Why Comcast Sucks. (Today.) Part III
May. 18th, 2009 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aSo we now have working digital cable. Comcast called us today saying that we were losing half of our channels tomorrow, so I finally sat down to undo what the idiot cable installer did two weeks ago and set up what I thought would be a correct layout (having studied it more the night after that idiot cable installer was here). I was right, but it did take 60-90 minutes, including much waiting-for-the-Tivo.
In the end there were two major problems with getting the Tivo connected to the digital cable box, all of which no one thought to tell us. First, there had to be a way for the Tivo to control the cable box. Fortunately a serial cable worked with the second cable box we got, so we don't have to depend on Tivo's IR-control-fake kludge. Second, the Tivo had to go back through its guided setup.
Now in the normal course of things, I'd mostly expect Comcast to want to know enough about a setup, even if it's only used by 5-10% of their customers, to get them installed right. But in this particular situation, where Comcast is forcing digital down the throat of all of its basic customers, I'd damned well expect it, and there Comcast came woefully, woefully short of anything approaching competent customer support.
When all's said and done, here's how Comcast sucked:
So, the end result of Comcast's "painless" digital upgrade--which is not the same thing as the antennae going digital, however much Comcast might imply otherwise--is that I wasted 3 or 4 hours of my time, all of our channels take about 5 seconds to change now, we now have an extra point of failure in front of our Tivo, and we're paying extra electricity bills for their set top box. And what do we get out of it? Nothing we want.
And I have to say, I'm relatively electronically competent. I can't imagine that the average person would have been able to do a damned thing, faced with the lying and incompetent customer support we got.
Oh, for competition in the cable space!! Comcast shows what comes of monopolies.
In the end there were two major problems with getting the Tivo connected to the digital cable box, all of which no one thought to tell us. First, there had to be a way for the Tivo to control the cable box. Fortunately a serial cable worked with the second cable box we got, so we don't have to depend on Tivo's IR-control-fake kludge. Second, the Tivo had to go back through its guided setup.
Now in the normal course of things, I'd mostly expect Comcast to want to know enough about a setup, even if it's only used by 5-10% of their customers, to get them installed right. But in this particular situation, where Comcast is forcing digital down the throat of all of its basic customers, I'd damned well expect it, and there Comcast came woefully, woefully short of anything approaching competent customer support.
When all's said and done, here's how Comcast sucked:
- They forced this digital change on everyone as part of a territory grab on their part.
- When Kimberly first talked to a CS rep, he assured her that the new Cable box would come with complete instructions for setting it up with the Tivo. It came with nothing of the sort. My guess is that was a lie of convenience: he probably wanted to get her off the line, and figured maybe we could set it up but in any case, it was someone else's problem.
- When Comcast shipped us the box, not only did it not have instructions for being hooked up to a Tivo, but it was also a model that was known not to work with the Tivo.
- When I later talked to a CS rep, I asked him if there was any steps I'd missed, or if things should just work the second I connected the coax cable. He assured me that was all that was required, and to underline his credibility, he explained that he'd done such a setup for his dear-old grandparents just the weekend before. As far as I can tell, that was a bald-faced lie, because it would be pretty much impossible to set up a Tivo with a cable box and not know you needed something to make the cable box switch the channel.
- When the cable installer was here, he was totally incompetent. I can now say pretty unconditionally that he didn't know what the cable box did, because there's no way you could set up a cable box with no output and think that would work. We'll give him a pass on the fact that he didn't know how to hook up the cable box to a Tivo in particular (as opposed, you know, to AT ALL), but ...
- Comcast sent up a cable installer who didn't know how to hook up a cable box to a Tivo, even though they knew that was our issue, because we'd mentioned it multiple times by now.
- Comcast has spies on the internet. Within 12 hours of my last invective-filled post, someone with an LJ id of something like "comcastspies03" sent me a Message about how he'd be happy to use his Comcast "resources" to help me solve the problem. Yeah, like I was going to trust them again. I was already at the point where if my new setup didn't work, I was either getting a Tivo 3 (which had an easier setup path) or else writing off Comcast entirely.
So, the end result of Comcast's "painless" digital upgrade--which is not the same thing as the antennae going digital, however much Comcast might imply otherwise--is that I wasted 3 or 4 hours of my time, all of our channels take about 5 seconds to change now, we now have an extra point of failure in front of our Tivo, and we're paying extra electricity bills for their set top box. And what do we get out of it? Nothing we want.
And I have to say, I'm relatively electronically competent. I can't imagine that the average person would have been able to do a damned thing, faced with the lying and incompetent customer support we got.
Oh, for competition in the cable space!! Comcast shows what comes of monopolies.
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Date: 2009-05-19 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-20 02:11 am (UTC)