she asked me when I’d gotten this modem. “But doesn’t Comcast know?” I asked. “After all, I got it from you guys. I brought in my old one to the Comcast center and they exchanged it for this one.”
It turns out (and here I am condensing and clarifying a rather lengthy and convoluted discourse on her part) that the people at the actual real-life Comcast center, the one where you go to exchange modems in the physical rather than virtual world, have their own system of recording such transactions. But alas, Ms. Customer Service does not have access to that arcane and highly confidential information.
Nor could she figure out what was wrong. So now I’m going to journey back to the Comcast center and exchange this modem for another.
As her final interaction with me, she helpfully said she’d tell me where the nearest center was. But of course she insisted that it was in a town 40 minutes away. I know this is not true; I’ve been there before (although I forget the exact street address, but I remember the town), and it’s only 15 minutes away. But she wasn’t having any of that.
I called Comcast again, got someone else (after the obligatory hold), and ascertained that the nearby center is still functioning—but on Saturdays it closes at 1:00 PM. And of course by this time it was 1:30 PM. So till Monday, to use my computer, I’ll either visit a friend’s place or a public place with wifi. And all for you, my beloved readers!
I’d been a Comcast client for quite a few years, and I always had the sorts of problems neo describes, cusotmer service and all. Finally, I’d just plain had it, signed on to Verizon Fios, and never any problem ever, ever again. Been a cuppla years now . . .
Spelling: customer
Don’t do it for us. Do it FOR THE CHILDREN!
I find that if you call Comcast support late at night, or past midnight, you get the batcave techno-nerds that actually know what they are doing.
In our area its either been Comcast or Verizon, and sometimes a choice between a couple of different satellite companies as well, to put together a package of phone/internet/TV services, and over almost 15 years we have had and dropped Comcast several times, the last time for good.
The alternatives start to creep up in price and service deteriorates, and we have then switched back to Comcast–once actually making a profit when we sold the equipment we had bought from another company to Comcast as part of a signup deal. Up until now satellite has been unreliable as well.
As with the others, Comcast usually starts out with a great initial offer and pretty good service, then the price starts to climb and the service deteriorates. This last time the climb in price was steep, as was the deterioration in service.
Despite sending literally dozens of techs to our house over the years–some who apparently couldn’t speak English, some barely literate and sentient, some with a great line of bs but no real expertize, some who never actually set foot on our house but just called and said that “they were sure the problem was at a local repeater box on a telephone pole several blocks away or at the “central office” and we never heard from them again, some that made me think they were casing the joint to rob us. Technical support by phone has been a UN’s worth of usually unintelligible so called “help.”
During these dozens of visits they have peaked and peered into most every corner of the house–except one time when the couple of “techs” they sent out one Summer’s day told me that it was just “too hot” in our attic and company regulations forbid them from going up in a hot attic–I thought they deserved some credit for that excuse not to do any work–and walked around outside, replaced every connection, replaced wiring inside and outside of our house, changed splitter configurations numerous times, replaced the connection box on the outside of our house, and even run a new underground wire to the telephone pole and replaced the connections on the pole, but they were never able to give us service that is up and running and fully functional for more than a couple of consecutive months and quite often we had no TV, no Internet, and sometimes no phone either.
The last straw was when Comcast told us, with much fanfare, that we were now going to be getting their new “Xfinity” service which, as far as I could see, was merely a new name for the exact same crappy service that we had been receiving, and as I told them when I finally trucked all of the Comcast equipment back to them, should have been called “Nofinity.”
Right now we have put together a package of Verizon and satellite service that are about half of what we paid for Comcast alone, which are working much better than Comcast ever did but, stay tuned.
I dumped Comast a few years ago and went with ATT DSL.
No problems.
No slower than Comcast’s never delivered hi speed.
Oh, yeah — Xfinity. Comcast provides my cable. I see the Xfinity commercials all the time. Even some of the comcast trucks have xfinity on the side now.
So I thought I’d try one of the xfinity things — changing the cable channel for the TV over the internet. Couldn’t get it to work.
So I called 800-die-on-hold-we-don’t-care-if-you-die to get some tech support.
And was told (despite a year of ads) Xfinity wasn’t really in our area yet.
Yippee.
That is not the first complaint I have heard about Comcast.
I have SBC DSL for my ISP. I have no complaints about its maintaining a connection. Occasionally the connection stopped temporarily due to rain, but not recently. Over the years I have called SBC for various reasons. Initially, I considered the quality of its call-in center customer service to be good to excellent.
