A friend of mine recently decided to get Comcast’s high speed Internet
access in her home. I should probably redefine what I mean by
“decided”, since it wasn’t really much of a choice. Because she is too
far from her central telephone office (CO), she can’t get any form of
reliable DSL, so she “decided” to get Comcast’s service.

Right off the bat, it was a battle with Comcast as they said that they
wouldn’t be able to provision her service without her having a computer
on site. Normally, this is not a big deal, but her only computer (a
laptop) only has a wireless network card and not a wired network card.
In order to be able to provision the modem, they wanted to charge her
to setup a wireless network instead of having me setup all that up
later.

This is all really absurd. When I moved into my new apartment a few
years ago, I called Comcast and the tech came out to provision my
modem. I had nothing in my apartment besides myself, air and some
sunlight. I did not have my computer with me at the time and he was still able to provision it.

I called Comcast in behalf of my friend and they were dead set on
having a PC with a network card ready to roll at the time of
installation. When I told them my story about not having my PC, the
support representative explained that it was a new registration
procedure and that it was necessary. Instead of fighting with Comcast,
I decided to meet the Comcast installer at her house with my laptop.

The day of the install, the technician was scheduled to show up between
2 and 4 PM. We waited and waited and he finally showed up at 4:40 PM.
The guy shows up without a cable modem (although another installer did
bring a modem 10 minutes later) and tells us that the registration
system is down so he isn’t really able to provision the modem (register the modem to communicate on their network). I was
astounded, he shows up nearly an hour late without a cable modem and to
tell us what? “No Internet for you today, folks.” To his credit, he did
call my friend on her cell phone in the morning because apparently he
had some time to do the install then. To his disservice, he failed to
leave a message then, didn’t call us to tell us that he wasn’t showing
up on time because the registration system was down, showed up without
a cable modem, and had such a blase attitude that I thought he might
slip into a coma from boredom. An example of this? At one point she
asked him about the installation charge so that she could write a
check. When asked to confirm the amount, he responded, “Something like
that.” I told her to make the check out for 25 bucks and if he said
something, just tell him, “Well, you did say something like that.”

During the long wait for the installer, my friend told me that in her
experience, this type of poor customer service is a normal thing with
Comcast. I’ve heard others say the same thing about DSL, and telecom
providers (Qwest comes to mind). Are we so conditioned to poor service
from these types of companies that we think that this is normal?

I hate it when the little guy gets trampled by the “Big Corporation”.
Companies should step up to the plate and admit when things go wrong
and offer to make amends with their customers. I love to fight with
companies to see if they step up and do something, so after the
installer left, I called Comcast and complained about everything. I
managed to get her installation fee waived (as it should have been).

There were other problems with Comcast, but I’ll let my other post (soon to be written explain what those are).