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Revenge of the Cable Customer
crimeandpunishment writes "After years of poor service and poor reception, years of hoping the cable guy shows up sometime within that four-hour window, years of constant price increases ... it may be payback time for cable customers. Cable TV companies are trying to treat customers better. Considering the industry has long had some of the worst customer satsfaction ratings of any industry, it may take a while to overcome that reputation. But they'd better succeed. Cable customers are switching to satellite and phone companies in droves. According to industry research, cable companies lost five million video customers from 2006 to 2009."
It's called replacing cable, satellite and everything else with just the internet.
Because the phone company is known for their warm, friendly, helpful customer service. Can't speak for satellite, but my years with DSL with SBC yielded only marginal support at best.
Time Warner, at least here in north central NC, has been making a concerted effort for the last several years, and actually has pretty darn good service. Their broadband is almost never down. They almost always show up when they say they will, you can get someone on the phone typically within 5 minutes, and the people on their phone support seem to actually know what they are talking about. Yes, they are still too expensive, but service hasn't really been an issue for me. We are moving our business phones and internet access to their business class service as it will save us around $30k a year, so we will see how that works out, but other than price for home service, I'm pretty happy with them.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
My wife and I just purchased a Bluray player that does Netflix, Amazon, and several other on-demand video services. I also installed an HDTV in the attic and ran the signal down to both of our HDTVs. We still have to pay Verizon for internet access, but we no longer have a $100+ video bill every month.
I know where I live, Charter has a monopoly on cable. There isn't much you can do about it; They've got the fastest internet. They charge you 50 dollars cash on the spot to hook up a modem and provision it for you. Hard stuff. The service techs they send to your house are dumb as hell too. They couldn't figure out the crappy interface that their newfangled modem / wifi router had installed on it. I laughed quite a bit after they couldn't figure out how to enable WPA2. Although, in their defense, the admin panel was designed by someone who didn't know what they were doing. So, basically, there is a lot they can improve on.
It's a reckoning. I've slashed my Comcast to just internet and the most basic nubs tv deal you can get. Thankfully, Verizon came down my road, spray painted the place up and said, "FIOS is coming!"
Goodbye Comcast!
My favorite is being on the phone with the cable company after the 4-hour window: /slams the receiver.
"Hi, I had an appointment, but nobody came"
"It says here nobody was home."
"Listen to me, I took a day off work, in order to sit here and wait for someone who didn't come. A day I could've used to make a 3-day weekend and go somewhere warm. I certainly was in my god damn house"
"Would you like to reschedule?"
"Can I schedule it so that I don't have to take a full day?"
"We can offer you 12pm-4pm or 11am-3pm"
"Will the technician come this time?"
"The technician will arrive within 30 minutes of the 4-hour window"
"So you mean it's a 5 hour window"
"And you need to be at home"
It had some chick, I had to close the tab and reload without images
I worked for a small(er) cable company 15 years ago, in their community Television department. We covered city council meetings, parades, had several shows about life in Cleveland etc. It has changed ownerships a few times, and is now Time Warner, and I stopped in not to long ago to see if I still knew anybody who worked there.
The entire community TV department had been replaced by more call center lackeys answering angry phone calls, and what was more interesting was the main reception area where people could pay their bills has the customer service reps behind bulletproof glass, and there was an armed guard sitting in there.
If you are doing such bad job servicing your customers needs that you feel you have to protect your employees from customers so angry they might start shooting up the place, maybe, just maybe, you might want to try and improve your customer service a bit...
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
Simple. The three plan (Internet, TV, Phone) all worked out to be cheaper and better. I got faster and more importantly, more reliable internet. When I was with cablevision/Optimum Online I would get maybe 5Mbit speeds that would flake out during prime time hours since they were over subscribed. Now I get 20 Mbit consistently, even during peek usage hours. The TV was a better quality image, more channels and more innovative products (Multi room DVR rocks). Phone is nothing exciting, but since we also have cell phones with verizon, we get a small discount for linking all our bills together.
Overall, I got the impression that cablevision simply stopped innovating since they were the only game in town, and they did not care that much about their customers. They sure got a big surprise from Verizon, and they are calling us up every week it seems begging us to come back.
Last month I got sick of my Comcast bill creeping higher and higher without my consent or notification. I cut it. I get my TV over the air and the quality is _better_ because it isn't compressed further to cram more channels into a finite bandwidth. I paid 17 dollars for an antenna and 40 dollars for a distribution amplifier. That's still less than a month's worth of cable TV. I went back to a copper landline for increased reliability and a cheaper price. I get my internet from FiOS to stream netflix and other internet videos. I suddenly find myself with entertainment that is better in quantity, quality, and price. Who needs 900 lousy quality channels all with nothing good on?
The problem isn't when the service men show up to fix a problem -- it's that there's a problem at all. We've had internet outages 20+ times a day since Comcast acquired the local cable company. All they had to do was not touch anything and it would've been fine. But instead, they screwed it up, and have sent people to our house on 4 occasions trying to fix it. They have no idea what the problem is. They don't need help that shows up on time, they need help that can get the job done on the first visit.
But more likely they're buying into satellite and internet services. Wouldn't you?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
i have it in NYC, $130 a month for cable, internet, telephone, DVR and all the local taxes they have to charge.i always have a month of cartoons DVRd for my son to watch. the DRV software is laggy and slow but overall the service is good. can't remember when i had an internet outage. unlimited calling phone is nice along with caller ID info being on the TV when someone calls. i have hundreds of channels to choose from. sometimes i'll turn on Dirty Jobs or some show on Discovery Channel with lots of trucks building something and my 2 year old loves to watch it.
i have more HD channels than I need and it's included in that price. every time i wanted to switch i looked up the competition like RCN and no one had the HD channel selection. or they wanted more money for it. over the last 7 years i had one billing problem. if equipment breaks i take it to a time warner store and get it replaced with no questions asked. almost like the Apple Store.
my inaws have Cablevision with the same package and are happy as well. a few weeks after they got it FIOS came to their neighborhood. They showed me the card and I looked it up. it costs more than cable, less international channels, they nickel and dime you for features included in the all in one cable package. i'll stay with cable.
...and forgo TV alltogether. Hockey game on? I'll stream it online or listen on the radio. TV show that seems cool? Hulu or Netflix. Don't even try to convince me that channels like HBO are worth the premium...again, Netflix.
Living With a Nerd
Quick cable companies, blame your failing business model on those dirty pirates!
As a VERY happy Verizon FiOS customer, I can tell you that cable absolutely has something to worry about. The installer showed up when he said he would, did a good job, and the service is absolutely perfect (and actually came out a few pennies cheaper than the cable company's equivalent triple play).
So it's no surprise that the cable company is running ads that say things like "40% of customers switched back to cable!" (they had to *really* mess with the sample set to get that number) and "we've been using fiber since 1991!" (yeah, fiber to the node, not to my house, and yes, people know the difference).
What's the creepy part? I've become a cheerleader for the phone company. That just blows my mind.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Yep, the cable operators suck big way.
Back in 2001, when I decided to go for Cogeco, Canada (their reputation was better than others), I didn't believe the mess they made me go through. The installation never happened thanks to time mismatches. And customer care rep had hard time to figure out that I am not going to be home for 24 hours and she needs to give me some scheduled time. That made me finally decide not to go for their service and I told her over phone to cancel the installation with assurance from her that I will not be charged for anything since installation did not go through.
To my horror, after a month I started getting their bills. My calls and explanations made them stop bills, but few weeks later, I started getting calls from some lady looking after Credibility issues demanding me why I haven't paid their bills yet.
I fought back with every evidence I had, discussed with their top guys and sorted it out. But looking at what I have gone through with other operators, I feel Cogeco was far better than other lot. Tells you everything.
hilarious
I'd rather get my cable service from the phone company rather than my phone service from the cable company.
FTFS: Cable TV companies are trying to treat customers better.
As well they have to. Comcast's new digs ain't gonna pay for themselves, ya know.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
NOW IT'S EVERYONE!!! Biff is taking over the world.
Comcast's customer service has been good for me, but their costs, not so much.
With a $150/month bill, I turned off the TV side, turned in the receivers and bought a new flat-screen and an Apple TV, which I use through my Comcast internet to download content.
