Fu**ing Comcast, again

[question everything]

It is not that there is a "service interruption." It is that Comcast is not listed in the phone book - not in the white pages and not in the yellow pages.

I had to find their webpage to find their 800 number!

And I really hate those "have a nice day" cheerful message when it is obvious that woman is smiling. Like they do in country music stations.. Why, on earth, do they think that this is the way to have a voice mail?

[Duer 157099]

1. I've got it committed to memory:

1-800-COMCAST

[question everything]

7. Thanks, I will. (nt)

[matcom]

2. www.comcast.net

who uses the phone book anymore? :shrug:

[question everything]

6. Comcast is also my Internet provider

and this is the first time that TV is off. Usually it is the Internet so I really like it when I do call them and I hear a message that I can "always access them via the Internet." Yeah, right, when I cannot log on..

[matcom]

8. DOH!

sorry about that. misread your post. i gotcha now.

fwiw, we have comcast and have only had 2 outtages in 10 years. except for the price they charge us, we have no complaints

[AlCzervik]

3. my comcast is out more often than it's up. I kept a tally for 3 months

and i had 29 days of service interruptions, those lasted more than 3 hours. I called up comcast and demanded they adjust my bill and they actually did, they gave me a month of cable and broadband for free--well not free since i paid for already but a month of no bill. Comcast used to be the only game in town but now we also have Surewest available.

[SoCalDem]

24. Gotta get with Dish.. Never out, and a 24 hr number if you need help

we love it..:)

[JuniperLea]

4. We just went through the same crap with Verizon!

ARGH!

Now we're told we live too far away from the base site to get the fast DSL... even though we've had it for nearly two years and it worked perfectly... and we never moved the house! Not one inch! I swear!


I think they oversold the area and we are suffering because of it... so some new subscriber a block away is getting my fast connection... for now anyway.

Bastids!

[kaygore]

5. I'm blessed! I have always been a Cox Internet user

Believe me, though, Road Runner is the worse. My friend's Comcast in Portland, OR, didn't seem that bad, but then I wasn't a user.

If you can get Cox, I highly recommend it!

[question everything]

9. Oh, the joy of monopoly

Just with utilities, only one cable company gets a market and you really have no choice.

We had Cox while living in California, Road Runner while in one part of the Twin Cities but ATT (later purchased by Comcast). Road Runner was actually cheaper and had more interesting choices in the basic channel, like Trio, than Comcast.

[mrcheerful]

14. Cox cable has a monpoly in saginaw michigan, they are the only cable

company there. I had problems with Cox during the 25 years I had them. They even went so far in the 1980's to ban certain cable channals in one of the small towns outside of the city after the Baptists decided they could boycot them until they took the channals off. The Cox internet service was terrible, every other day it would go down for 2 or 3 days, then you'd have to call them up and have your signal boosted so you could go back on line. Plus Cox would jack up their price every 3 months.

[RoyGBiv]

23. Not sure of the specifics ...

But, sometimes cable companies don't have a great deal of choice in the matter of whether they "ban" a station or not. Local franchise agreements, which they are required to get in the communities they serve, sometimes stipulate certain conditions like these, and only by agreeing to these do the companies even get to set up shop.

Cox in OK has a similar issue with a small suburb of OKC. The channel lineup there is completely different than what it is in the rest of the state, and Cox is required by the terms of their franchise agreement not to offer channels like MTV, BET, Oxygen, etc. in its default package. You can subscribe to them if you want them, but the agreement just as easily could have prevented that as well.

As for your Internet issue, the type of problem you describe is usually isolated to specific areas, even individual homes in some cases, and it can be a royal pain in the ass getting the company to fix it because a) it's hard to find and b) a lot of technicians don't put a premium amount of effort into fixing obscure problems. I've personally never had a problem with them at all, but I know a lady whose phone was going out every other day. She'd had dozens (literally) of technicians out there, and none of them had fixed it. She got lucky once and had her problem end up in the lap of the VP who heads the technical service department. Problem was fixed in 24 hours and hasn't returned.

[OldLeftieLawyer]

10. Been with Comcast for five years,

and the service - TV, Internet, and now phone service - has been stellar. A couple of outages for which my bill was comped, and always great tech support.

Yesterday, I got my bill, with an exorbitant tax charge - it's local - on my new phone service. From 33 bucks a month, it went to 55.50 a month, and I flipped. Called and spoke with a nice young woman, stayed on the line while she researched it - I have a feeling that staying on the line is the secret to success with any support lines - and finally she came back and deleted the charges.

I'll do the same thing next month, if I have to, since my deal was the $33 a month (for the first year) promotion, and I'm not about to be jacked another 40%, even by my own town.

[question everything]

11. That's the spirit. Several months ago we had interruption

in the Internet connection several days in a row. I did not hang up while hearing that there was a problem and they were "working" on it. I stayed on a line to get a "ticket number" and then called the billing dept. the next day to demand credit. And made sure that such credit was on the next invoice. Most people often forget all about this by the time they get the next month invoice.

But then, I am a person whose checkbook is always balanced to the penny ;-)

[OldLeftieLawyer]

12. So am I

You just have to put them on speakerphone - as I did - and start fixing a big salad for lunch.

heh heh heh

[Arkham House]

15. Geez...where do you live...?

I pay $68 a month for Comcast where I am--southern CT...I'd try the competition--but there isn't any...:-(...

[OldLeftieLawyer]

18. Alexandria, VA

right across the Potomac from Washington, DC.

My total bill - Internet, TV, and digital phone service with unlimited long distance and all the bells and whistles - is $132 a month.

[grasswire]

13. goodness

I had comcast for quite a few years with nary a problem with cable TV or with the internet connection. No outages, no trouble. Great customer service. It must be a regional problem.

[SeaBob]

16. Comcast

try 1-800-comcast

[Breeze54]

17. Why pay for tv?? It's only crap! Same as reg. tv! n/t

[question everything]

19. What, and miss John Stewart and Bill Maher?

Not to mention C-SPAN and CNN - on good days?

Perhaps because we moved a lot so always were looking for national news instead of the tunnel vision of local news. So CNN Headline News was always a welcome site.

[Breeze54]

21. I hate CNN but

I watch C-span on the net...it's cheaper!
I get 'national' news and local news on reg tv.
But I mostly watch The News Hour on PBS...

[blogslut]

20. here's a handy page

http://gethuman.com/us/

[Berserker]

22. Thanks for the link!

thats great