Slashdot Mirror
Comcast Says There's 6 Million Unhappy DSL Users Left To Target (dslreports.com)
Karl Bode, writing for DSLReports: As we noted last week, cable is effectively demolishing phone companies when it comes to new broadband subscriber additions, and Comcast still says the company has plenty of room to grow. Comcast and Charter alone added 500,000 net broadband subscribers last quarter, while the nation's biggest telcos collectively lost 360,783 broadband users during the same period. With AT&T and Verizon backing away from unwanted DSL users, and Windstream Frontier and CenturyLink only eyeing piecemeal upgrades, the bloodshed is far from over. Speaking this week at the Nomura 2016 Media, Telecom & Internet Conference, Comcast VP Marcien Jenckes stated that the company has plenty of unhappy DSL customers left to nab. In fact, Comcast says the company still has around 6 million DSL subscribers in its territory, many of which are likely frustrated by outdated speeds.
Comcast and the like have come down my street several times taking surveys asking if we would subscribe. Since many don't want cable TV, and the ones that do already have DirecTV or Dish, they decide it's not worth it.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
What about the 20+ million unhappy Comcast subscribers? Shouldn't they target some of them for better service?
Wait, this is Comcast. Those people are already in the gallows.
Give me that $20 to $40 a month 40 Gbps internet speed any day of the week that the rest of the Free World gets under their "socialism".
1000 times faster. 10 times cheaper.
There's the sweet spot.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I am an unhappy ATT DSL customer. Mostly, I'm unhappy with ATT. They spend more on lobbying to protect their moat than they spend on improving their technology. Lobbying has a better return.
The happy Comcast customer is a myth, just like Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Sure, there may be some unhappy DSL customers remaining to poach, but thanks to their legally-regulated monopoly, Comcast's own service is unreliable, awful and badly, badly overpriced too. These customers are jumping out of the frying pan, and into a bigger frying pan. Switching to Comcast will likely make their internet faster when it works, but it will also make it much more expensive and their happiness won't improve one iota.
three times now. Even offered to handle the last ~800 from the road to no avail. Meanwhile Windstream keeps raising price -- now nearly $80 for a measly 6-Mbps.
ATT has told me too bad your DSL is really just really good dial-up there is nothing we can do about your regulated service. The retired ATT guy said yeah they are killing the connections as fast as they can. You sell your house and had DSL the new owner cannot get it back. Oh just get Direct TV. Yet fiber is 400' from my house. Bastarde'!
Handing out EBT cards for use at Jack innuh Box.
Comcast Says There's 6 Million Unhappy DSL Users Left To turn into Unhappy Comcast Customers
disclaimer: im a comcast engineer.
what tfa fails to mention is that there's 6 million unhappy DSL users left to target with our fresnel laser of doom. rest assured, (and we've tested this,) customer complaints are a thing of the past after exposure to the futuristic beam of a laser that blots out the sun.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I could never pay Comcast for any TV services because their system is so out of touch with competitors its terrible. On the other hand broadband has been really good, stable and fast. But I do know several people who have switched back to DSL to save money. I personally think Comcast offers a expensive bottom tier package that does not compete well with DSL. In my town the only way to get a cheap broadband service with Comcast is to also get TV service with them.
Comcast is delusional if it thinks speed is the major bottleneck between subscribers and happiness. It is but one of many issues, though it is somewhat significant. By far, the bigger issues are:
1) Price. High speed Internet access in America is way over priced, and way under-delivered.
2) Lack of choices. We need the municipalities to own the infrastructure, and multiple, competing private companies to administer it. It's the only model that works.
3) Availability. High speed Internet is available in probably 10% (or less) of America, despite decades of massive tax cuts to Internet providers for the sole purpose of connecting America. The corruptions needs to stop, and we need to get our money back.
a faster frying pan, as it were
I have DSL that used to be cheap but they made me get a phone line and it almost doubled in price. (i don't need or use the phone line). I called comcast and they said i can get internet only for 44$ per month. I don't need tv because i get all i need from an OTA and the internet. Is that price for real or is there hidden prices that despite my asking about will still get tacked on my bill. I'm in central NJ, only choices are Verizon DSL(what i now have) and Comcast.