With the Apple TV I can itemize the few cable TV programs I watch, such as "No Reservations" from the Travel Channel and "Mythbusters." The iTunes Store lets me buy these shows as a season for the cost of 1/3 of a month's bill, rather than renting. Being able to buy or rent popular movies on the fly is a nice touch, too.
The Apple TV isn't a perfect solution. But I'm not a typical customer, so I know how and when to record or rip content from other sources as needed. I keep up with live stuff from my HD broadcast antenna. Strange to say, I've not missed national cable news.
For all else, I pull around the laptop and watch it from Hulu. If I really wanted, I'll connect my laptop to the HDTV with a DisplayPort to HDTV connector, straight into the TV.
The biggest problem in going this route is storage. Had to upgrade hard drives as the iTunes content rests on the ATV drive as well as the central laptop HD.
And yes, since the food is good, I like being "enslaved" to iTunes. But I'm more like Colonel Hogan, who only looks imprisoned and steps out of Stalag iTunes every so often for additional stuff.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
About a year and a half ago, my Comcast internet service failed for about 12 hours on a Saturday evening, so I called to complain. There was no report of an outage, they lied, but they would make a note of it. The next Saturday it failed again, so I called again. They not only repeated the "no report of any problems" lie, they refused to issue me a credit because this was my first complaint (i.e, they claimed I hadn't called the week before).
So I canceled right then. The first available customer service witch made the process as difficult as possible, and insisted a technician had to come to uninstall the internet modem. Of course, no one ever showed up on the appointed day.
Comcast already had their "on-time or $20 guarantee", but when I called to complain, another Comcast witch not only cackled that wasn't I going to get my $20, but proudly boasted that she wouldn't connect me to one of their fake supervisors, and ha ha, in Illinois there is absolutely no one you can complain to. (I did have fun leading them on retaliatory wild goose chases for their equipment over the next few months).
But wait. There is a punch line.
About two weeks after I'd canceled, I got a form letter from Comcast which, after briefly apologizing for the overnight outages, explained that they were incurred during the process of doubling my area's download speed from 10Mbps to 20Mbps.
Heh. If only they hadn't trained their customer service witches to always lie first.
Insight has been treating their customers with value and respect for years in the Midwest. Highly recommended.
In my area, I have two options for internet service: 1) Pay Comcast $60+ for a connection that flakes out constantly, is monitored and throttled, goes out during peak usage, and is subject to change without notice. 2) Pay ATT $20+ for a dry-loop DSL that only goes out for one day every six months or so, but otherwise works as advertised. Either way, screw cable ($60+/mo for freaking TV? You gotta be kidding me! People actually pay that!?), I stream and Netflix all my viewing.
JERRY: Well, said he was waiting about two hours. Seemed a little put out.
KRAMER: Oh, was he? Was he? I guess the cable man doesn't like to be kept waiting.
JERRY: You don't seem too bothered by it.
KRAMER: You remember what they did to me ten years ago? "Oh, we'll be there in the morning between nine and one", or "We'll be there between two and six"! (quiet anger) And I sat there, hour after hour, without so much as a phone call. Finally, they show up, no apology, tracking mud all over my nice clean floors. (malice) Now, they want me to accommodate them. Well, looks like the shoe's on the other foot, doesn't it?
JERRY: Boy, I've never seen you like this.
KRAMER: Oh, you don't wanna get on my bad side.
When "basic" cable costs $20 or more a month and is basically the same channel lineup you can get OTA, why the heck would you bother subscribing when you can take that first $20 bill payment, get a cheap antenna to hide in your attic, and get crisp, clean HDTV for free.
Since cable availability has been ubiquitous for so long, I always thought that broadcast TV was a dying art; and subsequently that the HDTV rollout was a death-throw or at best an exercise in futility. Now, having canceled my IPTV based cable over a year ago and relying solely on broadcast TV and the internet, I can say that I will have a very hard time ever justifying $50 to $70 a month for cable channels of actual interest.
Suck on that, cable companies.
I've heard that Time Warner is better now, but in late 2003, my internet was down more than it was up. The service monkeys couldn't fix the problems, so I tried DSL. TW claimed their internet was faster than DSL, and it probably was, but the DSL worked nearly all the time compared to 50% for TW. And since I was no longer using their internet, there were no barriers to switching to DirecTV for television.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I hate Charter, our local cable company, with a passion. We still use them for Internet only because we don't really have another choice. As soon as something else becomes available we'll drop them like a hot potato.
I didn't hate them originally... We've been Charter customers for years - basically because that's the only option for cable TV in our town. We had Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) DSL for Internet, and Charter for TV. I wouldn't have changed anything, but we were moving out of town and couldn't get DSL there. Had to switch to Charter Internet.
On the move day we had a call scheduled with Charter.
We had Vonage for phones, so I'd explained to them that they couldn't call that phone number to confirm that somebody was home. I gave them my cell phone number to call.
We waited and waited... Couldn't make as many trips with the U-Haul because somebody had to hang around the house. Nobody ever called. Nobody ever showed up.
Turns out they were calling the disabled Vonage account, instead of my cell phone.
We scheduled a second call... Made sure they had the cell phone on record... Took out the Vonage number entirely...
They showed up this time. But then they decided that we were actually some previous owner who'd failed to pay some bills. So instead of hooking up our Internet (the TV was already working for some reason) they turned off our TV.
We had to go down to the local Charter offices with various forms of ID to prove that we weren't actually that previous owner who'd failed to pay the bills. Then we got another install date scheduled. And they actually showed up to install things - about a month after we'd moved at this point.
And since we used Vonage for our phones, we were without phones (besides my cell) for that month.
Since that time we've had an assortment of issues. It's horribly unreliable. So much so that we gave up on Vonage and got everyone cell phones.
And the prices keep going up. Eventually we dropped them for TV and went with DirecTV.
The Internet performance is crap. When I call technical support I have to use my old cell phone number to look up the account, because they can't manage to update their records. Their technicians aren't even in the same state as me, so they never know if we're having issues in the local area or not. They just want me to reboot my modem - over and over again. And then they tell me that my wireless is bad, when I don't have any wireless, and try to sell me an upgrade.
Seriously, I will drop Charter Internet as soon as it is possible.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
You can't get live sports online W/out blackouts.
I've got a choice:
* 41$ a month for 100mbps internet, 80+ digital tv channels and phone from out local telco
* 39$ a month for 100mbps internet, 80+ digital tv channels and phone from out local cable company
I chose cable since telco requires you to use a set-top box in addition to your tv (yey for another remote!)
In the 15+ years I've been on my own I can count the number of times that I've had to call any of the utlities on one hand and most of those times are just to call up and schedule an install. Yet all around me all I hear is complaints about service. Am I just lucky, or do people just need to chill out a little bit?
I finally bailed on my cable a little while ago. There were a lot of problems, including spotty internet service. The cable subscription included basic TV service, but only because that was cheaper than internet by itself. The rates kept going up and up for no reason. Then they call me and tell me they're no longer going to support my cable modem and I can't buy a new one, I have to rent one from them or they won't support it... but they'll still provide the service... oh and the rates are going up as well. Whatever, I'm too busy to mess with it. Then the cable goes dark because by still providing the service to an unsupported cable modem they meant, we'll shut it off because we don't have the MAC address in our list and charge you anyway... but not tell our customer service department that's what we're doing. After three service calls without the two departments figuring it out, I told them to just cancel the bloody service. Then, of course, they offer me discounted rates, when it is way, way, way too late. Luckily DSL rates had just dropped to be about the same price. AT&T has a monster bureaucracy too, but at least they have reliable service.
simple, that 100$ worth of DTV boxes wont pick up anything for more than random slideshows 10 miles outside of the city
OTA was great, now it is worthless unless you live pretty close to the source
heck I could not even get PBS when I lived in the city
The best cable service I ever had was in Columbus GA. There were three local cable companies each had service to the neighborhood. I was renting in an older neigborhood so naturally there were problems with the cable running to the house. But unlike every where else I have lived the cable company I chose did everything possible to make the service work perfectly. After about six months my cable router got fried, I called the company after work and after about 10 minutes with the help desk they called a technician in the area and he delivered a new router at 8pm. He stayed until he verified that all service was working properly. Unfortunately I can't say the same for other places I have lived. I'm currently with AT&T and the service is "OK". Not great, just "OK". My experience tells me that competition breeds excelence.
