Slashdot Mirror
Comcast Is Reading Your Blog
Paolo writes "A Washington student got a bit of a shock when he received an email from internet service provider Comcast about comments he had made on his blog. Brandon Dilbeck, a student at the University of Washington, writes a blog and used it to complain about the service he was getting from Comcast. Shortly afterwards he got an email message from Comcast apologizing for the problems and suggesting he might look at a guide it had posted on its web site. Lyza Gardner, a vice president at a Web development company in Portland used Twitter to complain about the company and was surprised to be contacted directly.
Comcast is now monitoring blogs as a way of improving its image among customers. The company was ranked at the bottom of the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index."
Or so I expect, now. It's good PR, I saw a little segment about the twitterer on some network news program this week.
Reading a public blog and giving free tech support about problems posted in the blog is good.
I'm really upset with my comcast internet. I wish it was much cheaper and even faster.
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
Contacting people on teh Intarweb directly and offering them platitudes to make them change their weblog posts is easy.
Actually making improvements to your services to improve your customers' experience when regional cable monopolies ensure that you're the only game in town? That's hard.
Quit the bandwidth throttling, or conversely, just be straight forward with honest numbers about the service. I live with bandwidth throttling with my pipe, but my ISP was very straight forward with me that if the traffic load spikes they will rebalance accordingly, and that will on occasion throttle my speed in some cases. If Comcast were at least honest about issues, they'd gain a lot of respect.
So many companies are so worried about their image, they actually hurt their image more with the tactics used to keep their noses clean.
I'll be moving in a year or so to an area serviced by Comcast, and am weighing them against the FIOS thing carefully. How Comcast handles their customers will be key to that decision. Comcast used to stand for being a great cable service company, and I would like to see them stand tall again.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Comcast is helping their customers, yes? They are crawling/indexing/filtering blogs that are completely public, yes? So what's the problem? What am I supposed to be outraged about this time?
"It feels like nobody ever really reads my blog," he told the New York Times.
"Nobody has left a comment in months."
Oh, that's the problem. Seriously, this is a lousy post.
As long as they are using public means like blog-monitoring or using search engines and not underhanded means like customer/IP-monitoring/stalking, this is probably a very good thing. If only every company would listen to what their customers say in public and use that information to improve customer service.
The minute they start monitoring me to see what blogs I post to, the minute they start stalking my online activities, or the minute they start using what I say to retaliate against me is the minute they've gone too far.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The story is that it's COMCAST.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Cancel his account and get 56K dialup through another company. Yeah, that'd show 'em.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
I'd basically say that if Comcast is using this to supplement its normal customer support channels (rather than replace them entirely), it's a good thing, especially if they beef up the ability of customer support to help the customer out before it gets to the venting on the web stage.
...and then complains because it was read and responded to? I would be bothered if it was a private intended email sent through their email relays, but not to comcast, and they responded to that. But he put it on a public, blog, WOW maybe they are using something like google searching for these negative remarks and OH MY GOSH trying to make the customer happy by suggesting things!!! WOW...OK sarcasm off. Come on, if you don't want anyone to be able to read it, don't post it on the web. Sorry to say but the title should read "dumb blogger shocked when public blog read by someone" OK I admit I'm assuming it's a public blog, but a quick scan of the article didn't indicate it was private/secured in anyway. So unless I missed something, this is a non-issue.
Those who can, do.
Are they monitoring your network traffic looking for key-words or searching the web for comments relating to them?
If they are monitoring your network traffic that would make me a dissatisfied customer right there! Maybe make a blog post about them invading your privacy by monitoring all your traffic (ie. "wiretapping" as defined by that university project that monitored Tor traffic).
they're actually inserting the responses directly into their customers' page requests.
If an ISP wanted to and was willing to violate customer privacy, they could tap your connection for phrases like "my isp sucks" or the URLs that indicated posting to the top-1000 blogs.
This can be automated, with followup by a human if desired.
That's what I meant when I said if COMCAST starts stalking me or seeing what blogs I post to.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
somebody else is actually reading my blog? Wow, I never thought I'd see the day my hit counter went to 2.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I wrote a website a long long long time ago about weatherbug and they contacted me directly years ago to let us know they had changed their software. I was pretty impressed that they took the time, but it was a very good idea in their case. They had kind of screwed themselves early on by bundling spyware with their app and while they don't anymore, they still haven't fully recovered from the rep they earned themselves (I'm still surprised at how many hits that page *still* gets)
Comcast is in ur internetz.... reading ur blog.
Comcast is now monitoring blogs as a way of improving its image among customers.
Here is an idea don't throttle P2P connections also, don't block websites, don't keep logs, and stand up for fair use and anonymity on the internet. Do that and you might be more liked. But keep throttling P2P connections and acting as a puppet of congress/MPAA/RIAA and people will hate you for it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So a company has employees who read information posted to a public forum. Big deal. In the article (yes, I read it) the author wrote, "The rest of his e-mail may as well have read, 'Big Brother is watching you.'" Um...how? "Big Brother" is the government, not a company employee who reads *public* opinions of the company's service and responds to the company's *customer*. I think this is great. As a Comcast customer, I *want* them to respond to customer opinion.