So what are they doing about that?
i am very happy that i have DSL and not Comcast.. so there's that.
Have gnu, will travel.
Hello! I have seen and experienced Comcast's service and customer service.
I cannot advise anyone to use them.
That is all - and I hope that won't get me tracked down and sued.
You forgot Jesus, Moses, and a bunch of other fictional or mostly fictional beings who never existed except in a few stories that have long since been blown way out proportion. I do believe there was actually someone named Jesus who had a following of people talking some bullshit that another group of people didn't like and crucified him. No different than MLK or Kennedy or even Hitler. Damn near 100% of the bible is fictional at best.
I'd take DSL any day over Comcast's service.
I had DSL ... but it started becoming unreliable including one time one of their people messed up my line. Switched to Comcast for a year until a local ISP wired our block with Fibre to the house.
While I had cCmcast, I was happy, other then constantly trying to up-sell me more stuff or a faster speed.
How much of those numbers are outdated? For instance, Centrylink is very aggressively replacing all coper lines with fiber lines in the Pacific Northwest. 8 months ago I could sign up for DSL service through them still. 7 months ago, I couldn't, because they made the switch in my neighborhood to fiber, and now no longer offer anything lower than 40mbps fiber connections with no option at all anymore for DSL. Upon finding this out, I promptly switch from cable (municipal ISP) over to their gigabit fiber, because, well, the local cable ISP is still debating if/when to upgrade their network and moving "at the speed of government"
It's hilarious that they think I'm unhappy. Since I canceled my Comcast service I've never been happier. My 20Mbps Centrylink DSL is fast enough and reliable.
As for them being "slow" to roll out new service. They offered fiber at my condo in Salt Lake City six years ago. It was expensive and I had to spend $1500 to run it from the pole but it was available. From what I understand they're upgrading the lines in my current neighborhood to fiber as well.
Funny how things work when there is competition. My condolences to anyone with no options.
My girlfriend and I finally reached the breaking point with Time Warner and cancelled our "working when it wants to be" 100 megabit service for a perfectly stable 7 megabit DSL connection. It was a matter of maintaining sanity and we are much happier with it. Also, no more burning up mobile hotspot bandwidth every time it flaked out.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
My case in point is myself. I own a house which is actually *inside* the boundaries of one of the top 5 Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the US. It's a small neighborhood with about 80 full-sized family homes that are about median-priced for the MSA as a whole, and right next door to a fancier neighborhood that's about 3-4x median price. In pragmatic terms, it's about a 7 mile drive to a pop-10,000 satellite town, and it's a total 15 mile drive to the edge of the MSA's core where population density begins to truly skyrocket. My house is about 1/4 mile from the nearest major highway (leading through the satellite town into the core of the MSA). AT&T offers U-verse in my neighborhood at up to 75Mbps download speed, and is generally reliable and fairly-priced all things considered. They are the *only* provider at my address for any kind of fixed-line internet or TV service. Comcast, as far as I know, has no plans to start offering service here.
I switched off Comcast a few months ago to a regional ISP that's deploying fiber-to-the-premises all over the place. Their current offering in my neighborhood is FTTN, which is basically fiber to a box near my house, then DSL from that box to my living room. I have two DSL lines bonded for a 50Mbps down, ~8Mbps up connection (that is, faster than Comcast in uploads) for about a third what I was paying Comcast. That's to tide us over until the ISP gets around to replacing that last mile, which they've actually been doing and not continually deferring to some distant future.
Don't cry for me and my DSL connection. Our download speed is theoretically slower, but in practice it's just as fast, utterly uncapped, and far cheaper. I somehow think we'll scrape by.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"Comcast says there's six million unhappy...." It kills me every single time I see people say this incorrectly. It is "there ARE six million ...."
