I have a love/hate relationship with Comcast. This is a story, and if you want the moral to it, just skip to the end of my review and you'll get the moral. Otherwise, read on as if it's an Aesop's tale and indulge me.
I waited a while and devised a point system to come up with my 2-star rating:
Availability--5 stars: everyone can get it. Not that we want it, but we can get it.
Channels available--4 stars: lots, but I'm no sports fanatic, and there are hundreds of channels to choose from. Why can't I find anything decent to watch though? You pay for everything.
Ease of setup--3 stars: if you're under 30, it's a snap. Over 30, grab a teenager. In fact, when we got the new cable boxes installed in our house, the tech actually asked us "Do you have any teenagers living here?" Yeah, that was a clue. Good thing we did.
Speed of internet--3 stars: I've had better, I've had worse. More later.
Customer service, phone--1 star: one hand is not connected to the other. No one has a record of what another one has done. Try to backtrack and you're lost in a black hole or you get disconnected.
Customer service, repairs-- negative 3 stars: no joke. If I performed at my job the way some of these people did, I would be on the unemployment line.
We had internet and reception issues for nearly a year. Since DSL was not available when the issues started, we called and called and had repairmen come to the house repeatedly to try to remedy the problem. Internet would drop for hours daily. Cable channels would be unavailable or "pixelate." Finally a tech diagnosed it: we were connected over 200 yards down the wire line from our house when there was a connection to the main line nearly 50 feet from our house. He put in a work order to have us reconnected. LAST FEBRUARY.
Call after call after call produced nothing. No one knew what I was talking about. They checked the wiring in our house. They came out again and checked outside the house from the house to the main line. But never the MAIN LINE. And then they'd check it again. I must have had 10 service calls, minimum (all with that famous "2 to 4 hour window -- can you be home at 10 AM on a Tuesday" sort of thing, like no one works?). So finally in July I had another guy come out who saw what initially went on. And I had him write down his name and his supervisor's name. BINGO. That proved valuable.
Monkeyed with them for another few months and said I'd had it.
MORAL: I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau -- Comcast HQ in the Washington, DC area. And I told them I wanted two months of comped service for all of my headaches. And I wanted it FIXED.
Within two weeks, I had calls and emails from big guns at Comcast. Suddenly they found all of the calls I made and all of the trips out to my house that were done for this ONE issue. I was rewired within a week and it was fixed. No dropped connections or reception issues since. And I got my two months of cable and internet comped.
I've learned that Comcast will take action when their backs are against the wall. I advise anyone with similar issues to do the same. read more