Comcast, CenturyLink Give New Home Owner Kafka-esque Introduction To U.S. Broadband Market
from the like-a-bad-novel dept
There's been no shortage of Comcast horror stories in the media of late, the company promising time and time again that it has made customer service a top priority under the careful watch of a new "Customer Experience" VP. Except despite ten years of these promises and what seems like an endless parade of horrible PR, the customer satisfaction rankings for companies like Comcast are actually getting worse. That's because with no serious competition forcing their hand and regulatory capture ensuring nobody tries to fix things, there's simply no organic penalty for being historically awful at what they do.While these kinds of stories are a dime a dozen, the Consumerist recently posted what I think is the near perfect encapsulation of what's wrong with the U.S. broadband market. The website tells the story of a Washington State resident named Seth, who purchased a new house after being told by Comcast (several times, according to a FAQ the user is maintaining) that the house was ready for broadband service. Of course once he moved in he was told that neither Comcast or regional telco CenturyLink could provide him service.
On it's face that's not necessarily a big deal -- broadband coverage gaps are common, as are inaccurate service databases. It's the experience the customer has with customer service after the fact that perfectly illustrates the utterly abysmal state of the U.S. broadband industry, and the way carriers' left hand (or right hand, or left foot, or brain) usually doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Seth notes it actually takes months and more than three Comcast technician visits for the company to realize the house has never been serviced before:
"He just appeared out of nowhere and asked us where our cable box was,” writes Seth. “We explained that we didn’t have one, but that we did have a Drop Bury Request in place. He looked perplexed. He told us that there was no way a Drop Bury Request could possibly get us hooked up, we were too far away from the cable infrastructure. We asked him to contact someone at Comcast to get things resolved, and he left."From there, Seth has to stumble through layer upon layer of what can only be described as total, relentless absurdism, including countless conversations with Comcast support personnel, on site engineering visits, phantom appointment cancellations and claims by Comcast that he'd had a successful install when no work had actually been done. From there it goes beyond "horror story" and well into Terry Gilliam "Brazil" territory, with Comcast at several points being totally unaware of his work order status, whether his house has service, whether the house could get service, and frankly, what planet Seth lives on.
Then on Feb. 9 another tech showed up — at least this one was on schedule — but just like his predecessors, this guy had not been given the memo that the house was not yet connected to the Comcast network. He was just there to hook up a modem and some cable boxes. Several days later — and again without an appointment — yet another Comcast tech showed up to do an install that simply couldn’t be done."
After initially being told he could pay part of the $50,000 to $60,000 needed to do a coax and hardware run to his house (pretty common for rural cable customers just out of range), Seth ultimately has to give up months later, after the company finally concludes the ROI on the work isn't worth Comcast's time, even with Seth and his neighbors footing the lion's share of the bill. Seth then turns to regional telco CenturyLink in the hopes it could offer something vaguely resembling a sane business transaction, since their website claims he can get service. Yet somehow, his experience actually manages to get worse:
"But then the next day he got a call informing him that his area was in “Permanent Exhaust” and that CenturyLink wouldn’t be adding new customers. Of course, that didn’t stop CenturyLink from billing Seth more than $100 for service he never received and will never be able to receive. Seth then had to convince someone with CenturyLink’s billing department to zero out the account that should have never been opened."At one point, The Consumerist tries to lend Seth a hand and contacts CenturyLink on his behalf, only to be told by the support rep they can't help because they're leaving the company. Said rep then decides to forward on the complaint to a manager -- who winds up being on a multi-week vacation. Ultimately, CenturyLink has to admit that their website has inaccurate data regarding its coverage area (data that hasn't been corrected to date). CenturyLink, it should be noted, has played a starring role in protectionist state level legislation preventing neighborhoods like Seth's from building their own networks, even in cases where CenturyLink refuses to service them.