If the noun is singular - use is. If the noun is plural - use are. It's really that simple.
I was an unhappy cable customer who switched to DSL. Best thing I ever did for my internet connection. Sure, cable can be faster... when it works. But after many weeks of it going down several times a week, usually at least once a day, and many service calls, I had had enough. DSL that works 24/7 is far better than spotty cable even if it's a bit slower.
On the plus side, I also get to work with a local company with legendary amazing(ly good) customer service, who are proud of their company and act it, and I now have 50 Mbit/s down, 25Mbit/s up DSL that is more than fast enough for our needs and is cheaper than cable. And if I need faster, 100Mbit/s DSL is an option.
I'm extremely rural, but amazingly both cable and blazingly-fast DSL are an option for me because our local telco is five stars. To such a degree, limiting ourselves to their service area was one of the top priorities when shopping for this house... no lie.
I've had sucky ATT DSL here in Chicago, - 6Mbps, for years. We could get comcast but it would mean changing to new email domains, which I am too lazy to do. If Comcast weren't just as sucky, customer service wise, there might be a compelling reason to move.
As long as the internet providers are not classified as a public utility, this shiite will continue.
Overpriced. Underserved. With lousy attitude.
If you can't provide the goods and./or somebofy can provide more than you, expect to lose.
Offer a cloud server of the user's choice of operating system with every signup, and you'll have DSL customers beating down your doorstep.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And what does it say about Comcast as a company when there's 6 million people willing to suffer through crappy DSL rather than have to deal with Comcast?
I'd only gone to DSL because of comcasts dismal reputation, but after ATT started hitting me with their billing shenanigans I begrudgingly switched to comcast.
Theyve been surprisingly good. The connection is both faster and cheaper & reliability is about on par. I asked them for their rock bottom internet only service & they didnt try to shove a bunch of tv crap down my throat... $30 a month... couldnt be happier.
My only complaint is that the next tier up is more than double ($75)... id buy it if it were only $20 more or whatnot, but double?!? nah.
Existing communication lines are taxed and every new line that is faster than ADSL can be used by the companies to reduce the amount. I had 5mbit just until recently, now paying ~18 USD for a gigabit connection.
Classic TV might be less popular, but the 6 major media companies use pricing, and bundling, to entice many people to buy those bulk purchases. Want to watch the Breaking Bad series finale, the Game of Thrones newest twist, or the Football game, and talk about it the next day? You need those expensive, premium cable channels. Or you can wait a few months, and pay $40 per season on DVD, or wait a few years, by which not many people will care, and those that do, will already be blurting out spoilers. Want the next high budget, well written Star Trek series (assuming such a thing will get made)? Better pay up to CBS. Want to see the spinoff of Breaking Bad? Pay up to AMC Networks (not a big 6 media company). You'll break down, and pay them somehow.... Unless you use internet piracy.
I'm a VERY happy Comcast customer (so they do exist) but I'm an enterprise customer and not a residential customer, so YMMV. Something like 3-4 hours of unscheduled downtime in the last five years on the HFC circuit, and the GigE private circuit that I have for one of my remote sites hasn't seen any downtime since installation last year.
I'd like to say that "service with big telecom improves as you spend more money" but AT&T still sucks no matter how much money I give them.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
I think you missed the point. In this context, customers refers to individual people and families. Corporations are more important than people, and so, by definition, get better service. It does not contradict the GP who says that a happy Comcast customer is a myth.
that you want another 6 million unhappy Comcast customers?
Comcast cable tv sucks next to all other systems.
There internet is good but there HD lineup sucks + now they are doing rate shaping as well. Also there channel map sucks.
DSL user here. Not too happy with the speed, but I consciously chose DSL years ago to avoid Comcast despite the lower speed, and I have yet to regret the decision, particularly since speed isn't that much use if your ISP is fucking around with your connection and/or capping you.