Oh, hey, I just got an email from Comcast myself. I gotta go.
Life is short; think quickly.
It's a public blog. If someone who is 20 levels in the company above the minions they have in their phone support offices wants to know how their customers are really being treated, I can't imagine a better place to look...maybe aside from their /dev/null folder where all of the Better Business Bureau and Attorney General complaints go.
The only way the average person usually gets the attention of a company that size is to cough up the money for a lawsuit or quit using them along with about 10 million other disgruntled customers. Your leaving the company would need to show up on a graph so some PHB may finally ask why the customer numbers are going down.
Maybe I should start blogging about Cox Communications. I just moved into their service area, and I'd gladly take Comcast back.
Hi everyone... We just found this post.
Wanted to let you know that Comcast is striving to improve the customer experience for all of its customers...
We love you!
For every blog that gets read, 100 newspapers (online or printed) get read. So one wonders if this lady will get a call too: http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080726/BUSINESS/807260323 If not, then Comcast is picking off small low-lying fruit instead of dealing with the larger, more widely seen issues. Silly.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
The headline and article make it sound like this is a bad thing. But is it?
A company is striving to make happy customers, and they've found that they can listen (gasp!) to what they're saying and try to help them.
They have probably found a way to scour blogs, forums, and apparently twitter and aggregate it for people to review and follow up with. I don't consider that a privacy issue if it's in a public location for all to read, as blogs typically are.
That's a whole lot better than not taking any action at all, or trying to shut down the offending blog. Normally we'd bitch about a company sending out the lawyers, but sending out someone from customer service? Sounds like a win to me.
-David
Reading your blog is not big brother. The blog is public. They could have a few generic scripts that query Google for combinations of keywords, and when they show up, someone looks at the page. We have several newswatcher scripts set up at work that monitor news articles that mention our company. Nothing sinister here. You can remove the tin foil hat.
So am I. Be afraid.
After reading the title i was half expecting to read on to find out that concast begins filing lawsuits against bloggers. Offering apologies and help was a pleasant surprise.
Don't worry AC, Twitter is just trolling.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Everyone so far seems to have been skirting the issue here. If Comcast now has a staff of people tasked with surfing teh interwebs and responding to comments about their service in blog postings, that's fine. Perhaps a misguided use of resources (how about some actual customer service instead of lip service responses to people you've already lost as customers?), but that's their choice.
If Comcast is using some sort of automatic filtering on their users' accounts that indicate whenever a user types the word "Comcast", and then responds with an email to that person's X&%YZ@comcast.net address, then there's an issue.
What we don't know, and what the article doesn't say, and what we have no way of knowing, is which of these two methods Comcast is using. A lack of transparency regarding what you pay for what you get, and a lack of transparency regarding service is already a PR issue (nightmare) for Comcast. This simply compounds that issue.
Please remain on the line, while our agents finish surfing the web reading blogs, Slashdot, dilbert.com, and the "Extra Mustard" page on cnnsi.com.
The headline kinda scared me. But in all reality, who cares? They're not doing it by analyzing packets; if I were a smart company I'd Google for myself and find people who have issues. If they provide a method of contact, I'd be stupid to not contact them by that method and try to work out the issue.
Can't stand Comcast as they're a monopoly and their prices are high, and customer service is terrible; however, they're service has always been reliable for me (internet, TV).
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
Comcast had... You know... Some kind of decent customer service or something...
Read blogs? They have no right!
I know no one else is. Now I finally have an audience!
Don't put advice in your sig.
It favors people who complain a lot. I shouldn't have to go public with a problem to get my ISP's attention. The most annoying people get their money's worth and the people who use more efficient ways to communicate with their ISPs are ignored. Well, I guess I'm going to cause a stir every time something is wrong with Comcast.
That's not how customer service is supposed to work, and it's creepy.
They should (1) keep their systems running so that people don't have to complain, and (2) if things fail listen to people calling/mailing in and try to fix their problems.
If they do (1) and (2) reasonably well, they don't need to read people's blogs.
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?q=comcast&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
I write a weekly column for a local newspaper. I wrote how ISP's in general are monitoring traffic and are playing with throttling.
I got a call from a Comcast PR person about what exactly they do and don't do. I just thought I myself was particularly popular and that even large ISP's were reading my articles.
Thanks for bursting my bubble!
A decisions might go like this
Plaintiff :
They are reading my Blog !!
I want to sue !!
Defense :
Impossible we don't have any overseas staff that can Comprehend English above grade level 5. ,al of our English speaking staff were on holiday in Israel when we allegedly read your Blog
So we cannot read your Blogs
Judges /jury final decision .