I pay an extra $10/mo because [my cable Internet is] not part of a bundle
Where I live, Comcast charges an extra $17/mo, which comes dangerously close to the price of lifeline cable.
I take the money I'm saving and buy shows a-la-carte on the xbox 360 or apple tv.
Can you get sports that way?
I'm considering dropping Comcast cable TV because they recently cut off clear-QAM service in my area. I use a Mac with TV tuner. I can still get local and broadcast channels but no more basic cable (Discovery, etc). Comcast doesn't have analog service anymore so it's no longer possible to watch cable channels without a cable box. CableCard doesn't seem to be an option on the Mac yet and the DRM worries me. Since then I've been relying more on Netflix, Hulu, and torrents. My computer is a Mac Pro tower, The software I'm using is EyeTV, Plex, and Front Row. It's really a kick-ass setup. I have a HDHomerun tuner and I plan to hook it up to an antenna soon. I still have a cable box for a TV in another room but I'm considering replacing that with a Mac Mini or Apple TV.
I've been trying to explain this to my girlfriend for a while, I have a good grasp but can't explain in a way that makes sense, so if someone else can help I'd appreciate it.
Cable companies suck, they know they suck. Wouldn't they try to build customers by giving decent service? I understand the idea of cutting costs, but if a service person has to come out anyway you're not saving anything by scheduling poorly. You have a list of service calls for the day, an estimated time to fix each, and a truck with just about everything the guy will need.
Simple scheduling where you arrange the visits in a reasonabl order (going out of town or coming in, not going back and forth) should be able to give you a 2 hour window maximum, without the 30 minute +/- on the outside. Even if you have to get a confirmation from the national service hotline and then an actual schedule from the local office, this is very basic stuff. You're sending someone out, you're scheduling a number of hours for the guy to work, this is known in advance. If the guy finishes a call early, moves on the the next house early, and the customer isn't there, you're actually costing real money by visiting and then having to re-schedule. From a business perspective, I would want to minimize costs by making sure the visits happen, and if one of the guys has a large number of "person not home" visits, I'd start putting a GPS recorder in the van.
So why did it get to this point? What business driver is there to make people wait and take off time and re-schedule? It's been a joke for years, enough that by the time of the Seinfeld episode everyone just nodded and said yep I know what you mean. Even if they haven't had to wait they've heard stories because their coworkers had to be off.
In other words, why would the business sabotage itself in this manner, in a way that doesn't give them any advantage? Obviously choosing the right people to hire is important, as is making sure they do what they are supposed to - but this is part of any job, any industry where you can't stand right over the people and watch over their shoulder. Normally, the CEO makes decisions for the short term so they can exercise their stock options and then cash out, but this isn't even a short-term strategy. This is intentionally running the business into the ground.
From the free market perspective, most people haven't had options and are only just now beginning to be able to switch to something else. So is it just apathy due to knowing they have the only option available for most people? If so, why wouldn't you future-proof your customers by treating them correctly? How does this help your business?
We're talking about cable television, not cable internet.
Except you can't get cable internet without cable television unless you pay a "line fee" that in some cases equals the price of lifeline cable television.
...a competitive marketplace forces industries to consider treating their customers like humans....
I had a very bad experience with AT&T DSL.
They botched the installation and then charged me $100 to come back and fix it. Several weekends ago, when my DSL died for a solid 2 days, I couldn't get a hold of a human because they kept transferring me to offices that were *closed*, which would then just hang up on me forcing me to start the automated system from the beginning.
When I finally did reach a human, they wanted to charge me again to come out and fix it. I cancelled my service the next day. During cancellation, when asked why, I said, "Because Comcast has better customer service." I don't think they understood the severity of that statement. I told them their customer service is so bad, I am switching to *COMCAST*: http://consumerist.com/tag/worst-company-in-america. Comcast, the company that sent me a technician when I asked for cablecards, and I had to install the cablecards myself because the tech didn't know how to do it!
AT&T mistreated me so badly that I am selling my iPhone 3GS just to switch to Verizon Wireless after my contract expires. Apple started me down that path by being annoying with developers started me down that path, but AT&T crossed the line for me.
There is no hope where I live. My choice is AT&T or Comcast. It is truly a desperate situation.
Directv kills comcast Chicago land in many ways
Like having a better price, more HD then comcast.
also comcast Dta are a joke hear you can't get CSN + on them and you need to pay like $7 per tv to get a channle that used to be on analog cable not that long ago.
Also why is fox movie channle and speed in the sports pack?
For everything else, there's either your friend's place or the sports bar.
Which sucks if your friend is also switching to Internet VOD and you have under-21 sports fans in your household.
Which sucks if your friend is also switching to Internet VOD and you have under-21 sports fans in your household.
Fuck 'em. They should be doing something more intelligent with their time, like reading War and Peace.
Or go outside and throw the ball around themselves. Commercial sports are for mindless peasants.
Have you ever tried to use Verizon's web page to tell you if FIOS TV is in your area? Everytime I do it tells me the page isn't working and that I need to call a rep to find out. (It's actually more annoying because they actually have a store for FIOS TV in my town but I don't think they have it as a service. Of course I can't be sure since they won't let me check. Yes, I know there are other web sites that have lists but those can be a bit out of date.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
While living in my last apartment I had SpeakEasy DSL which was my only connection to the outside world, because of some weird local (Houston) ordinance that parceled out cable service monopolies to multi-tenant buildings to a handful of local cableco's who survived entirely on gouging apartment customers and didn't even bother advertising their service to people with a choice (house dwellers). If I wanted TV type entertainment torrents and usenet downloads served my needs just fine, would be even easier today with Hulu, Netflix instant and Amazon VOD but I digress.
After renting a house and moving in with my GF we had to cancel SpeakEasy because we were too far from the CO and ended up on Time Warner. At the time their service was actually really good overall. The tech showed up in the middle of this four hour window and we were online within an hour. Couple times we had problems they were cleared up pretty quick. Internet service was almost as good as SpeakEasy, speed was fine, reliability was a little better but no static IP options and the uplink speed was too slow for running a server. Overall though life was good in cable tv land. Then they did that weird switcheroo with Comcast and it all went to hell. Within about a year everything started to go to crap. TV service got worse when comcast "upgraded" to their branded interactive guide service which was slow as hell to update, put in a worse and more expensive VOD feature. Internet stayed OK at first but then we had a really bad month when we were out for over a week due to a botched network upgrade on their end. They wouldn't admit that it was a network wide problem though and didn't mention a big outage on their telephone support line voicemail system but hold times were so bad they were rolling the tech support queue over to accounting (WTF?!) after an hour just to get a live person on the line which was worse because they had no information and no ability to help.
What finally pushed me over the edge was maybe a month after the huge outage when internet service crapped out again. Ten minutes of poking around on my part and I realized our modem had just lost it's provisioning because we had a solid connection but our IP had changed network routing was restricted to a private IP pool. Plugged a laptop directly into the modem and found too that DNS was being hijacked to a webapp for the installer to use to provision the modem. Should be an easy fix for phone support. First I spent an hour on the phone with a tech that not only ran though the while reboot and check that your cables are plugged in bullshit but also suggested I upgrade flash if I was having problems with internet video. After that she told me she would open a case with a higher support team. She gave me a case number and told me I'd be contacted within three days. On the fourth day of no service and no callback I got on the phone again and when I finally got through was told no such case number existed and was in fact in the wrong format for their ticketing system to begin with.
After screaming for a minute and going through the same scripted bullshit I was finally given to tier two support. She was more helpful but insisted on trying her own thing and kept assuming the problem was on my end. Every ten minutes of not making progress I'd beg her to reprovision the fucking modem but she kept insisting there was no record of my modem being moved into unprovisioned space. After a solid hour she setup a conference call with a network engineer and then fucked up the three way call and disconnected all of us. Per normal crappy tech support farms she had no direct call back number and had no ability to call out on her line. So back in the queue I went. Finally I got a support goober that just did what I told her and had her boss reprovision the modem - big surprise that solved all my problems.
Shortly after that we got a flier annoucing that AT&T was rolling out U-Verse service to our neighborhood and we signed up within the first week of availability. Tech came out on time and
Fuck 'em.