Nonetheless, I consider the quality of SBC/ATT’s call-in center customer service to have gone downhill. About 3 years ago, I couldn’t open a file that had been e-mailed to me for work purposes. The e-mail message implied there was a virus in the file, which was very unlikely, as the file came from work. After numerous calls with various service reps and their supervisors, the reason finally came out: the file was too big to open. It surpassed the e-mail size limit. I also recall getting different answers on the size limit. [So I had the file split up.] That was a very frustrating experience.
Fortunately, since then I haven’t had to call SBC/ATT for anything.
From my experience, Dell takes the cake for bad call-in center customer service. After I bought a Dell computer, I called with a question about hooking it up to the Internet. I waited nearly an hour for a customer rep to speak to me.
In one sense, that was a fortunate experience. I had purchased 3 years of customer service for ~$100 along with the computer. After I called to cancel that option, Dell refunded me not only the ~ $100 but $200 more.
The Dell computer has been very good. With various upgrades, it is still going strong. Good product, bad customer service.
I won’t bore you with the long winded horror stories, but suffice it to say that Comcast is on my permanent black list for behavior which sits just inside the line of being civil suit material.
I will never do business with them. I’d rather use dialup or do without. I urge anyone who has a choice to do a little web searching and then make every attempt to go with a different provider.
Hmm, I’ve had Comcast since 2004 and haven’t had very many problems. Most of the outages I’ve experienced have been weather-related. There have only been a couple of times when they had to come inside the house.
There was one time when I reported an outage, and the cause turned out to be squirrel damage on a part of their equipment on a nearby telephone pole.
A few months ago I went through a period where my connection dropped frequently and I had to keep unplugging and resetting my modem. I thought either the modem or router was going bad, but I couldn’t figure out which. It must have been a problem somewhere else on their network that they’ve since fixed, because that hasn’t happened in several months.
I have them and the word I’ve picked up from google searches on their support is there is no point in calling support. If the problem is not fixed in three weeks, without calling support, cancel and move on.
“Go to the modem”
Right there is a problem. As far as I’m aware cable connections do not use sound. DSL does… to some degree… so you can still call those ‘modems’….
The box that sits between the cable coming out of the wall and the computer is usually referred to as a “modem” even though that term is probably a holdover from the dialup days.
If you have an outage, the first thing to do is to disconnect the modem from the cable and power supply, wait a minute or so, then reconnect them. That often works.
The thing that annoys me the most about tech support is that they insist on me doing that, even though I told them that I already did it before calling them.
Fiber optic is getting popular, since it has no bandwidth cap. Comcast is living under 250 gb limit per month. IF you use more, you may over max your branch connections and take out the net con of your entire neighborhood.
Large-scale customer service operations often are both micromanaged and undermanaged. The agent is given precise scripts which define exactly what words (s)he is supposed to say in particular situations, but the overall flow of problem-solving in various scenarios has not been thought through.
The manufacturing analogy would be an auto assembly line in which workers are told exactly and in great detail how to tighten a particular bolt, but the sequence of operations is such that a seat is installed over the bolt before it is put in, requiring the seat to be unnecessarily removed and reinstalled.
“My favorite part was when she asked me when I’d gotten this modem.”
Amazon.com knows every one of hundreds if items I’ve purchased from them. FedEx and UPS know exactly where my packages are. But Comcast, well, ’nuff said. 😉
poke
Neo:
Left two links you might be interested in, I suspect due to the links it hit the spam filter.
“If you have an outage, the first thing to do is to disconnect the modem from the cable and power supply, wait a minute or so, then reconnect them. That often works.”
Yes. It’s good be prepared with some basic checklists of things to do when the most common problems occur.
Print any User Guides that came with your equipment & software. Use a highlighting pen on any trouble tips.
Comcast must have to actually work at it to be as bad at customer service as they are.
We had only ever dealt with Verizon, and the product was good and the customer service outstanding.
Then my daughter went to college on the other side of Pennsylvania, and Comcast is the only available provider for her apartment internet and TV. Thus I entered CCH…Comcast Customer Hell. They ALWAYS track me to the wrong customer service center because I am calling from one geographic area and the account is in another. It takes me a minimum of two transfers–it’s been as many as seven or eight–to get the correct western PA call center, even though I tell them right up front that I need to be connected to that call center. I’ve gotten a direct number for that western PA call center too, but it’s either the wrong number, or it’s only good for a short period of time before they change it.
I will spare you the agony of attempting to set up automated monthly payments; suffice to say I gave up after a year of trying.