We find for the Company/ Defense
Courts decision:
Reading is not reading comprehension ,
Sometimes I get the feeling that even YOU don't believe some of the insane things you ramble about on here.
I mean, if you were THAT crazy, you'd have been locked up and heavily medicated a while ago...
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I've been a Comcast customer for about 5 years simply because I have no choice...There are no other providers in my area. I use Vonage for my phone but despite that, Comcast keeps calling me and bugging me to switch to their VOIP service. I tried their TIVO service for about three months and its horrible. Their internet is slow and frequently goes down even though my line is physically fine. The word "Comcastic" has a new meaning all of its own to me and it isn't a compliment. Now, it sounds like they're playing Big-Brother. Either they read this blog or they are doing deep packet inspection. The later wouldn't surprise me, since they were throttling p2p traffic.
I hope they are reading and improving TV service too. I mean the fact that they send your local channels through unencrypted qam, but you have to pay for a box to get Sci-Fi in HD blows. Why should I have to do that?
As for the internet, look at broadband reports and repair some of your routers (the ones constantly showing up as problems). Their network topology looks far more complex than it should be and I suspect a number of problems come from that.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Suggesting that Twitter is trolling is so redundant it's bordering on a tautology.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Go to news.google.com and look up "Comcast Vermont." You'll see articles in every Vermont daily paper about how Comcast has dropped 8 channels from its basic analog service (including MSNBC and Comcast's own cable news station). It's telling people who miss those stations from their $18-a-month plan they can get them back by going to a $58-a-month digital plan. The state may be able to act against this, since Comcast is only allowed one "rate change" a year, and this would be the second, if dropping channels and charging the same price counts as a rate change. Comcast claims it doesn't. In Comcast's eyes, it can drop any plan to a single channel, offer more expensive plans to those who want their channels back, and it hasn't changed rates at all.
Disclaimer: My brother-in-law is a Comcast executive. He's a decent guy.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Not only that, but Comcast is actually addressing its clients' concerns and negative feedback, as opposed to being oblivious to them.
Now, to really score, Comcast would need to fulfill some additional criteria:
Let me tell you something, Comcast. You ruined your own reputation. Now it's going to be real hard for you to erase that. See what happened to Microsoft? (Hey, Sony, stop snickering.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
1-800-328-7448
"High Baby ... Thank you for calling. Beautiful girls on a virtual chat line are waiting for you in their sleek little nighties ... "
Please tell me that's the new voice of Comcast Tech Support.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Comcast is in ur internetz.... reading ur blog.
O Noes!
Comcast is now monitoring blogs as a way of improving its image among customers.
Seems more like damage control to me-- greasing the squeakiest wheels. When customers and employees of a company have to go outside of that company's established customer service channels to get/provide something approaching decent service, that's when you know that company's customer service well and truly sucks.
I had a similar experience with American Express almost 10 years ago, when they incorrectly stuck me with $12,000 worth of someone else's balance transfers and refused to sort it out for months. I was about to lawyer up so they'd take my next attempt to rectify it seriously, and then I was contacted out of the blue by a higher-up at the company who saw my post on the now-defunct amexsucks.org. Even though everything was straightened out, I will never use AmEx again, for anything, after that experience.
I hope Comcast realizes they've got to fix their established customer service channel for all of their customers, instead of just setting up a new one to deal with the most vocal pissed-off ones.
Hopefully they'll pay attention to what they read. Their service is atrocious, anything would help.
Do you have ESP?
Google Blog Search makes it easy for me to track a phrase of something I'm interested in - like Autism Speaks, or a Dragon*Con, or even my own name, and I use that regularly to keep track of people who I can direct to my stuff or who might cause me problems later.
A simple search set up for them with "Comcast" in the search term could have pulled this up.
All it shows is that Comcast is looking out for PR blunders in the making and responding to them. They shouldn't let them happen in the first place, of course, but at least give them credit for being smart.
There are several services (e.g. google) that monitor blogging sites or the web in general for key words or phrases, then alert you via email. They tend to be pretty fast, too.
So all that's probably happening is that someone set google alerts to send email to their support line when certain key words are found, someone looks at it, and responds if it is relevant.
*yawn*
If they read blogs they are accessing public information. So it is at least not invasion of privacy as it is whenever email is read/filtered.
If the reading of blogs can help to improve the service that essentially means that the ISP in question has an internal problem with their customer satisfaction tracking. But reading blogs can of course provide more meat on the bone that any issue tracking system can't resolve.
More problematic is the cases where ISP:s are reading your web habits and are injecting or replacing information in the web pages you visit. Sometimes resulting in data corruption.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
While your premise is technically correct, I'll provide a counterpoint to your point.
