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posted by martyb on Monday December 21 2015, @04:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the misery-loves-company dept.

So I'm sitting at work, on a Sunday, waiting for the Comcast tech that was supposed to be here between 8am and 10am.

It is now a little after 12pm, and I'm on the phone with customer service for the second time. I was supposed to get a phone call within 30 minutes of the first time I called (at 10:40).

I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

I finally called back at 11:30am, and got the same run around. I've been on the phone with them for over 30 minutes now, and have talked to customer service, and am now chewing on a supervisor.

I was just told (at 12:15pm) that the ticket was invalidated and was never put through. So I've been sitting here for NOTHING. They didn't bother to tell me this when I called in 2 hours ago, or to do the courteous thing and call or email me when the ticket got invalidated. Adding insult to injury, they also tell me that they only compensate for down service, not for people sitting waiting on their non-existent technicians.

It is no wonder people hate Comcast and many other internet service providers. I remember now why I swore off using Comcast for anything.

So now, because misery loves company (and many people hate their ISP), what are your horror stories?


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 21 2015, @05:35PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 21 2015, @05:35PM (#279334)

    You're just not paying enough money. In the 90s for $400/month to $800/month or so you'd get a local telco tech on site within an hour of a service disruption if you had a hicap circuit (T1, etc) if remote testing to the DSU/CSU indicated a problem with the line. Obviously the more rural or natural-disastery the less likely they'd get there in an hour. Oh and I'm talking about within an hour of service disruption, not a one hour window, or an hour after you call. Within an hour of the red light ticking on in the CO... Also I'm talking civilized america away from coasts, not international circuits to taco bell. Bell canada or WTF they were called were also a little weird. Maybe they'd send a residential cannon fodder tech to screw around till a hicap guy arrived, but they'd have a warm body on site in an hour, at least.

    Oh, whats that you're saying, you only want to pay $50/month for the whole service, not $500/month for the local loop alone? Oh well. Guess you get what you paid for, which certainly isn't very much.

    If you want a meg and a half of internet access with bullet proof SLAs and service monitoring and fast response, its available out there in the market if you have a financial need for it and are willing to pay for it. If you're not, well, you get what you paid for, however little it is.

    There's this weird belief in the tech community that it automagically costs $500/month to sling AMI/B8ZS on a piece of old barbed wire, magical somehow, and running DSL or DOCSIS is magically a tenth the cost. It isn't. Its just your service will be a tenth or more less responsive and effective.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by cmn32480 on Monday December 21 2015, @06:12PM

    by cmn32480 (443) <reversethis-{moc.liamg} {ta} {08423nmc}> on Monday December 21 2015, @06:12PM (#279353) Journal

    So let me be sure I have this right:

    Paying for services at the rate they are offering is not enough to get half decent customer service? Regardless of the dollar figure I'm paying, cancelling an appointment with no notice to me and wasting my time is somehow OK?

    I'm not asking for a bullet proof SLA. If I was looking for that, I'd be getting private fiber run, not standard Comcast Business service.

    The 1.5mbps T1 is simply not enough to run a business on anymore. Generally reliable, but certainly not always. I've had T1's that were down more than they were up. Regardless of what is behind the internet connection, a T1 is not really enough to run more than one or two people in an office, and even that might be a struggle. 10 years ago, I was able to run the server side of a large corporation with 50 branch offices on a bonded T1 at 3mbps. Today, given the problems and bandwidth hogging of Web2.0, it isn't possible, even with most services hosted offsite.

    What I really want for my money is decent service, both the internet providing part and the customer part. It is outright rude to cancel an appointment and not tell the person you are supposed to meet.

    And for the record, we are paying in that several hundred per month range.

    --
    "It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 21 2015, @07:16PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 21 2015, @07:16PM (#279388)

      Paying for services at the rate they are offering is not enough to get half decent customer service?

      Yeah. You want T-1 class of service, its out there, just not at $29.95/mo. Or frankly at $295.99/mo

      Regardless of the dollar figure I'm paying, cancelling an appointment with no notice to me and wasting my time is somehow OK?

      Well it kinda ties into #1 above, you say now that you'd pay $1/mo extra to handle the labor of calling back for every cancelled appointment, yet when it comes time to write the check... of course they're not off the hook, its (current year) why they can't have a web and/or text message and/or email fully automated hands off gateway is a mystery, and that wouldn't cost much nor cost much of anything going forward. I remember Bell Atlantic or some other hell hole of a local loop provider would call back on any trouble ticket except no trouble found, they'd just silently cancel those and "haha" when you complained, they were not a pleasure to deal with intermittent issues, I can sympathize.

      You're gonna pay the money anyway. Either in your salary doing nothing but herding cats / baby sitting every time there's a problem, or you can pay professionals to do it for you. So its not like the company is saving money.

      run a business on anymore

      Whats changed? Nothing? If you're hosting something its in a data center or its cloudy. If the receptionists and cube dwellers are just streaming youtube 8 hours a day you got bigger problems. My cruddy phone service isn't much faster. My home cable modem has 3-4 people pounding on it sometimes with no real issue.

      And for the record, we are paying in that several hundred per month range.

      Well, for a couple hundred more, at a real telco, you'd get real telco service. The price I quoted was the local loop charges I saw on orders more than a decade ago back in my misspent youth at a telco. On one hand inflation has only increased the cost of everything including the nearly 100% labor the cost of a local loop represents. On the bright side what your local loop connects to is likely very cheap.

      There are other alternatives. Rather than paying one provider 20x as much for 10x the service, you could buy two, even three different technology links. A "business" cablemodem, a DSL, and a wifi WISP (are those still around?). Maybe even one of those cell phone adapter things that are admittedly very expensive per gig. Go ahead, provider 3 of 4, make my day...

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by chromas on Monday December 21 2015, @08:40PM

        by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 21 2015, @08:40PM (#279436) Journal

        And for the record, we are paying in that several hundred per month range.

        Well, for a couple hundred more

        Always a couple hundred short. This works in other areas, too: "We are sooo clooose to curing juvenile diabetes. If only you'd give just a dollar more." "Ohh, we could add email-notification to our appointment management system, if only we had $n+200."

  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday December 21 2015, @09:04PM

    by sjames (2882) on Monday December 21 2015, @09:04PM (#279443) Journal

    No. Nobody here is expecting 5 nines with a tech on site within an hour of a detected fault for $50-75/month. They'd just like reasonable performance (say, 3 nines) with a tech that shows up on the day they say they will after you call them. Many of the things I want/expect would actually save them money.

    For example, rather than making me set up an appointment for 5 days later for them to send someone who has no diagnostic equipment and no ability to work on the pole (not even a tall enough ladder to give it a shot), I would like them to be able to check status of nearby modems so they can see that it's a line problem affecting the entire street.

    I would like people who speak passable english and don't lie to me about their name (imagine that, the first lie happens before you even say a word!) and who know that if you don't have WiFi, then WiFi can't be the problem.

    I would like for them to not have lying as a matter of policy. For example, do NOT tell me that only my house has no service, especially when I asked my neighbor and his service is down too. Do not tell me that a ticket is in the system and progressing when you didn't even enter one.

    It might be nice if their tier 2 people knew more about their network than I do (even though I have not hacked them and do not work for them).

    Ma Bell for all her problems used to be able to manage that when you only paid $20-30/month for POTS.