Took my equipment up to the Comcast office in Rockville today. Was dreading it after the time we’d had with the service (although the people were always nice enough - except for that nasty contractor). I stood in line for about 20 minutes and was seen by a cordial gentleman. At Comcast in Rockville they have plate glass covered cubicles and you have to slide the equipment through a 4×12″ opening. I wonder if they feel threatened.

The man behind the counter coolly, but cordially asked me to slide him the pieces of equipment one at a time and I did so, not so coolly, but cordially. He asked for my telephone number, then asked if I wanted to port the number elsewhere. I told him I had already done so. Then he looked at his screen, and quietly said, can I ask you a question? I said he could. He asked when we began having the problems. I said early August. He asked if anyone had switched the modem, I said yes, someone did at the end, but the issues still happened. He kept on shaking his head as he entered the equipement into the computer. I then got out my checkbook, opened it and waited for him to tell me how much the final bill would be. (I expected something around $75, but also expected a fight because we were leaving early (even though we never signed the contract). When we were done he said it was not going to cost anything. I must have looked shocked because he said, put your checkbook away. And apologized for the poor service.

Wow. All I can say is Wow!

Then again, this is Comcast. Perhaps the folks out in the Billing land won’t get the memo.

In June we decided to check out one of RCN’s competition, Comcast. We chose Comcast because of their digital voice messaging offer. I was intrigued by the ability to check voicemail online. I’d always thought this would be fun, to be able to listen to voice messages by clicking a link or button in a browser window. It was pretty cool, but with all the trouble we had with our connection - I wish we’d either stayed with RCN or gone to Verizon FiOS instead.

It began fine - we got hooked up with Comcast in a couple of hours, the technician was friendly enough and things seemed to be going smoothly. Sometime in August - around the first week, we began having outages in our Internet and dropped phone calls. We had a Comcast technician at our house pretty much every week, sometimes more often. My next door neighbor commented that the other neighbors were going to begin thinking I was having an affair with a Comcast technician.

I wrote about the entire sordid affair (there’s that word again) on dslreports.com (and was snubbed because I’d only just joined) if you want to read it.

About a month ago we got so fed up we decided to go with Verizon FiOS instead. They were supposed to come out and install their service last Thursday, but the representative I spoke to in September didn’t file the order correctly, so our telephone number was not ready to be removed from Comcast’s clutches. Verizon apologized and is giving us a free month of phone service for the mistake and because I reported the representative as being rude.

We were worried Comcast would hold us to a contract, but somehow the contract was never signed (or didn’t get to them). I’m kind of surprised Comcast has not called and tried to get us to stay, but perhaps Verizon still has not asked for our telephone number.

Ohh - I like this story:

75-Year-Old Woman Takes Hammer to Comcast Office

The mere fact I’m writing about Comcast indicates a problem. I don’t think I ever mentioned RCN when we had it for an Internet Service Provider - because it actually worked most of the time. Comcast, on the other hand, goes out regularly - including the phone service. The latest issue was with a dead phone. A call to Comcast resulted in a pair of technicians visiting us the next day and announcing that we had “too many splits” to the modem. That we needed to phone Comcast for a “change of service” and get an “independent line” to the modem.

I immediately phoned Comcast. It took 5 calls and 45 minutes to find someone who

1. Understood the problem
2. Was not “cut off” when being transferred to
3. Was not “cut off” when looking at my records
4. Agreed to not charge me $30 for the recommended solution

However, he couldn’t help me yesterday because there was a 2 hour block on the account. He gave me his extension and said to call back.

When I called back this afternoon I was again sent on a circuitous route - this time pushing buttons in response to the automated questions which kept on leading back to the main one. I eventually spoke to the same person who informed me that the reason some people charge is because they get commission points. It all makes sense and reminds me of the conflicting information given to me when my mom was being set up for Comcast.

So Thursday the will come and maybe solve the problem of dropped dial tones, telephone calls and spotty Internet service.

Question of the day- Is Comcast screwing with us?

A few weeks ago we switched to Comcast for telephone, cable TV and internet. So far I have to report that I’m not delighted. We’ve had at least three outages of the internet and two of the telephone. The technician who came out last week told me it was because we had “too much signal” coming into the house - it caused what I invisioned as a potential broadband heart attack. We had high-speed hypertension. Cable clogged coronary. The way to fix it was to have a “line guy” come out and reduce the incoming signal.

After that the phones and internet went out again. I called and the phone technician said the only thing he could see was too strong a signal coming into the house. While we were on the phone it fixed itself.

Earlier this afternoon I noticed that most of the lights on my modem were out. For a while I could still connect to the internet, but then even that was messed up. I called Comcast and talked to a friendly person on the phone. Again, while I was on the phone the problems cleared up.

So, while the issues may be very temporary, they are still issues. I make my living by being connected to the internet. A slight hiccup and I lose data. We never had this issue with RCN.

Maybe we should have tried Verizon Fios.

Too late now, we have a 2-year contract with Comcast. (And that’s subject for another post)

Despite the issues I encountered with my mom’s Comcast installation at Christmastime, I made the decision to move our service from RCN to Comcast. We’ve been happy enough with RCN except for their price hikes. We signed up with them a couple of years ago at a reasonable price. When our year of cheaper prices was up they also implemented a Digital Vision tier that we had to get because we had an HD converter box - so instead of just having to pay about $7 more for the HD converter, we had to pay $27 a month for it.

We’ve wanted a DVR for a while (and even tried to install a DVD recorder ourselves - with no success) so I called RCN to find out how much more a month the DVR service would be. They wanted nearly $20 more a month for that.

I tried to compare prices online and couldn’t so called Comcast to see what they could do. With their service we now will have an extra converter box, a DVR, HBO in addition to Showtime & Starz (the best of the movie channels) and online management of our voice mail (something I’ve been wanting for a while). All this for about the same, or less than we were getting with RCN. Of course it is a special offer - only good for a year or two, but still - we will be saving a little. By the time they’re ready to charge us more we can move to FiOs or something else.