Ewww.
They should be doing something more intelligent with their time, like reading War and Peace.
Perhaps they already did read a similarly long book (The Lord of the Rings) by a nearby author (Tolkien). All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Or go outside and throw the ball around themselves.
In a thunderstorm? Hardly.
For anyone not sure, DirecTV is absolutely superior to Comcast for TV. I'm continuing to use them for internet for now, since they're the best option where I live, but the TV product is MILES ahead of Comcrap. If anyone would like a $100 off referral, give me a shout. They have a program, and it's worth $100 bill credit for you and me. They don't make it terribly public, but once you're in, you'll see that commercial. mat(at)cityofrain-com
While living in my last apartment I had SpeakEasy DSL which was my only connection to the outside world, because of some weird local (Houston) ordinance that parceled out cable service monopolies to multi-tenant buildings to a handful of local cableco's who survived entirely on gouging apartment customers and didn't even bother advertising their service to people with a choice (house dwellers). If I wanted TV type entertainment torrents and usenet downloads served my needs just fine, would be even easier today with Hulu, Netflix instant and Amazon VOD but I digress.
After renting a house and moving in with my GF we had to cancel SpeakEasy because we were too far from the CO and ended up on Time Warner. At the time their service was actually really good overall. The tech showed up in the middle of this four hour window and we were online within an hour. Couple times we had problems they were cleared up pretty quick. Internet service was almost as good as SpeakEasy, speed was fine, reliability was a little better but no static IP options and the uplink speed was too slow for running a server. Overall though life was good in cable tv land. Then they did that weird switcheroo with Comcast and it all went to hell. Within about a year everything started to go to crap. TV service got worse when comcast "upgraded" to their branded interactive guide service which was slow as hell to update, put in a worse and more expensive VOD feature. Internet stayed OK at first but then we had a really bad month when we were out for over a week due to a botched network upgrade on their end. They wouldn't admit that it was a network wide problem though and didn't mention a big outage on their telephone support line voicemail system but hold times were so bad they were rolling the tech support queue over to accounting (WTF?!) after an hour just to get a live person on the line which was worse because they had no information and no ability to help.
What finally pushed me over the edge was maybe a month after the huge outage when internet service crapped out again. Ten minutes of poking around on my part and I realized our modem had just lost it's provisioning because we had a solid connection but our IP had changed network routing was restricted to a private IP pool. Plugged a laptop directly into the modem and found too that DNS was being hijacked to a webapp for the installer to use to provision the modem. Should be an easy fix for phone support. First I spent an hour on the phone with a tech that not only ran though the while reboot and check that your cables are plugged in bullshit but also suggested I upgrade flash if I was having problems with internet video. After that she told me she would open a case with a higher support team. She gave me a case number and told me I'd be contacted within three days. On the fourth day of no service and no callback I got on the phone again and when I finally got through was told no such case number existed and was in fact in the wrong format for their ticketing system to begin with.
After screaming for a minute and going through the same scripted bullshit I was finally given to tier two support. She was more helpful but insisted on trying her own thing and kept assuming the problem was on my end. Every ten minutes of not making progress I'd beg her to reprovision the fucking modem but she kept insisting there was no record of my modem being moved into unprovisioned space. After a solid hour she setup a conference call with a network engineer and then fucked up the three way call and disconnected all of us. Per normal crappy tech support farms she had no direct call back number and had no ability to call out on her line. So back in the queue I went. Finally I got a support goober that just did what I told her and had her boss reprovision the modem - big surprise that solved all my problems.
Shortly after that we got a flier annoucing that AT&T was rolling out U-Verse service to our neighborhood and we signed up within the first week of availability. Tech came out on time and
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Don't watch much TV, so I was well behind the curve when I finally spent on an HD flatscreen last fall. When I called up Comcast to find out what the upcharge for HD was, DirectTV was running a special. I now have an rooftop dish, HD DVR and SD box for the kids' room for about half what I was paying Comcast for two SD set-top boxes before. The "rain fade" issue has hit us exactly twice for under 5 minutes total since November. If AT&T would get me full 6 Mb service (just far enough from the CO they're only offering 3 Mb at my place) I'd tell Comcast off completely.
Oh Please... They are probably working with the government for a bailout!
I hate my cable company. I now receive HDTV from an antenna, although I do have internet through cable. As soon as a competitor comes to town, I'm switching.
When "basic" cable costs $20 or more a month and is basically the same channel lineup you can get OTA, why the heck would you bother subscribing
Because you'll be paying that $20 per month whether you like it or not. If you have Comcast High Speed Internet without Comcast TV, you get hit with a $17 per month line fee.
Just last week I called Comcast to drop the TV service (but retain net access) which I have not used in over two years; the cable is not even plugged into a television. First they put me on hold for a while, then made me verify my identity via their automated system, then again verbally when I finally got an agent. The agent argued that I shouldn't cancel because I was getting a discount based on having two services (though he failed to mention that I would be paying $4 a month to keep even the basic service once they raise the price on June 1st). When I insisted on dropping the service the agent, in an annoyed voice, said fine he'd disconnect it, but there was a fee to do so. When I told him that I thought that was ridiculous he began a debate. His justification "Comcast is just doing what any other company would do." "Perhaps any other company with an effective monopoly," I thought. A couple of weeks ago I called to change the credit card number for autopay. The agent I spoke to was not allowed to take a credit card number over the phone - I had to do that on their website. I didn't have my password but she couldn't help me with that because that was another department's job. In all simply changing the card number took two calls and half an hour. There is still plenty of room for improvement in customer service.
Geez, maybe Microsoft's advertising is working, or maybe it was just the capitalization, but i actually read your signature as Bing-ing (like Googling)
Basic cable is $48 including a DVR (37 without it). ...but, I get 4 OTA channels reliably and FOX isn't one of them. Basic cable has 38 channels. I'd have to subsidize the lack of basic cable with a combination of Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes purchases to replace just a handful of the shows we actually care to watch other than news. If I deployed my own DVR (which is essentially required for me to be able to watch what i want that isn't broadcast between 9PM and 10PM on weeknights) my costs for OTA would actually exceed basic cable... I checked, did all the math, and came to that conclusion. in most places in this country, ditching your service provider simply isn't worth it. The hassle and costs outweigh the benefit of sticking with one.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Rant mode on, but it's on topic.
I live in the UK. I used to get cable internet service from Virgin Media (the only cable provider in the country, because they bought up all the others). I would *love* to have had the quality of service that you guys above are complaining about from Comcast et al.
Understand that Virgin Media works great until it breaks. Up to 50Mbps wherever you are, low latency, dropouts rare. When it breaks though, getting it fixed is a nightmare. And it *will* break. They don't keep track of what models of modems they've given people; they never send existing customers new hardware to replace obsolete models; they change the wire protocols without notice; they push broken firmware updates.
Tech support is outsourced to India. It's manned 24-7, but wait time is at least half an hour at all times. The "people" at the other end of that phone line are barely more sentient than M-x doctor. Diverge from their script, even the tiniest bit, and they'll tell you you're not supported and hang up on you. To get through their script, you must either lie to them or unplug every single piece of gear you have except for a Windows PC connected directly to your cable modem. You then spend half an hour having them tell you to unplug and re-plug all the connectors and reboot it five times. At the end of their script there's still a 50% chance that they'll tell you your PC must be broken and just hang up on you, rather than agree to do anything about it at all.
If you're lucky, you'll get sent an "engineer". He won't have a 4 hour window of arrival -- oh no, it's all day, any time between 8am and 6pm, and his best trick is arriving at 9am THE FOLLOWING MORNING. When he arrives, he's woefully underprepared, with only about a third of the equipment he ought to have (he will complain about this). He will fiddle with your modem, attach a meter contraption to the cable, and possibly change the little widget they fit inline with the cable to make up for the signal strength being too high. If you're unlucky and this does not work, he'll spend a few minutes using *your* phone to ring someone and explain to them that he doesn't understand what's going on, he'll noncommittally say "they'll look into it", and he'll leave. If you want to chase up (and thence have a hope that they'll sort things out), it's back on the phone to India, but the goon at the other end doesn't seem to understand the concept of records -- so you're back to square one!