Large companies like Comcast (or Microsoft or most others), with some good aspects and some bad aspects, do indeed tend to be treated as one big monolithic blob --because that's how they're asking to be treated. Comcast is using its name as a brand. That's what it means to be Comcast. So, while it's not surprising that there can be factions within, we will still rate whether Comcast is nice or nasty on an overall scale. The responsibility for this falls on upper management which oversees both the Customer Service Department and the Lie About Unlimited Bandwidth^W^W^W^WMarketing Department. If Customer Support wants to improve its image separate from the rest of Comcast, they can spin off into "Support-A-Tronics -- A Division of Comcast(TM)" and change their logo. Of course, I've heard quite a few not-so-good things on Slashdot about Customer Support itself.
In the same way, I disagree with people who keep saying that "companies aren't evil --just the people within them". As a whole, companies can indeed be evil, greedy, upstanding, etc, just as people can be evil, greedy, etc. even if you can break their actions down into component actions which, by themselves, are not inherently evil etc.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
If Comcast didn't give crap service, and/or actually listened to their customers when they complain the first time...then they wouldn't have to dig around looking for public complaints and attempt damage control after the fact.
Yeah, it's good to make an effort to fix mistakes, but this is a kind of bass-ackwards way of dealing with problems related to the company's ability deliver services effectivel. Not to mention creepy.
I'm not a Comcast customer, but I'm sure they're on par with most other big telcos, who are completely happy to forget about you once they've got you paying a monthly bill.
Hey Comcast: I switched over to AT&T U-verse for Internet because they were less slow than Comcast and certainly cheaper. I would have switched over to them for TV too but their HDTV image quality is hideous (too bad, they're way cheaper, SDTV works nicely though). C'mon Comcast, if you can't outperform AT&T you just aren't trying. DOCSIS 3 should fix this, though you might want to go ahead and replace your rotting coax with FTTH in case AT&T recovers from their rectal-cranial inversion and quits trying to shove U-verse through their antiquated copper lines (27Mbps for HDTV and Internet for the entire house, WTF?)...
If I lived in Verizon FiOS territory I wouldn't bother prodding you. You're just screwed there.
Exactly. It could be summed up as Commcast is listening to what is being said about it in public and trying to improve upon its services based on that.
This is more or less exactly how a good corporation should behave.
Comcast commercials say when over-the-air broadcasts switch to digital in early 2009, Comcast will maintain its analog service. However, I have heard rumors that they are maintaining their analog service for just 1 year and then switching completely to digital. I have two Televisions in my household and one uses the analog service...I've noticed that a few channels have been removed from the analog lineup. In their place is an onscreen message saying "channel has been moved to the digital domain". That seems to lend some credence to the rumors I've heard, which implies Comcast is lying. If they do remove analog, I hope they redistribute it into the digital spectrum and use less compression on existing hidef channels.
Exalead.com offers enterprise solutions to organize and better exploit what they call "the Extended Informational Assets" of the enterprise, including "information on the web, including blogs, e-mails, RSS feeds, etc." This is for the enterprise to organize structured and non-structured data from heterogeneous sources, internal and external to the enterprise, and better exploit said data for decision making processes to give them a better competitive edge. This EIA includes comments, blogs, etc., on the interenet. Such solutions are called BIMS (Business Intelligence Management Systems). Clearly Comcast must using such a system. Personally, I'd like to buy stock in Exalead. Soon, every company will be using this stuff. Is it an invasion of privacy? Not if you've publicly posted something on the internet. Now, PAY ATTENTION COMCAST: I'm satisfied with the services I purchase from you. They work as they are intended to, and I have no complaint there, but, What's up with the prices? You offer affordable package deals, triple play for $99/month, etc., but, there are dozens of hidden charges, and the price doesn't stay the same. A year after switching in, and after even having cut half the TV channels and other services I initially purchased, I'm paying c. $200.00/month, for this triple play that you are still advertising for $99.00 a month. What gives? Also, when we initiated use of your services, we were told we had 8 hrs of international phone calls included, which was then cut to 4 hours, and, then the service simply disappeared. When we called asking why international calls are now appearing on our bill, you deny having ever offered this service.... Your services work fine, IMHO, but, your pricing practices are dishonest. We're considering Vonage and DirectTV, now, solely based on your pricing fiasco. I'd rather stick with your services, and the convenience of one bill, but, I don't like feeling like I've been lied to and cheated.
-- tonybaldwin.me
Your local public service commission and the FCC might have a different opinion about the way common carriers spend their money. Companies that use public servitude have public obligations. Cable companies, which are often protected by state and local monopolies, have even more. It is outrageous for them to waste money combing through blogs to shut up complaints. That money is supposed to be spent on communications equipment they promissed to buy, not PR.
In shock news today it was discovered someone somewhere actually read a blog.
Whoopy do.
(Actually given most the blogs I've seen it someone reading a blog and taking notice of anything in it is probably news ;) )
Struggling very hard and failing to see the news in this...