I live in a gated community. Unfortunately Comcast is our only cable option at this point in time. Their customer service, IMHO, always tries to make you feel stupid. There was a point in time (last fall) when we suddenly had chronic problems. Yup, they always wanted me to unplug the modem and router. At a point I simply refused. The customer service person also told me that my modem was too old and needed to be replaced. NONSENSE. All of it was nonsense. They ALWAYS insisted that a tech HAD TO come in to our house when the problem WAS ALWAYS outside. If you don’t let them in, no one will come to check the outside. Twice they came and each time they changed a splitter and blaming the tech before them. More nonsense. Before the third visit, I saw a Comcast truck working at one of the main Comcast terminals in our community. I asked if he was a sub-contractor or company man. He said, company man. When I told him of my experience, he laughed. He said that he was brought in to fix what the subs messed up. The last tech who came to my house was the same as the time before and this time he came with a supervisor. They confirmed that the problem was NOT in the house. The amount of aggravation was unbelievable. I suppose you noticed that Comcast pulled their ads touting their customer service and giving you $20 bucks if they don’t do it right. They just don’t get it. They must have some dossier on me.
Ron–I’ll call you and raise.
I once spent a whole afternoon with two–and finally after they called in another one– three supposedly “senior supervisors” scratching their heads, trying this and that, and traipsing around my house and property, trying to get my signal strength up to a level that would allow me to receive viewable TV service, instead of the “pixilation” and hash that made it impossible to actually view and enjoy TV.
They pulled up the diagnostics on the expensive 52 inch plasma TV outfit I had just bought on the strength of their promise of their new “high def” service, and showed me how my signal strength kept fluctuating, and was never high enough to get perfect reception (their fall back excuse whenever my service went out was always that I was “at the very end of the line,” and that these kinds of crazy things just inexplicably happened sometimes).
Well, something like three hours later I got a picture that still had occasional pixilation, and that fluctuation was still there, but they just basically declared it “close enough for government work” and left.
Sometime their fixes lasted for a few days or a week or sometimes a month or two or three but, then, something always went on the Fritz –mostly TV, sometimes Internet–let me tell you about the time I waited a week for someone to come out and try to restore my Internet service, and occasionally we had no phone service–usually combined with not TV either. Just maddening, and high priced maddening at that.
“Comcast is living under 250 gb limit per month.”
I should be so lucky as to have that high a cap on my usage. I’m on a two way satellite Internet service and my monthly cap is 17 gb. (Don’t have DSL or cable way out here in the boonies.)
Obviously, I get my movies on NetFlix DVDs and Dish Network DVR saved Encore movies.
Our customer service is pretty good though (it’s Wildblue).
Oh…and at my summer home in NM mountains, I have DSL which is very fast, has no cap on usage, and customer service is fantastic. Our little village has a population of about 795.
Dumped Comcast years ago for much the same reasons, went FiOS and never looked back.
Re: Customer Service…. I’m in institutional support where we support huge business customers with their globally implemented apps, and we had to go to India because the job market was, and still is, too constrained here. I have, however, seen a cultural difference that pervades even our high end engineers. Americans are so much better at thinking outside the box and working without a flight plan than almost everyone else in the world (eastern europeans being an exception). That’s something that even executive leadership has been able to see, but not exploit.
And if you are a customer getting support from India, it is always better to call around midnight because that would be the day shift for them. The best engineers work the day shift over there for obvious reasons, and you have to be cognizant of the time zone differences if you want to get someone who actually knows what they’re doing.
Heh, I lost my internet (and phone) on Saturday. Turns out that mice had moved into the half-wall at the end of our porch (right beside the bird feeder, natch), and while they were in residence chewed up my phone line. “Eek, they cut the phone lines! THERE’S NO ESCAPE!” Fortunately I got the line spliced before there were any nervous breakdowns from internet withdrawl.
I do tech support for a small local ISP. I always find it irritating when a customer calls to cancel because Century Link or Charter can give them cheaper service. I did support for Charter and left two weeks before they closed down local tech support and started outsourcing it. I’m fairly sure CL also outsources as I know they use contractors with a one year time limit for their business tech support. Meanwhile, our company hasn’t raised prices in the six years I’ve been here. If you never have to call tech support, I guess you can go with cheaper. Just don’t expect a lot of help if you need it.
(And for the record, I do have Comcast for my telecommuting which seems to be okay in this area. And, I would have you powercycle that modem. If I don’t have a customer do that, I will have that nagging feeling that I’ve missed something. So I aske them to humor me, and get it out of the way first thing.)
Here is a solution (a plan B) for when your internet Comcast cable (or Verizon DSL) stop working.
If you happen to have an Android smartphone, use the built it “hot spot” or its “USB teethering” to get your laptop on the internet via the Wireless phone network. It is very easy. It just requires the Android. I think iPhone has a similar feature as well.
I just googled this feature for other smart phones. There is a universal app at http://tether.com you can use to enable this feature on any smartphone. And then you just connevt your laptop to teh phone, and voila!
This shouls be plan B whenver your ISP fails.