Last year I was unlucky, and had a problem that was slightly non trivial. I counted. After three visits by these "engineers", SEVEN hours on the phone to India, one whole week waiting for second level support to ring back -- and they rang while I had something on the boil on the kitchen, I asked them to call me back in ten minutes, I never heard from them again -- they still had no idea what was wrong. After a month of no service despite constant chasing I rang the sales line, and cancelled, and told them precisely why. My call got escalated immediately, and the manager offered to send along one of the engineers who handle their much more expensive business service to take a look, but in a further two weeks' time; I cancelled my contract anyway, but accepted the engineer appointment since it was free.
Seven weeks after my connection had originally broken, and one week after I had DSL fitted -- slow, but with real support (www.aaisp.net.uk -- they're very good) -- the proper engineer arrived, picked up my cable modem, fiddled with it for a couple of minutes, and said "yeah, there's a return path fault on the modem. I can replace it if you'd like." I spent some time staring at him open mouthed before I managed to explain to him why I wouldn't like him to do that. I think he was pretty shocked at the quality of service I'd received.
Never, ever, ever use Virgin Media.
A door-to-door Comcast salesman (I kid you not) came up to me, clipboard in hand, as I was sanding a woodworking project in my driveway last Saturday. He wanted to know if I used Comcast. I told him that I did not, and why (the usual list of reasons, plus a couple of specials). He seemed shocked but, to his credit, undaunted as he continued to try and convince me what a mistake I had made in dumping his company's over-priced shitty service. Alas, it was hot and I was tired, so I mentioned that I needed to get back to work and invited him to leave. Otherwise, I'd have been happy to expound at length on the many reasons that Comcast will not likely get my business again anytime soon.
So it's interesting to learn this morning that Comcast is doing something, albeit too little and far too late, about their practices that have driven customers away by the million. Good luck with that, Comcast.
.. just ask The Hammer how it's done.
Comcast's customer service is so bad they drove a 75 year old lady to taking a hammer to the local office.
End of line..
Gee, what had Comcast done for me lately... Well for one they changed the name of their service to XFINITY, that doesn't seem to help me at all. Then because of the new "upgrades to [my] service" they REMOVED two of our favourite stations that we used to watch, and now they want US to "upgrade" to get those two stations back. That's a lot of "doing more" to me, not for me. Yes, I can see why they have such a low satisfaction rating.
Basic cable has lots of Shopping channels that you don't get over the air :)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
simple, that 100$ worth of DTV boxes wont pick up anything for more than random slideshows 10 miles outside of the city
OTA was great, now it is worthless unless you live pretty close to the source
heck I could not even get PBS when I lived in the city
What kind of antenna did you have and where was it pointed? I live nearly in the middle of nowhere using a 30 year old yagi that came with the house and I get good reception about 50 miles from the station. There are utilities online that will give you the best possible direction to point your antenna, try one of those out.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Get a decent antenna (any UHF one will work) and hide it in your attic. Point it in the general direction of most of the stations and run a coax line down to your TV. Get a signal booster (or antenna with built in booster) if you still have trouble. I can pick up stations 20-40 miles away very easily with this setup (for my basement TV) and the TV in the upstairs bedroom has the antenna just sitting right next to it and all channels come in great. Neither antenna I bought (one even with booster included) cost more than $20.
In short, either you are a hundred miles from the station, you live in a mountainous area, or you are doing something wrong.
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a confidant .
*facepalm* FTFY.
I got chapped a few years back when Comcast was in my backyard one day, "checking on the lines...".
About a half hour later they knocked on my door, and asked if we had cable tv, and I said "No, just internet, we don't watch tv that much".
He asked if I knew I could have been getting free cable tv that whole time, and(of course) I said "Really, you don't say..."
So, the free cable tv was gone, so I had to sign up with Dish Network.
How much more than $48 is it for a HD-grade DVR? And of those "basic" channels what is included that's not either 1) also OTA, 2) crap infomercials, or 3) crap government programming? In central Ohio, the answer to the first question is "at least $10 more" and the second question is "none". $80 a month, $50 a month, hell even $20 a month just isn't enough to interest me in anything on the basic channel lineup, even if it's delivered in HD.
You are considered a consumer. Not a customer. Therefore you have NO CHOICE but to buy their product or get it from their competitors. But as long as their competitors ALSO treat consumers bad, the company will get disgruntled users from their competitors.
They do this because being shit to your customers is cheaper than being good to them and they can only handle so many customers, so they aren't really competing.
Your only option is not to consume.
But very few people will put up with that, they'd prefer to be assraped than give up their TV.
I'm happy that you could cut the cable. Unfortunately, as a baseball fan that's not an option for me. Local TV broadcasts of major league baseball are largely a thing of the past. MLB.tv offers out-of-market coverage via internet, but local teams are blacked-out in order to preserve the local cable monopoly. To see local major-league baseball on TV, you pretty much have to pay a cable bill or a satellite bill, or content yourself with a handful of nationally-televised games on broadcast.
You're lucky. Now that the FIOS rollout has ended, if you don't have FIOS now you're not likely to have it for a very long time. For those of us in the FIOS dead zone, it's pretty much a choice between cable or satellite, and a lot of people can't get satellite due to line-of-sight issues.
I haven't subbed cable since I moved out 7 years ago. As far as cable internet goes, it varies from place to place. In Virginia I had Comcast, even during my time their they changed a lot going from down once a month to maybe one outage/year. I've had roadrunner up here with similar quality. That's good, as I work from home and an unreliable internet is as much jeopardy as an unreliable car: too many absences is poor for anyone's future career.
I have no interest in cable television/land line phones. I see it as an overpriced model to begin with, and completely overdone with advertisements. Spending 1/3 of your view time in commercials unless you also get TIVO, whereby you fast forward by commercials, is a pretty bad practice IMO. Similarly getting a landline that's then bombarded with robocalls till you sign on a DNC list, and even then gets bombed around election time because for some audacious reason they think they are above your election to not be called by a robot @ dinner time... yea. No thanks. You couldn't give me that service for free.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
Some cable customers just quit TV. It is still the TV Wasteland. Video industries are losing customers due to poor products, DRM, commercials, liberal news & other better forms of entertainment. We quit Cox 10 years ago, quit Dishnetwork 3 years ago & largely quit watching DVDs. TV stations in Houston TX broadcast free perfect views of TV wasteland that I do not watch. With 50+ DVDs still to watch, why look @ the wasteland?
FIOS came to my neighborhood a few years ago. For the last three years, I've made an annual phone call to Comcast:
Hello, how can I help you?
I'd like to cancel my service - your standard rates are higher than FIOS, so I'm switching.
What can we do to keep you as a customer?
Reduce my rates.
I can offer you $33/month internet for 12 months.
OK, I'll stay with you. Thanks!
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Once they get you subscribed at a low monthly rate, they'll just raise it again in a few months. It always pissed me off that we had to pay $60+ a month and the channels were still packed with garbage content and paid programming at night.
I would love to see the cable industry collapse and all content be delivered from TV networks to viewers online.
CBS has the right idea. I can go to their website right now and watch any episode of a number of their shows.
"That impressed Steve Curtin of Denver, who tweeted about his Comcast Internet service conking out last spring BEFORE calling the cable company. A cable agent reached out to him and got him back online within half an hour." something seems amiss here... is this the new internet system that doesn't need cable, but instead works on hopes and dreams??
I've never had a Comcast account. From what I know about the company and the experiences of friends and family, I will avoid that company at all cost.
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
I wonder why is it that all the cable companies are so bad. Here in Switzerland we have something called Cablecom. They have got such a bad reputation that they were planning to change the company name at one stage:-) If there are any problems or disputes, these will go on for months and years - happened to all of my friends who made the mistake of signing up with them (happened to me as well). I wonder why anybody puts up with that.
As far as I can tell; no TV service provider makes a DVR as awesome as my MythTV box. Once you've got automatic commercial skip -- you never want to go back. Naturally, this means I only get OTA local channels; but there just isn't enough decent programming on cable or satellite to take me away from automagic commercial skipping. For the few non-OTA shows I do want to watch (SCIFI stuff mostly) -- I use hulu. I've had this setup now for about 4 years and have saved a ton of dough.