With telecommuting to do and the daily usage caps of satellite broadband not an option, Seth's currently stuck on a capped and very expensive Verizon LTE plan until he can figure out what to do with the house. As we've been discussing, AT&T and Verizon have been backing away from DSL in the hopes of shoveling customers just like Seth on to capped, very expensive LTE plans -- in the process actually making already dismal fixed-line competition actually worse. Ultimately, this lack of competition means these companies don't have to care whether you like their service -- or their Kafka-esque support. You will, whether you like it or not, take exactly what they're willing to give you.
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Filed Under: broadband, bureaucracy, customer service, new home
Companies: centurylink, comcast
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REIGN. IN. THESE. COMPANIES!
Seriously, this is getting absurd. What do the American people have to do or say to you to finally get you to actually listen to us instead of the paid mouthpieces from the broadband industry who want do what they want with no one to keep them in check?
No more mergers. No more protectionist laws to prop up their monopoly or duopoly gatekeeper power. Stop fighting against net neutrality and enact policies that dramatically increase competition.
Signed,
The Fed Up American People.
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We have all kinds of militarized police departments sitting on surplus gear: let's put them to work taking control of every Comcast data center, corporate office, and consumer outlet. The result couldn't possibly be any worse than what we have now.
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Viola, free market competition.
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Almost all the government is now being run officially by private crops disguised as contractors. Looting the treasury along the way.
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This is why some want to point a gun at you. Don't cry if it happens.
You are an idiot.
There is zero reason to nationalize... we just need to get the government out of creating the monopolies.
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it is a legalized extortion racket...
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Arrest them all and confiscate their wealth. Make them shovel a ditch to the homes of the people they are screwing by using their wealth to corrupt free enterprise and liberty.
Retrain DHS to become cable installers and customer service reps and then put make them part of the new postal service.
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Then the members of Congress use this money to fund their re-election campaign to make sure no one else can elected and do something about the issue.
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Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite
What do you have to do? Vote out the politicians that give preference to corporate interests over their voting constituency. Until you do that Fed Up American People ... you're just pissing in the wind and complaining your face is wet.
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We moved into a new neighborhood that was in its first stage of construction. After we got our keys, we got our homeowner's package, and included were two ads: one from Comcast and one from AT&T, both offering "specials" to get us hooked up.
Comcast "won" out for its $88/mo (HAHAHAHA) special, but when we called, we were shocked to find out they didn't have service in our area at all.
When I questioned why they were advertising in an area they weren't even servicing, I was told they were just the sales rep. I told the rep: "You work for a horrible, horrible company. Put me down as a 'Never, ever call this customer' and have a great day."
I hung up, vowing never to be a Comcast customer. Ever.
We then called AT&T, and told us that while they had plans for service, they had to wait for the contractor's final approval. They had it within the hour, and that very day, AT&T had service at our new home.
Of course, not to say AT&T doesn't have its issues, but honestly, aside from their price gouging (how their $99 special went to $159, for example), they've been pretty much a decent ISP in terms of correcting issues.
Comcast, not only should the company take notes, but it would do better to serve the people of this country by selling off its assets and closing its doors forever.
The only reason Comcast has customers is because most don't have a choice when it comes to ISP selection.
The FCC isn't moving fast enough to fix the problems plaguing this country, and I'm not just talking about broadband access.
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that would have been rippa!
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This story makes me rage so much. The competition is non-existent. If we had anything resembling an actual market, we wouldn't even need Title II.
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Go away asking price
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Congresscritters are blatantly for sale, they listen to anyone willing to pay them.
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Been there, done that.
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best April Fools prank ever!
Extending a customer service nightmare for 3 extra months just to so techdirt would report on it on April Fools Day? Best prank ever!
Now Comcast should just call him, say 'April Fools!' and hook up his cable.
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Can you spell Catch-22?
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"I'm sorry, but we no longer service your area, and you'll need to pay us sixty thousand dollars before we even consider servicing your area. And our consideration will probably be 'no, and you don't get a refund either', at that. So there."
