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I may be intermittently missing for a day or so
06-28-2012, 02:34 PM
Once again, our internet connection at home is dead. As far as I can tell from some of the widgets and utilities I have running on my tower system, it died approximately 7 AM on 27 June, and hasn't come back yet on its own. In the past this kind of thing has been a simple inconvenience, but now that Peggy works part of the week from home over a VPN, it's now a critical failure. I spent about 40 minutes on the phone last night yelling at Comcast customer support, with the upshot that someone is coming out this afternoon -- allegedly; I've been screwed over by Comcast techs before -- to fix it. If all goes well, I'll be on line from home again by tonight. If it doesn't go well, I'm switching to FIOS and Dish Network, and I don't know what kind of interruption in my home service I'll have until everything is changed over.
Just a heads up for everyone.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I do say, they've had their chance to get your connection so that it just doesn't drop and have to have someone jiggle the wiring in the office.
It's probably time to initiate a changeover anyway... it's just a matter of timetable.
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
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FiOS usually tends to be pretty good, at least in my experience. My advice, Bob, is to check on customer feedback on dslreports.com. It's an older website, but still very reliable I think.
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Sadly FIOS turns out to be unavailable in my area -- there's only DSL. But the phone, DirecTV and DSL bundles are looking rather attractive.
Anyway, so I take an afternoon off from work (which I can ill afford) and sit around the house from 1 PM on. No tech shows up. 3:30 I call Comcast, and the automated system that picks up the phone says "We see that you are scheduled for a technician tomorrow between 9 and 11." Which, as you might guess, pisses me off.
When I finally get a live person, I rant about how the guy I talked to the night before told me one day and timeslot and actually scheduled me for a different day and timeslot. I pointed out the fact that I took off work to be there, that my wife critically needs connectivity by 7 AM the next morning, and that if they can't have me up and running by that evening, they are losing my business permanently. The rep goes into overdrive and submits an escalated request for a service call to be filled immediately -- specifically defined to me as between 4:30 and 6:30, and all but begs me to tell her that if they get me connected that I won't cancel my account. I refuse to promise anything, explaining that given my recent experience with Comcast technicians, I'm expecting the Titanic to dock in New York City sooner than I will get satisfactory results. I may have also used the phrase "can't find their own asses with their hands tied behind their backs" in expressing my opinion on Comcast support. Anyway, she submits the request, I get a new ticket number, and I thank her for both her time and her willingness to listen to me rant. It is now 10 minutes of 4; I sit back to wait for my (new) tech appointment.
Two hours later, the only person who has shown up is Helen, for her weekly crash at our place. 45 minutes later and we're out of the appointment window, and Helen and I debate whether I should even bother calling them back. I didn't even get a phone call saying "we can't make it, can we reschedule?", after all, let alone the 30-minute warning call saying they're coming.
7:30, Peggy gets home from work, and still no sign of life from Comcast.
At 8 PM, an hour and a half after the second appointment window passed, we head out for dinner at a local Benihana's for my birthday.
At 9 PM, during our dinner, I get a call on my cell phone from Comcast to reschedule an "emergency technician visit" back to Friday morning. I ask the person on the other end what they hell they're talking about. Apparently, when they blew me off on the 4:30-6:30 appointment, some kind of third appointment was triggered without consulting me about scheduling. (Or maybe they just didn't give a damn about the time slot, and came hours late without warning us.) I didn't quite find out whether someone had actually gone out to the house after we left, or if they just couldn't get someone out to the house despite the apparent seriousness of the matter, but the upshot was they wanted to know if they could send someone out the next morning in order to fulfill my demand that they fix it the night before. I told them no, because when no one had shown up when they said, the point had become moot. Once it was impossible to get service for Friday morning, my wife would have to go in physically to her job, resulting in a) elimination of the need for a Net connection by Friday 7 AM, and b) the absence of anyone to let them in, sign off on service, etc.
The rep was quite frantic at this point, though calm and quiet about it. Apparently, an expressed intent to cancel one's account gets a lot more attention than six years of patient and repeated complaints about poor service, and she desperately wanted to rectify the situation. I agreed to a service appointment on Sunday between 3 and 5 PM, but I made it clear that I expected to be shafted again.
If at that time they actually do fix our connection, well, that just means we have Net access until we set up arrangements with Verizon. If they don't, well, no loss that we aren't already suffering.