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School
My elderly mother still has OTA for her TV reception. The picture is pretty good now that its digital, but watching broadcast only TV is like torture. When I go to visit we mostly have it on PBS stations, because if you watch regular network TV, its nothing but pharmaceutical commercials. I feel like a doctor in training.
you might think that with the arrival of "new competition" (bell getting into tv, various cable companies getting into residential phone, etc.) we might be able to get better deals & service... ...well, no. not a chance. rates & service still suck and are getting worse (bell canada offshoring customer service to india, etc.) in cable, telephone, cell phone, internet... etc.
my best chance right now for "improved customer service" is to look into ota hdtv, but for now, "outlook hazy, better chance next time" (i live in the ottawa region, which sucks for ota hdtv).
whilst people in the us complain tv / radio / cell phones, they don't know how good they have it compared to canada.
I work for a small cable carrier with roughly 8,000 subscribers. Competing with Dish and Direct TV is a nightmare for the cable industry as a whole. Satellite providers are not regulated in the same way as cable providers despite offering the same product to the end user.
Our area is roughly 40% retired old white people and 40% Hispanic. The FCC prohibits a cable carrier from offering a $20 package with just Spanish language channels like Dish Latino. Instead, we must first sell a customer a basic and an expanded basic package before allowing the customer to buy any kind of premium or special interest tier. When you throw in all the national networks that are only sold by the package to the cable company, we can't be competitive.
For instance, we have a very small population that actually cares about MTV or VH1, but we can't offer Nick which is very popular without the first two. ESPN is one of the worst. Roughly $4 of your monthly cable bill goes straight to that one channel. But, to carry ESPN the cable company and eventually the customer are required to buy the other ESPN channels like ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNews, etc. at $0.50-$1.00 each
I'm not going to say cable companies are a misunderstood hero, but article in the OP barely scratches the surface of the issues.
As near as I was ever able to determine, the cable companies have always been all about marketing, the art of inducing people to give you money for something.
But they forgot the other part of marketing is customer service. Advertisements (Look at all the wonderful channels!) can get customers into your garden, but only good customer service can keep them there.
Supreme excellence in the art of marketing is making people glad to give you money for something.
As for me, I gave up cable over ten years ago when Comcast insisted that I had to buy a five channel bundle to get the one channel in that bundle I wanted to watch. Funny thing: with the internet, I've never missed them.
all NFL games for your team are on free tv
THE ESPN and NFL network games are on free tv for your team.
You can get cable Internet and not pay for TV. I am, anyhow. True, I pay an extra $10/mo
Don't you find it odd that you are paying an extra $10 per month to not receive a service?
Kind of like going out to dinner and paying an extra $5 so that you don't have to eat dessert...
[UID-HeinzIntel]
Get a decent antenna (any UHF one will work)
Unless you're like me and have half of your local stations on VHF, including one way the hell down on channel 5. I'm not sure what inspired most of the stations here to return to their old VHF assignments, but it certainly hasn't increased their viewership among apartment dwellers. The higher frequency channels at 10 and 13 are generally watchable, but channel 5 is just gone. I can't even get a signal 20 miles away with a direct line of sight to the tower. (Yes, it really is direct, the towers are 2000' tall)
I just recently dropped cable in favor of 20/2 internet service. After years of dealing with increasing costs and overpriced equipment enough was enough. With the savings I'm getting from dropping cable I can have a Netflix subscription and come out way ahead of where I was before. Everything else I stream online or can buy through iTunes, so cable companies will have to do a lot of sweet talking in order for me to return. The only big loss from having no cable will be college football - but some games are still on local channels, and the games that aren't I can go to a friends house or alternatively go to a sports bar.
Sure, I don't get 500 channels - but we all know that those 500 channels are really all either carrying the same content, or are really niche (the Black Jewish Food History channel, the American Country Lawn Mowing channel, reruns of Flip That House, the Chopping channel (for lumberjacks), etc.
If there's nothing good over the air, there's always the internet. Or go walk the dogs, see other people, etc. No need for cable tv at all.
What ever happened to a la carte channel packages? I thought this was meant to finally be getting forced on the cable companies about 5 years ago?
20+ years ago, my local service was a fly by night that had managed to browbeat several local governments into accepting a sole provider rider in the contract. To say they were bad qualifies as understatement of the civilization. This continued until the local power utility put in a system to monitor consumption and load. One of the techs for the power company ran a small TV repair shop on the side, and noticed that A) lines were going to almost every house in the county, and B) they had a buttload of bandwidth open. He convinced his boss that the co-op (yep, co-op. trust me, this comes in later) just needed to buy the head end and set top boxes and they could offer a new service...AT COST. The FBN raised holy hell, promising lawsuits and blocked access. Co-op lawyer, (a good one, dealt mostly in civil rights cases) replied, all the way to the state Supreme Court, that blocking over the air and FCC licensed satellite transmissions was illegal and you can't sue a government agency for supplying services and the co-op was a semi-government agency.
Long story short, the FBN was out of business in about six years, the co-op still thrives, although rates have gone up (ya gotta pay programmers) and the big boys stay the hell away from that area. Service is great because co-op board members are elected every two years and want to keep their jobs.
I'll second that.
I went through the stupid escalating cable pricing scam in the 1980s and vowed never to pay them another dime.
Tried DirecTV satellite and it seemed to be better on the price hikes but after a few years I tired of the lack of a la carte and having to pay for a ton of unwanted channels just to get the few I wanted. Dishnetwork was not a whole lot better but I could get the channels I wanted with a cheaper package and they had some HD programming.
But once OTA HDTV was rolled out by a significant number of the local channels I axed the dish and put a basic antennae in the attic. The reception, picture and audio are absolutely amazing. I have no idea why the OTA networks are not shouting this from the roof tops, they can compete directly with the cable and satellite providers as long as they bring the content.
And on the programming, I love PBS. The journalism is actual real journalism not some one sided hyperbole laced shouting match from a crop of dunderheads. The science and nature programs are also far superior to the hoax that most of the History/Learning/Discovery channel have become. No more UFO abduction or Nostradamus 2012 end of the world programs aired as factual issues we should be concerned with.
Yes, OTA HDTV absolutely rocks!
Actually, living too close to the transmitter can be a problem because ATSC is vulnerable to multipath reflections (aka "ghosting"), especially with older generation tuners. Proper aiming of your antenna is essential, and if it's outdoors, wind can knock it out of alignment over a few months. A signal attenuator may even help with your reception.
However, channels 2-6 (low VHF) tend to be really bad for ATSC for other interference reasons too, and most stations have abandoned them with their final assignments. There's one in the next market area over, just at the edge of reception with a good antenna, that went from channel 2 to 5 that I can sometimes receive, but I couldn't even get a barely watchable picture back when it was still analog.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
YHBT. HTH. HAND.
I used to work for a cable provider. My satellite office did a damn good job of keeping stellar service customer noticed too. Because it was a large company, some of the other offices didn't try as hard, which kind of let to the company getting a bad rep. Really bad in some respects - because some agents were doing a horrible job in sales and support some didn't care, but most, I'd question their intelligence. I know I spoke with them and I knew why the customer wasn't happy with them.
The problem with the 4 hour time frame is when we'd book an appointment we'd include wether or not the customer wanted additional outlets. Sure enough, because there was a small cost in having it installed, most people didn't choose it at the time of the call. The tech shows up. Instead of one outlet, the customer now wants 3 and two of these outlets are in difficult to install locations. Then again, it could be a new home and they have to find a way to route the cable to the chosen outlet location. The customer wants it NOW or they complain to manager or HQ. This isn't accounted for in the scheduling so they don't have the staffing to get the calls to the other customers. Could they better account for this? Probably.
I've tried to call my local cable provider (different then one I worked for) to get service. The hold time for sales is horrendus. It takes over 2 hours most times to get an agent. A friend had cable hooked up and the terminal wouldn't work properly. He waited on hold about 3 hours each time he called just to speak with an agent. After a few calls, I gave up.
In the US, car dealers have huge political influence, so dealers have been able to purchase state laws that make it illegal to buy cars directly from the manufacturer. It might be that customers would prefer the current system of car sales, but we may never know. I, for one, wouldn't mind being able to arrange a test drive and then order a new car all on the internet, and have it delivered to my door, without having to deal with some slick salesman at the local dealership.
