Cox And Comcast To Dump @Home

randolph reports the drop of yet another shoe in the ongoing @Home tale: "The New York Times reports that Cox and Comcast are ready to stop providing @Home's internet service, replacing it with some unnamed internet service. The story also comments 'AT&T may let At Home file for bankruptcy before making another investment in the company.' Registration required, yada yada."

Comments

Lousy technical support.

[Maul]

One time I called tech support to tell them my service had been out for over a day. They responded by saying that there was a problem on their end that was causing some people to lose service. Fair enough, it happens. However, they the tech had to take 10 minutes to get that information. You would think that something big like an outage would be readily available to all techs.

I asked for the estimated time when my service would resume, and they had to transfer me to a level 2 tech support desk for me to get that information.

Of course none of this tops what the installation guy tried to pull on me (this was before self install options). I had just bought a new windows box, and we were getting @Home service. When the guy came to hook up the cable modem, he disabled the network card (dunno if it was an accident or on purpose). Needless to say, the service wasn't working when he tried it out. He said there was a problem with my network card and that I would have to buy one from them for $80. I told him to look in the hardware profiles, and he did. Sure enough, the network card was disabled in the hardware profiles. I told him to re-enable the network card, but he refused and told me my card was simply not working with their service, and I'd have to buy one of theirs. I was pretty annoyed, but he kept trying to push me buying a network card from them. To get rid of him, I told him I'd call the manufacturer and then call him back. He agreed and left. I then re-enabled the card, and naturally everything worked fine.

To this day I don't know if the guy was just an idiot, or if he did it in purpose. Either way, it doesn't speak very well for @Home. Unfortunately, they were the only broadband provider in the area at the time, so I was stuck with them... or 56K.