I don’t know what the hell Comcast is doing but they have all but lost me as a customer. Let me tell you what I’m talking about. I have Comcast Internet at home. I chose them because they are cheap and when their service works, they are pretty fast as well. I also chose them because I didn’t want to be locked into a DSL contract (the same reason I won’t switch to DirecTV).
I work at home and I work in the software business so you can imagine that during working hours I need solid internet access. When Comcast decides to not work, that doesn’t happen and often it takes a week or more to get things settled down again.
I don’t know what their problem is actually. I don’t know why their service is so bad. I have some ideas though. My best guess is all this talk of “speed boost”. They have some kind of technology that allows downloads to be super fast. I don’t know if they do it with caching or with some hardware trick or some combination of both, but the end result is that nothing works reliably anymore.
When I browse, there is a significant delay as I go to new pages and then everything spits down in a rush. For some, I can see how this would appear to be fast, but for me it’s worse than it used to be. My upload speeds have decreased as well. Things just don’t seem to flow correctly. I’m loosing random packets all over the place.
But all that would be fine if the modem would stay connected.
This is my 4th modem. I went through number 2 and 3 about a month ago when I had (literally) 10 Comcast guys here over a 10 day stretch trying to get my connection back up. It turned out (as I had told them from day 1) to be a problem at the head end (ie. Their fault) and not in my home.
Whatever, the modem is having trouble connecting today. It has been bad the past week for me here with this connection. Today it’s been the worst ever. I’ve had a 75 minute outage, a 45 minute outage and a 20 minute outage (along with a bunch of 1-2 minute deals). Clearly something is wrong.
I called Comcast customer service (again) which is based I think in Canada to complain. The person there was able to establish that not only was my modem not connected (as I had told them) but all of the others on my block were having the same issue. Hmn.. sounds like a problem in the line no? I thought so, and so did she but you know what? There was nothing she could do about it. All she could do was schedule a service call for me… on Friday!! Apparently if 4 others on my block called in and complained and also scheduled service calls a “red flag” would go up and a line tech would be called in to diagnose the problem… which is who should be here right now.
But no, Comcast is going to force 5 people to stay home from work to meet with a Comcast home rep (me on Friday and the 4 others, probably next week) who is going to look at their setup and say “looks ok from here, this needs to be checked outside on the line” before a Line Tech will be summoned to fix the problem.
And we wonder why they are so backed up with service calls? Probably because of this stupid policy. Probably because they are so into adding extra features like “speed demon” (or whatever it’s called) to their service before they even get their current system all shored up.
And they still send me flyers in the mail trying to get me to switch to their VOIP service. Ha Ha Ha.. Yea. So when my net goes down I won’t be able to call them.. good idea Comcast..
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