What's the beef? With modern compression algorithms, DSL is plenty fast enough for video streaming, who needs more than that? If I wanted, I could potentially stream 250 GB a month, imagine what that would cost on a wireless contract. DSL reliability is incredible; in 10 years it's been out maybe 3 or 4 times for a few hours. When the power has gone out for days at a time, DSL still works, as does my landline phone. There are no rental charges; my modem was free and it still works. Best of all, I don't have to deal with Comcast and their incomprehensible rate structure. Even including all the phoney landline charges, it's less than half what I'd pay otherwise. DSL now, DSL tomorrow, DSL forever.
There is one exception - when Google Fiber comes to your city, and then suddenly it's a whole new Comcast.
Google Fiber has only begun to deploy here in Nashville, and already Comcast has run new cables on the utility poles in my neighborhood, and offered everyone a no-contract $139 / month Xfinity X1 package with 300 Mbps service. Before Google Fiber, my Internet dropped out a couple of dozen times a day. Now it's rock solid. Phone support is still abysmal, but I can go to the local Xfinity store and actually have someone competent address any problem I might have. Plus, I'm paying less per month than I did before I upgraded.
Of course, I'm still going to switch to Google Fiber once it gets to my street. For now, it's just a matter of getting the best bang for the buck until I can rid myself of Comcast forever.
We have DSL, AT&T and Comcast available, and stick with a slow, local DSL provider over having to deal with Comcast.
I'm a DSL holdout on Verizon. I loathe Comcast/Xfinity and believe in "voting with my dollars". However, it is becoming increasing difficult to justify paying $49.99/month for 7 Mbit.
My Mother recently called a Crapfinity tech out to her house because she was only getting 52 Mbit instead of the advertised 100+. And they fixed it. Compared to me, she lives in the middle of nowhere and has 15x better speed. Meanwhile, I'm still getting buffering issues on 720p video from YouTube.
Yeah, choice. Woohoo.
but where are our lobbyists?
captcha: earmarks
Why anyone would switch TO Comcast for ANY reason is beyond me; their lousy service is only eclipsed by their lousy CUSTOMER service!!
Release countermeasures! Take evasive action!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I cancelled Comcast and went to slower Verizon DSL because I got fed up with Comcast's
1) Lousy customer service
2) Constant outages
3) Outrageously high prices and constant rate hikes
How the heck is Comcast planning on winning me back as a customer??? If they're saying they can, it must be opposite day...
Most services typically face periods of sluggishness. Based on my experience with slimy telecom marketers, they'll suggest that those periods are due to not having high enough "speed". Naive customers may just fall for it.
In reality, those periods of sluggishness will likely happen regardless of "billed" speed. I've purchased higher speed mainly because it was bundled* with something else, but I still get periods of sluggishness, especially on weekend evenings. They all oversell capacity, probably with DSL also. (It's not Comcast, but I've read similar complaints from users of ALL the big telecom's. Oligopolies usually suck, period.)
Thus, speed is probably being used as a sales gimmick.
* I hate forced bundling, but that's a different evil-telecom subject.
Table-ized A.I.
We're one of three houses on our street (in Brookline, MA) that Comcast won't serve because we're too far from a utility pole. They don't seem too interested in doing anything about it; we've called repeatedly. So we're stuck with damnfool 1500/368 (kbit) DSL. Feh.
Offer a cloud server of the user's choice of operating system with every signup, and you'll have DSL customers beating down your doorstep.
Yeah, that's what Joe Sixpack Average User understands - cloud-based virtual servers! Clearly this will be a mass-market WIN!
with each other. They have exclusive franchises granted to them in exchange for paying for the infrastructure up front ( Yeah, I know they didn't really pay for it since they got tax credits almost immediately to offset it on top of tax cuts to further offset it, but hey, that's America for you).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
but they can charge you extra for speed, it costs them virtually nothing and their sales reps can at least pretend you got something in exchange for the last round of price increase (up to $75/mo in my neighborhood, yay!). But hey, it beats that commie "municiple" broadband, amaright?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sounds like British Telecom or BT OpenReach, who have decided that households should "only expect to get one HD video stream at any time".