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Does He Have Legal Option
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Maybe as a settlement, the company could agree to run a line to his house.
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CenturyLink advertising
Having set up a land line, I'd found at that time that CenturyLink did not offer service to my address.
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Hits Too Close to Home
Grudgingly, I turned to Comcast. But although online it said that service was available to me, it kept giving me an error when I went to actually complete the check-out process, and their online chat rep told me that I would have to go into a Comcast office in person to sort it out. When I did, the tech came back after 10 minutes and told me I was years away from ever getting service at that address, even if they were to start the process now, which, by the way, they weren't even considering. So, thanks to Comcast for wasting as much of time as possible.
I ended up with CenturyLink, whose best offered DSL plan in my area is 10 mbps, but who told me they could only offer me 6 mbps under it (with no discount of course). So I ended up going from a 150/10 connection to a 6/0.5 connection.
Still, it could be worse. At least I have a connection that can stream a video . . .
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Feb 9th imaginary conversation
Seth: Great! Finaly! We were told the box is in that direction *point-somewhere-across-the-street*. Here is a shouvel. Have a nice day and good luck.
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Comcast Is Mentally Incapable of Doing the Sensible Thing.
Cellphone service is not designed for connecting outlying houses. It uses a comparatively low, omni-directional frequency, rather than the kinds of frequencies which are well-suited to microwave relays. 4G LTE operates on various bands between 700 MHz and 2.6GHz. A municipal system, which was short on money, and could not simply build out landlines, would install 20 GHZ phased array wireless units on the tops of telephone poles at the outer extremity of its landline network, and then proceed to sell relay units for perhaps a thousand dollars each, which people could put on their roofs. Going from roof to roof to telephone pole gives a decent field of view, and the wireless relays can often be a thousand feet apart or more.
In similar circumstances, in the 1930's the Federal Government created the Rural Electrification Administration, which organized a series of local cooperative projects to supply farms with electricity. It generally worked out to farmers putting up their own poles and stringing their own wire, pretty much line a barn-raising, only with a limited amount of supervision by experts. Part of the deal was that any farmer who wanted REA electricity had to give right-of-way across his land, so that other farmers could get electricity too.
The MIT Roofnet project, under Robert T. Morris, Jr., worked pretty much like the REA, on a smaller scale. The MIT computer center gave away WiFi relay devices to students who were living in the usual off-campus student-slum apartments in Cambridge, Mass. I would not care to venture how many of the students' landlords actually gave permission to install the things, but that probably did not stop many people.
ComCast seems to be pretty conflicted. The company is obviously terrified that people should start installing stuff on their rooftops, and doesn't want to make any suggestions along those lines. Once line-of-sight relay wireless took off, people would begin installing wireless even though they had cable/DSL access, because the wireless was cheaper. One might think that Dish Networks would be more rational, but, given their interconnections with the television industry, they seem to be a bit reluctant to do something which precipitates wholesale competition with cable. They are afraid that doing mesh wireless might involve them in additional difficulties in buying television programming.
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1. Municipal broadband
2. Google Fiber
3. Some company that isn't Comcast
And, if I do get an affirmative, I'm going to see if I can't get it in writing, just to make the resulting lawsuit (if they're yanking my chain) easier.
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We're in the process of moving to 1&1 (which is using the Telekom infrastructure) but Vodafone blocked this too at first, saying we had to fullfil our minimum term of contract completely gnoring our special right of termination. Now that this is finally gone through their thick skulls, when 1&1 planned our move for April 24th, Vodafone just added 3 days for the fun of it.
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ISP
Comcast was not available.
In spite of all the winging & moaning about no competition, I checked out 2 satellite companies and 3 microwave companies and selected a microwave ISP. Almost anyone can get a satellite ISP. Microwave service is also widely available except in areas that local governments have partnered with a private firm and forbid competition.
When government gets involved, everything gets worse.
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Different company, same BS.
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