Other than it features Comcast in a good (?) light for once.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
The story is that even as recently as a few months ago, the expected reaction from any average $SELF-PROCLAIMED_CORPORATE_OVERLORD would been to see themselves as unfailing by the grace of God and their MBAs, and to launch an overblown attempt to silence the blogger with nastygrams trying to enforce at lawyerpoint some obscure non-disparagement clause (that would never hold up in court anyway) from a click-thru user agreement, as well as alleging DMCA etc. takedown rights at the critics' providers/schools/employers, and maybe even filing libel/hacking/piracy/whatever charges or having a shill flame in prominent places about the political or religious affiliations of those analyzing, documenting or disclosing the shortcomings and misgivings.
Making the blogosphere explode in revolt all the more, but that seems to be a lesson some companies have apparently learned by now, as they are finally starting to see in particular experienced customers as a source of useful feedback again, rather than only as otherwise annoying cash-cows.
"Lyza Gardner, a vice president at a Web development company in Portland used Twitter to complain about the company and was surprised to be contacted directly."
Well, if you are using a person with hundreds of sockpuppets, no wonder you get the message across.
Oh, the other Twitter.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I used Comcast for a year. The service was spotty and never, not once, lived up to any of the hype on their advertisements. You know what I did? I called them and complained. I had a list of complaints that ranged from browser compatibility issues in their bill-pay website to connections never reaching the advertised speeds.
After almost every call I made to them, they'd call back to do a followup survey on my experiences with the call. I'd repeat a few of my complaints and then take their survey: "Yes, I had a good experience on the call. Yes, the representative was polite. Etc."
You know what they never did? Address any of the complaints. Never, not once. So I switched to Qwest and haven't had any problems.
So Comcast, you know what would be way easier than scanning people's blogs? Listening to the people who go out of their way to call you with legitimate complaints.
I guess if you read the same thing over and over again you'd hide from the world too. If I was a Charter employee reading complaints about them it would be like eating a turd sandwich everyday: it's so bad you'd never get use it.
BTW, Charter is both evil and sucks. They make Comcast look like a puppy and kitten playing together with a ball of yarn.
You have to have money or great insurance to get treatment for psych issues nowadays, and I'm sure twitter is far too crazy to have such means. He's probably more like the people on the street screaming at imaginary enemies, except he just hasn't quite hit rock bottom yet.
... Comcast is watching You!
I can see him walking around with his sign:
"The end is nigh for M$ shills!"
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I can't help but think that this is a good thing, and I wish that more companies would do things like this.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Just curious...
I'm not sure I'm a fan of this trend where people think that a company should just scour the interwebs looking for any and all complaints (including so-called 'open letters' which are no more than a blog post that don't actually get -sent- to the recipient) and address them there.
Most companies do have a support site, hotline, whatever.. and more and more it seems people are ignoring those and instead griping on the internet.. the griping some more if apparently the company failed to be Web 2.0 social up the wazoo and find the blog post + react to it there in an official capacity.
I can understand that people get frustrated when the support line is dysmal (long waits, long flowchart q&a back-and-forths, etc.) and then take to the internet, but imho it's the second station - not the first.
Especially if you're a smaller company that can't exactly hire somebody to scour the web several hours per day, let alone hire them to respond to those posts, it's rather frustrating when encountering such behavior while eyeing the - say - tech support forum being rather quiet, no post from the person there; and -not- for lack of attention/quality of replies/etc. but simply because the userbase thinks the company -will- be scouring the web.
To avoid their search bots, say, "The lousy cable company that starts with the letter 'C'" instead of "Comcast". Or "Crapcast" or "Comcrap".
Table-ized A.I.
Here here!
You mis-dialed, that's 1-800, not 1-900.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Well they desperately need to do something to improve customer service because as it is I would rather have sharp pens shoved under my finger nails than go back to that nightmarish cavalcade of misery and grief that is Comcast.
Clearwire does this, too.
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
After hearing all the horrible stories about cable ISPs, I was very reluctant to go with TWC (Time Warner Cable) when I was working in San Diego. But, I was too far from any CO for decent DSL. And, a T1 at some $300+ a month was too expensive.
Turns out, TWC has a "business class" of service: 12 Mb/s down, 1.2 Mb/s up (and I routinely saw 15 down and 1.5 up), for $105 a month. Any reasonable number of static IPs you need (4 to 8 is considered reasonable -- I was happy with one); no traffic shaping shenanigans, no quotas, whatever servers I wanted to run (just SMTP, and SSH for me), etc.
I wonder if Comcast has a similar offering in greater Seattle. But, given their tricks, I'd be loath to use them, even if they did.
So, for now, I'm on a hokey WiMAX link. Sometimes, dialup would be faster.
In Liberty, Rene
Actually this is old information within the company. Many employee's have been called in by management for posting any information that could be negative towards the company.
I know for a fact one person who was called in for stating some information that is not private nor sharing of business information that can damage the company.