But the upshot here is that I will continue to be only intermittently present for the foreseeable future.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Good luck getting it fixed, Bob. Here's hoping Verizon is a better service for you.
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Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
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I am back. The guy came early and did a painstakingly thorough job tracking down the problem, according to Peggy, who was here while I was off helping my Mom out. He even went so far as to clamber up into our attic (in 95-degree (F) heat) to check the splitter up there. I suspect his early arrival was the result of my emphasizing how often I was blown off and explicitly telling the customer rep that while we'd accept the appointment today, I didn't actually expect anyone to really show up, based on past performance; and I'm certain his thoroughness was due to Comcast really, truly hoping I'll be caught by inertia and not change after a successful fix.
Sorry, Comcast. All you've really done is made it easier for me to research alternative packages from Verizon.
It didn't help that the tech warned that the part he replaced -- what looked to be a grounded splice for coax cable, located in outside box -- was likely to fail again the next time there was a power surge on the line, say during a lightning storm, such as we've been forecast to get over the next three days. (At least.) Sorry, Comcast, but I've never had phone service go out from a thunderstorm. You're just making Verizon look much better.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Man. Sadly I am totally NOT surprised at your trevails with Comcast. I've seen and experienced way too many horror stories. Consumer reports repeatedly rates Comcast dead last year after year in customer service.
Last year, they won Consumerist's uncoveted "The Golden Poo" award for "Worst Company in America".
Then there's this quote from their wikipedia entry - Quote:In 2004 and 2007, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) survey found that Comcast had the worst customer satisfaction rating of any company or government agency in the country, including the Internal Revenue Service.
I mean, when the IRS has a better reputation than you...
It's so bad they're trying to re-brand themselves. Watch out for any service in your area calling itself Xfinity because that's Comcast with a new name!
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Oh, they've been doing the Xfinity thing around us for years; they seem to be using it as a brand name rather than a new identity, though.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:It didn't help that the tech warned that the part he replaced -- what looked to be a grounded splice for coax cable, located in outside box -- was likely to fail again the next time there was a power surge on the line, say during a lightning storm, such as we've been forecast to get over the next three days. (At least.) Sorry, Comcast, but I've never had phone service go out from a thunderstorm. You're just making Verizon look much better. That does imply "not our problem, man." Uh, it is. It needs a surge suppressor of some sort, and it should have been installed then.
Logan: They're also doing Xfinity out here in Colorado, but again, it appears to be more like a brand than an identity, at least right now. With that said, though, it might work to catch the complete rubes who moved away from Comcast because, well, they're Comcast.
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"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
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And meanwhile, Time-Warner Cable along with Wireless 4G ISPs (Cricket, Clear) rule the land here in San Antonio. I won't recommend the Wireless 4G ISPs - if you're in a densely populated area, the cell tower that carries your service is most likely going to be inundated with connections (all those new 4G Android phones, you know). On the other hand, Time-Warner is pretty decent. We never had a whole lot of downtime, though it'd be real sucky sometimes around peak hours (because we had one of the lower bandwidth packages... I think ours was the second from 'just get on to check email' package). But other than that, Time-Warner was pretty satisfactory.
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All I'm saying is that here in Seattle, the situation is either Qwest/CenturyLink or Comcast.
And I want you to consider the fact that after time with Qwest, we were insanely happy to switch to Comcast. Brazil has decided you're cute.
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We were *thiiiiiiiiiiiiis close* to switching to CenturyLink this week. Their bundles looked amazing. I mean, $80 a month for 20Mbps Internet and 150-channel TV? Who wouldn't want that?
Then we got on the phone with them, and the bait-and-switch started up. By the end of the conversation (over an hour later), we'd lost a handful of features, and found out that it was $80/month for a year, and $130 a month after that.
We dropped a few TV channels with Comcast, and got down to that price within 20 minutes.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
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I would rant at length about my current provider but there are reasons it would be a bad idea for me to do so. Let me just say that I am in the same boat as Talienas, and am fully aware of Comcrap's reputation, and I am *still* planning on switching to them as soon as I can afford it.
--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs
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In my last year in university, "Comcast internet is down again" was one of my main reasons for going to campus on my days off of class. Not that the free air conditioning in the computer lab wasn't worth the bike ride. I'm currently living with AT&T DSL; the uprate is horrible, but I can't complain about the uptime.
-- ∇×V
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