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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."
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 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The entire community TV department had been replaced by more call center lackeys answering angry phone calls, and what was more interesting was the main reception area where people could pay their bills has the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...
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yeah, that's cool... how do you get the internet? I don't subscribe to cable TV, but I get my internet connection from the cable company, because there isn't any FiOS in my area and DSL is crap, so its either cable or buy a fractional DS3, but why bother when cable internet connection is just as fast, if not faster, and cheaper?
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.
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Very similar issues with Comcrap.
First, when they came out to do my install, I was getting a crappy-as-hell signal. Their techs sat around scratching their asses for three hours, and eventually (only after I'd been on the phone with a supervisor behind their backs) finally went out to check the routing equipment, only to find that some ass-tard had simply shoved shit together any which way out there and had broken the lead on the connection going to my house. Elapsed time before they got that fixed: 7 days later.
Then they started rolling every goddamn thing into the "digital only" package. "Doesn't cost any more" except that you have to rent a specialized fucking receiver for each goddamn room you want it in, or if you want to actually use the CableCard function built into your TV, they actually charge you MORE to rent the fucking cablecard.
Then we get to the network crap.
I had three machines; one recently rebuilt, one laptop, one old machine I use for video-to-TV playback.
Video-to-TV box and laptop are configured to OpenDNS. They worked the moment I wired in. Upstairs box, newly rebuilt, started getting Comcrap's "we hijack your traffic" crap-DNS info, kept trying to make me go through a fuck-ton of meaningless registration crap and "please sign up for a comcast.net email" (don't need or want yet another fucking email address) before crashing both IE and Firefox (supposedly they were "in the middle of updating it" for multiple days).
Took me 3 phone calls. On the third call, after calling bullshit on their "well they must be working on it" lie, it then took 4 hours and 2 levels of jumping up and down screaming "just give me your supervisor or someone who goddamn knows what they are doing" to get the goddamn thing cleared. Went through afterwards, said "fuck you" to their DNS servers, and set both the final box and my router itself to use OpenDNS instead.
Every time I have a service issue, I wind up calling them, and some retard in "customer service" insists "well the tool says your cable modem is fine" (bullshit, both cable TV and internet service are down completely, and yes I already went through your ENTIRE TROUBLESHOOTING METHOD you fucking dingbat, it happens frequently enough that I have the goddamn process memorized after all). Then I insist they pass me to a supervisor, who half the time is a complete ass who's mad I took him away from playing his fucking facebook games, and the other half the time admits that yeah, there is either a "scheduled maintenance outage" (which they never inform us of AHEAD of time) or a problem at the local routing station... which they are too fucking lazy to inform the level-1's about.
The only reason I'm on comcrap at all is that my alternatives in the area are crap. AT&T DSL in my area gets maybe 0.5 Mbit down, if that. Verizon FiOS is a mile away but keeps saying that because they don't "own the lines" in my subdivision, they aren't allowed to offer service. Functionally, Comcrap is a goddamn monopoly, and it shows.
I have internet and cable. I wanted only internet. I called to cancel cable. I'm now paying $5/month for cable. Guess I'm still a customer, but that $5 is good value for being able to watch some sporting events and the wife's occasional show. They asked me how much cable was worth to me a month, I told them, they charged me that. That made me fairly happy.
I used to work for a cable company (a major one, I might add), and I had that unfortunate conversation with lots of customers.
What's ironic is that this usually took place in areas where the company I worked for used some local contractors. In areas where the company hired directly, I only heard praise of the technicians, and their punctuality.
Supposedly it's supposed to be better for businesses to hire locally, but from my experience, the local contractors were lazy fucktards.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I recently moved to Seattle and was looking into fios, but freaking Comcast still has some antiquated exclusive franchise deal with the city that won't let Verizon offer it to anyone. How does this make sense in any world?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
"the truly wonderful show known as "real life""
... at least a few years. Can't stand it. Even hulu is getting on my nerves with their increased commercials. I only know roughly when shows air because of when the latest ep gets added to the online services. VOD is to network tv like MP3 is to the RIAA and divx is to the MPAA.
mmmm..... nope. No. Just internet, with video on demand. Hulu. Netflix. All the other free-stream-online-until-they-get-shut-down sites.
It's the new normal. Broadcast is dead. It started dying with tivo and the dvr, and dropped dead and stinky with ubiquitous broadband and solid, simple and reliable VOD services.
I've had no landline phone since 2003 and I haven't watched broadcast TV for
Is hulu big enough yet to have original content? FOX NBC CBS and ABC will have to truly embrace the streaming stuff, and I think they have to a certain extent, so perhaps they won't go the way of the newspaper!
Flappinbooger isn't my real name