Where we live we have the choice of WOW, Comcast and AT&T. We have WOW and have great service, techs that know what they are doing and paying only 2/3 what my friends that live in areas nearby that only have Comcast. A Comcast sales guy stopped by once. I looked over his deal and told him that he was more expensive then what we have now even with his limited time deal. He admitted that this area was tough and that Comcast offers deals here that they don't offer elsewhere.
Is he strong? Listen bud, He's got radioactive blood.
The cable company is dumping all the small towns in our area. That leaves only DSL, WiMAX, 3G or WildBlue internet for our customers. Dish Network is a good TV provider and DirecTV being 2nd because they don't have locals over the dish. The main reason the cable companies were surviving was the internet.
http://www.mistersampo.com
When "basic" cable costs $20 or more a month and is basically the same channel lineup you can get OTA
In San Jose, CA, all I can pick up OTA is the local PBS station. All the network stations transmit out of San Francisco and are out of range.
no and the competition was recently regulated so it would not reduce the profit margin of bell and rogers.....
my current unlimited 7 mbit 33$ plan was grandfathered in the new regulation but If i was to change provider, I would loose 2Mbit, and I would gain a 200gb cap and HAND HAVE TO PAY MORE.
Thank you CTRC....
I'm about fed up with my cable company's attempts to maximize the points of failure and minimize the fault tolerance for people who dare use their own DVRs. First it was a software "upgrade" to their cable boxes that effectively bars their control by TiVos. Now it's Switched Digital Video boxes that can fail to get the signal, will flag all analog programming as copy protected (including SD broadcast channels), and can silently stop working so that you fail to record even non-switched channels.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
In our little suburb, we have 2 cable companies. Cox, and Wide Open West. Cox is expensive.
I have Wide Open West. For $79 a month, I get internet at 2MBps down, basic Cable TV (with
lots of sports channels - which is important to me) and phone service. Their customer service
is quite good. After 12 years with Wide Open West, I have no complaints. Everything works
like it should, it's reliable, it's not over-priced, and they seem to really care about
making customers happy.
Disclaimer: Of course YMMV, and I'm not an employee of any of the companies mentioned.
Just a satisfied customer of Wide Open West.
I recently tried out Comcast cable TV in the bay area. The DVR they gave me is a horrible piece of crap. It would crash or freeze about once a day, and after rebooting it would take 20-30 minutes to reload the program data after a reboot. It would record the same episode over and over, even though it was set to new episodes only. The list goes on but those are the worst of it. I assumed I had a bad unit until I found this site: http://www.bernzilla.com/2008/03/08/the-joys-of-using-a-comcast-dvr/
Turns out they have been giving this same awful DVR to customers FOR OVER TWO YEARS. They knew it sucked, but continue to give it out. When someone complains, they replace it with another of the same. That is seriously crappy service in my opinion. Luckily my place has just barely enough sky view for DirecTV. My fiance and I seriously wanted to smash the Comcast DVR with a hammer after a week.
--- Robert Strickland
Now only if Comcast can stop throttling my torrents, then I'd have complete customer satisfaction.
A big problem with "cable TV" is that, even though the cable company has a box on the user's premises which they own and to which they can talk, they don't do network management that way. They're mostly still organized as if their systems were entirely one-way.
For decades, telcos have checked out their wire systems using Automatic Line Insulation Test gear. This runs some test voltages down the line and checks for shorts, opens, leakage to ground, etc. (This usually happens around 4 AM, at the time of maximum humidity, and some cheap phones produce a "bell tap" ding when a DC spike is sent down the line to check the insulation.) The cable companies, on the other hand, started with a completely one-way outside plant, and no institutional history of network management. Even though newer cable gear is two-way, it's mostly a kludge on a one-way system. Cable companies don't have the concept of automatically monitoring every piece of outside plant. They wait for customer complaints.
The newer cable hardware can at least talk to central control, but cable boxes don't seem to come with the kind of line quality monitoring that modern DSL interfaces do. It's not something that cable companies have demanded from cable box suppliers. Ask your cable company to read out your bit error rate and line levels remotely, and they'll say "Huh?"
No, but you can watch at a sports bar.
I addressed that in this comment.
Improving customer service is great, but the best customer service, like the best weapon, is the one you never have to use.
I can understand the customer's sentiment.
People are paying more to DTH providers for the same service the cable operators provide. DTH providers are riding on the consumer's hatred for the cable operators.
Sudheer Satyanarayana
www.techchorus.net
It's EVIL!! I'm pretty sure I saw the word "Comcast" embossed on that piece of carbon-ized Evil at the end of Time Bandits. I do hate them so.
So?
(I know, I know. I'm in the minority of folks who don't watch sports. Before someone gets their panties in a knot, for me it's "So?")
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Well, I recently switched to Comcast. DishTV was OK, and I liked their DVR, but the DSL and POTS from AT&T were ... not too good. Decaying old copper infrastructure that goes out or develops horrific noise at every rainstorm, and crumbling insulation on the wires at the junction boxes that flakes off and shorts out every time the technician touches it, and not fast enough to stream audio without constant "buffering" pauses. Streaming video? Ha! I've been waiting for years for AT&T to get around to providing UVerse in my neighborhood, but it doesn't look like it's ever going to happen.
I really hated to go with Comcast. Really, really hated it. But the internet is very fast (I don't utorrent terabytes of movies, so the cap hasn't been an issue) and the voice quality of the phone is good. I save a good bit over Dish + DSL + POTS line, and it'll still be a bit less after the 6-month deal expires.
If uVerse or FIOS is ever available here, I'll grab it in an instant. But I quit holding my breath; I was about to pass out.
Are you sure it's using the actual VHF channel 5? DTV stations use "virtual channels" so if your TV says you are watching channel 5.1 it could very well be on frequency channel 42. Most stations jumped to higher frequency channels during the transition, only retaining their old numbers virtually.
Ooohh! Can I tell my story about the cable company?
We've had basic cable from UPC (we're in Europe) for years and all of a sudden out of nowhere a courier shows up at the door with a cardboard box. We sign, unpack and in it is a digital set-top box from UPC. Had a big sticker on it stating "if you break this seal you agree to purchase digital TV from us, you decoder is in here". After my initial WTF we shoved the still sealed box in the guest room and thought nothing of it. Until after about a year I decided to check our bill for basic cable. Sure enough a fee for digital TV was added. I am not making this up! Called them at 45 cents /minute to bascially rant at them. Guy at the other end had a script for it, refunded the surcharge. Fuckers! Hated them with a passion ever since and switched to DVB-T as soon I could.
If you pay for the official NHL internet feed, you get "out-of-market" games only. They won't sell you an internet feed of your local team for love or money. We know how the cable companies hate competition.
REALLY ... that's because TV was the only game in town. If you could get 1 or 10 million viewers watching online then you are talking (See Olympics online). If they don't change eventually they will be filed under "who gives a shit". People thought TV wouldn't take out radio! Gimmi a break! Imagine a show/sport that wouldn't switch to TV for whatever reason... Good luck staying alive! Think about sports on Radio before you reply. Would you ever listen to a football game on radio? Well once upon a time people couldn't picture (Irony intended) the change to TV. Like Henry Ford said: " If I had asked people what they had wanted , they would have said "Faster horses"".
In some ways audio only broadcasts are great for sports, like you can drive while hearing the game. This shows the tech is relegated to 'novel' from 'standard' as is all old tech.
See ya... I'm gonna write a book on a typewriter, listening to sports on my short wave radio while riding my horse!
What about those fucking annoying , in show ads! Once while watching Small ville there was an ad for the next program on the bottom of the screen. There was also a transparent channel ID. While this was running they made a dancing pizza come across the bottom if the screen for a local pizza joint. During all this, Clark was putting a stick of old spice deodorant in his locker label to camera, the whole scene. Like he would wear that! It was so obvious to the point of distraction! From what I was distracted, I couldn't tell you because too much was going on! I wonder if superman could sweat ! Maybe he needed the deodorant to cover his weird alien smell. Maybe if superman gets stinky ... the whole earth dies! They could have a whole episode where the old spice saves earth! The sponsors would looove it!
I had been subscribing to Comcast's Digital Starter Package + Comcast's slowest and cheapest internet package and had been paying $92+fees+taxes every month. Once Verizon FIOS came to my apartment complex and after the following strongly worded email (reproduced in its entirety for your reading pleasure), that came down to $65+fees+taxes per month.