So for the typical person, this is not really a big issue unless you're paranoid, but for anyone who works in the company; even in the smallest department, you can be reprimanded or even worse just for speaking your mind.
The problem isn't that comcast doesn't know about issues its customers are having.
It's that they don't actually fix the problems that customers have in a timely manner.
They have been making a noticeable effort to improve customer service though. They actively monitor and handle issues on http://getsatisfaction.com/comcast as well. It's not as responsive as online chat, but you'll get set up with someone above the unplug-it-for-15-seconds level. Often, they'll even give YOU a call.
Maybe they do care after all.
This post approved by Shampoo.
That's going to pretty good lengths to avoid just giving people a reliable service to begin with!
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I have never had any issues dealing with Comcast Technical Support or Billing. Each time I called, they successfully solved my problems. Maybe the people calling are not answering the right questions or are technically inadequate. Anyone who has worked help desk/technical support know which users I am talking about.
The Consumerist is chock full of incidents and complaints reported by Comscat victims, I mean customers. The Consumerist recently had their "Worst company in America" contest to which Comscat is winning 2nd place.
Anyway, I read the Consumerist and I thank them. When I moved from Scottsdale Arizona to San Francisco 3 months ago Comscat was one of my choices for Internet service and cable. If it wasn't for the Consumerist I would've ended up using their crappy soul-sucking service.
I ended up going with DSL Extreme, which I'd just like to add are absolutely wonderful.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
... I write a blog about it?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This happened to me with Comcast twice actually. Funny thing is, they never fixed my problem. http://pseudosavant.com/blog/2008/04/08/its-comcrapstic-my-comcast-tech-support-story/ http://www.techconsumer.com/2008/04/07/comcast-rewards-you-for-complaining-publicly/#comment-3615
I have a new blog with less than 10 posts. They found a post I made, complaining when some contractor salespeople approached me at home about upgrading and getting a package deal. I got an email from a service and responded to it because my biggest issue was the salesman refused to give me printed materials on the package so that I could take a look without the sales pressure. Then a few days later I got a call from someone official sounding but never called back. My former startup did this kind of customer outreach by perusing sites looking for people complaining about or seeking our service. And they just had one person doing it, part time. So I say, bfd.
Nothing sinister here. You can remove the tin foil hat.
What fun would that be? How would /. survive without the tinfoil hat brigades?
You DEFINITELY must be new here.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
I love Comcast. There, I said it. I've had a lot of ISP's over the years: Speakeasy SDSL, Comcast, Speakeasy T-1, Adelphia Cable, Qwest DSL, plus a couple of other that probably no one ever heard of.
I currently have Comcast Business class, and it's by far the best I've ever had. From a technical, billing and customer service perspective. Technical, I get 20/2Mbps, real world, and I'm pretty rural. I get unbelievable 10ms ping times to my co-located server (not on comcast's network). I've never had a billing problem, unlike qwest (who is probably the worst phone company ever) and it's 20% the price of a T-1. Customer service always responsive, though I've never had a major problem.
It doesn't have the SLA of a T-1, but in the year I had my T-1, I had about 5 outages. Yeah, they were usually fixed in 4 hours, but it was always a pain. 2 years with comcast, I'm still waiting for an outage.
My Dad has comcast too, and it wasn't performing as well as it could, although it was within reasonable limits. But they sent a tech out anyway, and anther tech, until it was fixed.
My Mom has comcast. She wasn't getting a great signal to her cable modem. Turns out, HBO was on a similar frequency. So the empowered tech put a filter on that gave her HBO (free), and it fixed the problem.
Quote: "I suppose in the end a company is a company and they really don't care about how happy or unhappy their customers are."
That is exactly where they go wrong. Good companies -- and especially the best companies -- care very much how happy their customers are. That's how they become great companies.
Normally, in a free market (the way the United States is supposed to be), a business model that involves intentionally pissing off part of your customer base will backfire.
Your comment about "especially when there is no competition" is correct, though. But in that case you do not have a free market, you have monopoly or near-monopoly. Which is a BAD thing for the marketplace, and pisses people off.
Overall, your comments about companies gaining by pissing off their customers is just plain wrong in a free market.
As the webmaster of http://www.fuckcomcast.com/, I can assure you that Comcast has not responded to my criticism in that it does not yet appear to have gotten fucked.
Balls! And ass!
after I finished reading your post I threw up a little bit in my mouth
ew, there i go again...
ew...
Wow, Comcast PR knows how to use Google alerts!
Good would be training their call center employees to solve problems (instead of reading, tediously, from the "unplug your modem, reboot all your computers..." book)
Comcast call center people could be better trained. (I'm not actually a Comcast customer, I'm just assuming that Comcast does as lousy a job of training its call center staff as everybody else.) But no matter how well trained call center people are, there's no getting away from the Moronic Flowchart model of level 1 tech support. That's because 90% of tech support is asking really bonehead questions, like "Is it plugged in?" That's frustrating for techies like us, who already know to do that stuff, but there's no way around it. When you're answering millions of support calls, you have to have some filtering mechanism. It's just too expensive to give every caller a highly-skilled techie with serious problem-solving skills.