Consider that a household can have five adults, each with a smartphone, tablet, laptop and desktop, all watching Netflix, BBC I player, streamed educational materials, Open University, YouTube, then they really seem out of touch.
It really looks like BT need to hire themselves a new futurologist.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'm an unhappy DSL user with sonic.net but I'd switch over to two tin cans and a length of string before I sign any contract with Comcast.
I sell 768k dry loop DSL every day. A certain segment of the population does not want to spend more than $20 a month on Internet.
Less popular channels are often delivered through "switched digital video" (SDV), which delivers only those channels that someone in a particular neighborhood is watching. It's more like multicast video-on-demand, such as pay-per-view boxing, than like traditional digital cable TV channels.
The people still on DSL are not Joe Sixpack. They prefer a slower line in exchange for the one thing that faster broadband can't give you- a static IP and the right to run a server.
Give them an option that enables them to run their own server, and you'll capture that market.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Well, truthfully, I switched a month ago, after having Verizon DSL since 1999 or so. I have no love for either mega-corp, but 150mpbs via Comcast is blowing the doors off my old 6mb connection (it's more $$ as well, as expected). Had Verizon actually rolled out FIOS in my area, for convenience I would've stayed with them, but a birdie from the company told me it's never going to happen. The sucky thing is, Verizon will never officially tell you that and keep stringing you along.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
You're way off. About 50% of the bible is fictional. There are a lot of historical places, people and events in the book that are authentic.
There's a lot more of those. Thanks.
Well, I'd been a happy 25Mbs comcast subscriber for quite some time, but was looking forward to the day that some company would run fiber into my neighborhood. Google announced the Atlanta area, but not in the suburbs where I live.
Then AT&T came through announcing their fiber in my neighborhood, and within weeks I got a letter from comcast telling me I could upgrade my service. Still, I haven't had customer service problems with comcast's internet folks, the uptime has been great. Competition is great. I may switch to AT&T, but I've heard such terrible customer service stories.... and I've heard stories about comcast that don't reflect my experience, so I don't know how much to make out of the complaints. Of course, people don't jump up and down ranting about good service, so the negativity always seems to over represent customer experience for pretty much every company, but I don't see why, with my upgraded speeds and (so far) great service, I should risk change.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
While there are a lot of people incapable of getting decent service with ADSL there are a lot of people like myself who have only ever subscribed to ADSL or Fibe (two places I lived I got fiber, and not from Verizon, but local companies or via municipality public utilities) because of the manipulative tactics of Comcast and similar cable companies. ADSL is better in that you get what you pay for (pretty much always, I've never gotten 4mpbs on 25mbps advertised pipes for example, unlike I've experienced numerous times with Comcast, during prime time hours) so long as you are within a reasonable range of the central office. Comparatively Comcast advertises speeds you can't *EVER* get by design. They know full well that they oversubscribe to such extremes (often) that when users actually want to utilize (during prime time hours) it the connection is unusable- worse than ADSL in many places. Now they mess with the connections to make people think they are getting absurdly fast speeds. But if you actually look at the facts they do all sorts of malicious stuff including shaping of traffic, throttling, disconnecting certain types of content (Torrents), etc.
One being that the FBI only need to infiltrate ONE company to steal all of your data and ship it out internationally.
Comcast is one of those.
I think you missed the point. In this context, customers refers to individual people and families. Corporations are more important than people, and so, by definition, get better service. It does not contradict the GP who says that a happy Comcast customer is a myth.
I'm the guy who deals with the sales guys, tech guys, field guys and manages the circuits on a day to day basis. To suggest that I'm not a customer is an absurdity. With regard to your schtick that corporte customers are more important because they're "not people" I think it has more to do with the fact that the check we cut Comcast every month probably equals what everyone else in a quarter-mile radius pays, combined.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
“Comcast Says There's 6 Million Unhappy DSL Users Left To Target”
and the company feels they are the only ones who can truly elevate these users’ experience to suicidal misery.
Do they wish to make them even more unhappy?