Comcast a telecom that can’t ‘tele’ or communicate

The following is part rant and part attempt to do something constructive, with the help of others, about something that is fast becoming a major headache for us personally and as a business.

We have this misfortune to use Comcast for our Internet, TV and telephone requirements, a decision that we are in the process of revising but there are no ideal, or even close to ideal solutions as far we can see.

All of our services go down with a regularity that is completely unacceptable, i.e.several hours at a time and several times a month. Even when the service is up it is often bordering on the unuseable, unable to feed data fast enough for the TV for example.

Comcast customer service is nothing of the sort, it is actually a buffer designed to keep us as far away from any honest and useful answers as possible. They seem to think that the phrase ‘I would like to apologize’ is an all purpose get out of jail free card. Saying this, I do feel sympathy for the customer service end of the Comcast monolith- tough gig!

We are in down town Valparaiso, NW Indiana and we receive service out of Chicago although we do get some South Bend affiliates as well.

Their are two parts to this problem, the first being that Comcast are obviously pouring far to much money into advertising and not nearly enough into infrastructure the second being their apalling lack of communication.

We may not be able to do much about the former but I really would like to address the latter.

If enough people from the local area who use Comcast could get in touch with us and tell us of their experience we can start to build up a larger picture showing just how bad (or good) their service really is. On a smaller level I’d like to get a better take on the current problem that they are obviously doing just enough to get a quick fix without actually solving the underlying issue.

Moral of the tale: Never put all of your data feed eggs in the same telecom provider basket.