Of course, it often happens that after you've patiently told the Level 1 guy Yes, I've plugged it in, yes, I've reset it, and all the other stuff you know has nothing to do with your problem, you'll get handed to a Level 2 guy who's just as clueless. No excuse for that.
It sucks that Comcast of all companies is the one getting dragged out into the street by the FCC for BitTorrent traffic shaping. Back in Boston, Comcast was my ISP savior from RCN - what a nightmare they pulled me out of! Their customer service was always excellent in Massachusetts, and although it took 3 technicians to do it, they pulled off a miracle when I moved to Northern California (they basically had to redo a lot of hidden, shoddy work done by the people who built the place).
Comcast doesn't deserve this crappy customer service reputation. I'm forced to use Time Warner now and comparatively speaking they are abysmal! Just getting the internet took a full 3 months because I had a non-local cell phone (area code was Boston), and their BitTorrent traffic shaping is far more blatant and abusive - it kills EVERYTHING, even chat and basic web connections, over and over once a minute as long as there's any BitTorrent traffic detected. Where's the FCC on that? At least with Comcast it would just slow BitTorrent only, and you could work around it in 2 seconds by enabling encryption.
Yay, finally, one reader! I knew that eventually my blog thing would catch on!
You just got troll'd!
So the way to get Comcast to preform customer service is to make your complaints public, but talking to them directly is a YMMV proposition. This seems almost narcissistic.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Its a pretty lonely place there.
I disagree completely.
Unless you want to nitpick:
There is a free market... in some things, sometimes.
There has been a free market, in the past, for most things, most of the time.
There will be a free market again.
Admittedly, government interference has reduced both the quantity and quality of free market available to us, which has demonstrably damaged our nation. But I do not believe it is damaged beyond repair.
I am waiting for nothing. When monopolies exist, of course there is no free market (in that particular good). And when there is no free market, it is unreasonable to expect free market forces to correct the situation... again, we agree on this.
But that does NOT mean that free markets cannot be regained by other means. Reasonable antitrust regulation does work. It has worked in the past. Unfortunately, recent government administrations have almost seemed to have forgotten about that. For example, isn't it remarkable how the antitrust suits -- which were proceeding quite well -- against Microsoft seemed to disappear almost overnight, after Bush was elected?
There ARE answers. Your attitude seems to be nothing but gloom and doom. I do not accept that.
Wait, there trying to improve there image? Since when is "Big Brother" a good thing? I dont want a company looking at my blog and my IM and whatever else they can thats my buisness. As far as im concerned this makes there image worse.
Why was this tagged with "privacy"? It has nothing to do with privacy, unless the blog is password protected or otherwise non-public. It's not like he told his mom and Comcast had him bugged. He wrote in his blog, which many people want covered under the umbrella of "journalism". If it was in a newspaper it wouldn't be called a privacy issue, so why here? If you don't want someone to read your blog, it's called a diary. Hide it under your pillow. If Comcast still contacts you THEN worry.
That being said, I think a company actively responding to complaints sets a good precedent, and I applaud the effort rather than condemn it. I wish more companies would take this kind of interest in their customer's satisfaction.
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
If you don't want people to read your blog, stop putting it on the internet.
How twisted is that that a company that is bending over backward to help its customers is accused of invading someone's privacy.
And to think that at work our company had to fight to convince comcast come in to our industrial park, because the ONLY available ISP was actually worse.
We're talking pretty bad here, reliability issues, speed issues, way high price, and when you call to complain they're rude and say "well, we are your only option so... live with it."
Now that comcast is digging the trenches and running the copper, they have been a bit more responsive...
This is a semi-rural industrial park, no cable, no DSL, dialup yes, T1 yes, ($800/mo) and line-of-sight wireless. the LOS is pretty speedy and HAS been somewhat reliable for about 2 months. The first outage was yesterday, it was down for about 3 hours Friday afternoon. I got a live person to call me back and say they were climbing the tower to fix the wirelss equipment. Impressive!
So, the question will become, which is better - an arrogant local ISP that is overpriced, or comcast? hmmmm....
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
So let me get this straight:
Person complains about Company on a Public Forum.
Company contacts Person offering to fix the problem.
Person now feels, "creeped out," making allegations that Company is Big Brother.
Conclusion:
If Person did not want Company to read about Problem, then Person should not have posted a Complaint on a Public Forum. Me, I would call this sort of behavior Good Business -- a company actively seeking out customers that feel they have been wronged, and trying to make things right is just that. Comcast will never have my business over their P2P crapola, but they might, and more importantly should, win some people over with this behavior...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
The good: Clearwire is paying attention to its customers if those customers complain publicly. The bad: they haven't changed their methods and you still shouldn't use them as your ISP.