To,
Doreen Vigue,
Vice President, Public Relations,
Eastern Mass, New Hampshire and Maine.
Rick Germano,
Senior Vice President of Customer Operations.
CC:
Bob Sullivan,
Journalist and NY-Times best selling author,
Author of "Gotcha Capitalism"
(Bob, I was in the middle of reading your book yesterday)
CC:
press@cnet.com
Before I go into the details of why I'm sending out this email, please allow me get a few of the logistical things out of the way:
Comcast Account number: ***
Home/Service/Billing address: ***
I have been a Comcast cable customer since Mar-2006 and a Comcast internet subscriber since Jan-2010. Apart from the perpetually lingering feeling of overpaying for the services that I subscribe to, I have not had any occasion to be seriously unhappy with the service. To be fair, the latter part could easily be attributed to the low expectations that I had to begin with.
It was against this backdrop that a few weeks back, I received the joyful news of my apartment complex getting wired up for Verizon FIOS. Even though Verizon took almost 8 months (from start to finish) to achieve that feat, it was truly a moment of great thanksgiving and rejoicing. Comcast finally had competition! Almost immediately, I started getting phone calls from Verizon touting the virtues of FIOS and why I should switch. Each time, I nonchalantly brushed off their overtures mainly due to my complete aversion to sales pitches. I believe that I'm intelligent enough to make a decision for myself without being prodded by sales people who have only their interest in mind.
This weekend I finally decided to find out for myself whether switching to FIOS was actually worth it and how much money I would save (or spend) in the process. I went to the FIOS availability webpage and entered my home address (mentioned at the beginning of this email). I had done that a few times last year and each time was disappointed to learn that the only option available was Verizon's "cutting-edge" DSL service. So this time, when the word "FIOS" flashed on the results screen, my joy knew no bounds. The cheapest option presented to me was this:
Verizon FIOS TV Prime HD (with 40+ HD channels)
-plus-
Verizon FIOS Internet up to 15Mbps(Download)/5Mbps(Upload)
with a two-year agreement plan,
Monthly charges:
Months 1-6 : $80.98 (excluding fees, taxes, etc)
Months 7-24: $90.98 (excluding fees, taxes, etc)
Monthly charge WITHOUT any lock-in contract : $100.98
It would only be fair to mention what I'm currently paying Comcast each month and what I'm getting (or rather, not getting) for my money's worth:
(Also see my most recent bill from Comcast attached to this email)
Comcast Digital Starter Package (Xfinity TV)
-plus-
Comcast Economy Internet (Xfinity internet) 1Mbps(Download)/350Kbps(Upload) -> The internet speeds are NOT typos.
Monthly charge (WITHOUT any contract): $92.05 (excluding fees, taxes, franchise-related cost, etc)
I decided that I really had to call Comcast and confront them with this new reality. Not doing so would only question my sanity, intelligence and financial prudence. My first step was the "online-chat" feature with Comcast's customer service department. The reason why I prefer this to calling them is that I actually have a complete transcript of the conversation (attached to this email). I do believe that the customer service representative tried his best but was most likely not authorized to make changes to my cable+internet service. He gave me a 1-800 number and asked me call their "Customer Loyalty Department".
cheers, http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks
HD is the same price as non-HD on TWC. DVR is $7 and was included in the $48 i quoted. On Sattelite (like I have) HD is $10 more, but basic service is actually $15 less for more channels, so it's a better deal still. I Pay 478 including taxes for 4 rooms of TV, all on DVR, 2 in HD, and I get 2 movie tiers and HD... All my discounts have expired, i was paying less. This also included in-home warranty on tall the equipment so i never pay for onsite service and replacement hardware is free if it breaks down.
I have over 60 HD channels out of 200, of which, only 2 are available OTA in my area in HD. I only have 4 OTA channels at all, Fox and the WB are not one of them. Virtually none of the "crap" channels, or those that air infomercials large parts of the day, are in HD at all. Almost every channel in the "top 100" is in HD, including Comedy central, Toon, nick, noggin, Discovery, history, Spike, FX, SciFi, Food, the news and sports networks, and more. The basic tier is 120 channels... not 26 like it was years ago, and still is on some cable services, though for the bottom most "broadcast" tier on cable TWC only charges $24.95. (and $7 more for a DVR, though i agree, THAT package is poinless if you get all the AB-NBCS).
Even if i could get 50% of the programs I prefer (which includes none of the reality TV stuff, not any "popular" programming or sitcoms, we rarely watch the alphabet channels at all, aside from a few good dramas,) the monthly cost of a DVR (tivo) including service for just 1 room works out to near $25 a month including the cost of the device and routine replacement. There's no discount for having more than 1 in the house, and I'm on my own for repairs after a year. 4 rooms, 2 in HD, all with DVR would cost me more than satellite does! even 2 HD tivos replaced every 3 years, and including the monthly fee is not much better than i pay today, and I'd only get 4 channels? ...and to get streaming TV on more than 1 PC or set-top, I;d need to bump my internet speed by more than the diference thats left. It is simply not yet a good enough deal without major saccrifice.
This is not true everywhere, but it IS true here.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I have no idea why the OTA networks are not shouting this from the roof tops, they can compete directly with the cable and satellite providers as long as they bring the content.
They are the same channels. There is no competition between them, cable and satellite companies carry their channels as well.
I've read several posts about how badly service was when dealing with cable companies etc. That's all a walk in the park. Try dealing with Hughesnet Satellite Internet.... I'd take the worst provider over Hughesnet ANY day. I won't go into the horror stories of trying to deal with them. There are hundreds of blog sites that do that quite nicely. So quit whining and be glad you don't have Hughesnet as your ONLY internet provider. LOL
Say.... A friend of mine said if I gave my cable guy twenty bucks he'd hook me up with all the good stuff ;) ..... [insert Jim carry's response here]
Sounds like whoever decided to post this story was irritated with his cable company? The simple facts are that there are NOT customers leaving cable for the phone OR sattelite companies.. satellite has the most absurd "quality" levels and interference that makes good old over the air antenna viewing look great by comparison, the phone companies have nothing more than trial balloons of service up (fios and uverse get alot of press but the footprint they are available in is .. trivial)
people deal with phone companies because they have to for whatever reason not because they want to, and dish and directtv have absolutely horrible service, and even worse they treat their customers like criminals... the idea that anyone would switch to directtv willingly is comical.
Of course this is slashdot and i suppose it was a slow news day.. still why is this even being commented on? *sigh*
Twist the knife a bit more, will ya? :P
OK, here goes. I'm in a rural part of an even more sparsely populated country (Finland). We've had fiber to the house with 100Mbit down and 10Mbit up for a couple of years. There are no caps, throttling, or other usage limits or surcharges on the service. Even so, we have not yet reached 1TiB usage in any single month (we've exceeded 500GiB once or twice, though).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Oh no, someone on the internet is wrong... maybe!
You really thought that someone who understands how multipath is a problem with ATSC might not understand virtual channels? Geez.
Yes it's on 5, and its PSIP is 2.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I love my OTA HDTV broadcast - we haven't had cable since 2006, since we rarely watch TV anyway, so the OTA is good!
About 18 months ago - price was just too high, and the number of shows we knew we were going to miss to few (Daily Show and Colbert mostly, with scattered news, science fiction/cartoons, and science programs.)
Since then HDTV has come online - we now get five PBS stations with not entirely overlapping programming - which takes care of News and Science programming (The *best* cable science shows are only on par with Nova and nature, and often nowhere near as accurate. And let's not even talk about comparing cable news with Newshour.). With the money I saved I have now bought an HDTV and put together a MythTV box to record the shows I like - and now I can watch the Daily Show over the internet on my living room TV.
I wouldn't drop MythTV on someone not tech savvy (I actually had to reinstall Ubuntu because a plugin killed the frontend badly), but even so - versus something like $80/month for Satellite? So *very* much better.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
I gave up on cable a long time ago. Maybe if they offer me Internet service with better capless data rates than the competition for a lower price, I'll consider coming back.
You know what I've discovered in the interim? I don't really need TV, and I can rent the good shows on disk, or watch them online. It's been quite liberating.