Cablevision in NJ dropped a few analog channels and moved them to their digital tier. Cablevision did not offer to lower my bill, or comp me a couple of digital cable boxes for a limited time...so I responded by canceling my voice and TV service and moving to Broadvoice and Dish Network.
I downgraded my cable modem service to the lowest possible tier. When I did that, the "retention rep" asked why. I told him I was unhappy with their analog conversion policy, and the only reason I was keeping cable modem service was that FIOS and DSL are not available in my area.
I've seen the amount of satellite dishes in my area almost double since Cablevision implemented this bone-headed policy. I understand digital cable is the future, but there is no reason to piss off your customers during the conversion.
-ted
Hey Comcast, You suck!
Please try and suck less in the future.
There, that should help them out.
Just set google alerts for your customers and wait untill someone puts their name on something.
Sad to say, I am a Comcast user. Comcast has long since forgotten what Common Carrier means. Take the BitTorrent filtering scandal. Now this? Typical. Comcast: F OFF!!!
It's Portland, Oregon, and not Portland, Maine, if you're wondering.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I once made an offhanded comment in my blog about some trouble we'd had figuring out which port on the gigamon to use on a project and two days later I get a call in my office from one of their PR reps and an email from a coworker begging me to take the posting down. Evidently they monitor for keywords and then try to do damage control. In their case, it was rather foolish, because the problem wasn't with their product at all, but with our internal processes, but now we think of their company as "creepy."
> he got an email message from Comcast apologizing for the problems
> and suggesting he might look at a guide it had posted on its web site.
Well, at least companies are learning, and this wasn't a lawsuit from Comcast threatening to SLAPP him
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's amazing to me how much Comcast's customers hate them. I work phone tech support for another internet-related company. In general, it's potentially useful for me to know what ISP a given customer is using.
When I ask somebody with Road Runner, AT&T or Verizon who their provider is, they just answer the question. When I ask somebody with Comcast, about one time in three, their answer is along the lines of "Oh, man, I have Comcast! Is that the problem?" I have literally never heard something like that with any other provider. But I've heard that from Comcast customers hundreds of times.
Funny enough, the problem is almost never related to any aspect of Comcast's service.
Actually I have a friend that was developing software a while back that basically cralled the web to get product feedback for developers based on what customers said on their blogs. The idea was to create a system that crawled the web and automatically compiled recommendations for the producer, so there's nothing all that shocking in this. It's just good business.
This is perfect timing. Friday afternoon my Comcast cable TV stopped working. So I give Comcast a call only to find out my account was suspended due to no payment since June of this year. But Comcast, I sent my payment this month and am looking at my bank statement as we speak. They told me I have to send them proof so I had my bank fax it to them on Saturday. And Comcast tells me it will take up to 5 business days for them to address my problem. WTF!?!!!!!! Comcast loses my payment and I have to wait for them? And to think I was contacting Comcast directly to complain. I thought that was how it was supposed to work. But now I guess I have to go write a blog to get something done. What is this world coming to? And Comcast. You can go fuck yourself. I'm going to Verizon and DirecTV. I will put this in my blog as well.
"So, the question will become, which is better - an arrogant local ISP that is overpriced, or Comcast? hmmmm...."
LOL, I think they are one in the same. :) No doubt Comcast is like the Ike Turner of ISP's. They treat you so good that you let down your guard and then next thing you know you've had the crap beat out of you and you're on a stage singing Proud Mary.
I spent 6 months begging Comcast to do something with the infrastructure in our neighborhood. There mode of operation isn't to acknowledge a problem and then seek to correct it. Their primary goal is to find some way to blame your computer. I had a repair guy standing in my home office with 4 computers running various OS' trying to blame my "Computer" (yes singular because he didn't notice the other 3)Finally I came to the conclusion that it was pure insanity to beg someone to be their customer. Fortunately I had options unlike a lot of people that live and work in rural areas.
Its really sad, because they have a lot of potential as a company and I would have preferred to keep them, they *ARE* faster than DSL when they behave. But when they don't its like using dial up.
No, it's correct. Do a google search.
Apparently, reading Slashdot and your outbound email was not good enough. Yes indeed, Cox did correct the immediate technical problem, but no one is swearing off creepy practices. Comcast, as usual, is going the last mile to assure everyone that Big Brother is watching but you can be sure that other ISPs have and will be using the same "technology" to spy on their users. How else will TIA happen?
Except this isn't "snooping." Actually they are reading Blogs so they can improve their service. This is after numerous stories in the media on comcastmustdie.com and Mona "The Hammer" Shaw. In fact, businesses do this all the time. The only time I can recall it resulting in a lawsuit was with Lowe's suing someone over the site lowes-sucks.com
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/21/lowes_threatens_legal_action/
It is still sad many businesses must resort to reading blogs rather than having more technical support personnel to answer the phones when someone needs it the most or to change their minds.