Comcast is a Bunch of Scoundrels

So there are enough techie folks on here to appreciate this, but Comcast charges $150 to install cable internet. Are you kidding? $150 to install a few cables? I laughed my a** off when they told me that; think I'll go with the self install myself.

 

Personally, I wouldn't let their underpaid/untrained installation guys near my house with a power tool for any reason. (sorry to anyone who installs cable, I'm sure you're the exception)

 

When I got mine set up they wouldn't let me do a self-install

When I got the bill for installation I called them up and complained about how expensive the installation was and that they didn't have a self-install option and they took off all of the install charges.

 

They insisted they had to send out a guy to check the signal or something. They f-ed that up and left me sitting at home waiting for them for 2 days.

I called and complained they refunded the installation fee.

 

HAHAHA!!! There is no way those guys are going to be playing around with my house! Anyway, it's so freekin easy.

 

Do it yourself!

I've had the satellite guys do enough damage to my home over the years to trust any of these install monkeys anymore. Luckily complaining gets the charges dropped 90% of the time.

 

A service guy from Comcast burned down my neighbors house about 2 months ago!!! He was drilling from the inside -> out in the basement. His 1" drill bit hit the power box outside and sent sparks flying everywhere. By the time he got the fire extinguisher the basement was already up in flames. Three towns worth of fire trucks showed up and said it was one of the most intense fires they had seen in quite some time. Flames were coming out of the roof and the fire basically destroyed the entire house. Comcast is definitely buying that house...I wonder what happened to the service guy!

 

Egads, those install techs can be idiots. I have Direct TV and the guy did one of the crappiest cable runs I have ever seen. I mean seriously, does aesthetics mean nothing to these people? I should have been home to question and direct...my bad.

 

I think it's the contracted tech/installers than anything. We recently had Charter TV installed in a lobby area of an educational/technical center I work for and the contracted installer used the PBX key system as a step stool to reach some interduct. Cracked one of the channel bank boards and half the phone system went out.

After being told not to stand on it in the first place...

 

Smack!!

 

Did I mention that I had to be at work when the guy came for the install so my wife was the one who had to deal with the guy? I must have told her a million times last night "do not let him talk you into installing the internet". She still had to call me while the guy was there and have me talk to him!

 

Last time I needed my Hughes sat. dish aligned, it took 6 weeks. The first guy scheduled fell off the roof while installing someone else's antenna. Mind you, this was on a clear, dry, windless day. The second guy got lost looking for my house, which is easy to do, but driving off a bridge into the creek makes it special.

The third guy showed up on time, took 20 minutes to align the antenna and didn't damage anything. I suspect he got fired for competence.

 

The side of my house (twin) looks like crap between cable, telephone and electric lines. I have most of the cable lines installed in the walls, the telephone lines will be ripped off the building soon and the elctric will be painted.

Anyone know if i can just cut the telephone line between the street and my house and let the line just dangle? Can I cause damage to Verizon's lines?

 

You could as long as you don't want telephone service from Verizon... And they may charge you for it if you decide to get service from them again...

As for Comcast, "F!" (most of) their installers... I told the order taker and the dispatcher that called me the day before my install that the drop from the pole to my house was gone and they would need to send a bucket truck / guy who could climb a ladder... The eastern European dude came to the door, said he was going to check out the feed... Five minutes later, he tells me I have no drop (No **** Sherlock) and that he will have to refer the install to the bucket truck guy... Never mind the fact he has a ladder on his truck... He leaves without doing anything or leaving me the converter box and after 3 calls to dispatch, I somehow manage to convinve them to get the bucket dude to show up... He was a great guy... After hearing what happened, he gets on the Nextel and says "Get that damned contractor back here RIGHT NOW!"

Bucket dude ran the drop down the pole and in 20 minutes, I was gleefully watching sub-par Hi Def... =)

Did I mention this was after my '4 hour service window'?

 

I used to work for the cable modem side of Comcast, and yeah, the contractors were a joke. The in-house techs tend to be on the ball and at least in the markets I supported they had good QA for them.

As far as the bucket truck, the person in the call center can't send one of those directly. There are only so many to go around and the advanced techs that do maintenance (not service calls) are the ones that get them. An aerial drop shouldn't need one though, the techs have those ladders on their vans for a reason. Climb the pole, attach the drop to the tap, climb ladder at the house and attach the drop at the ground block.

You can probably haggle for free installation if you really want. While I was still working on the floor, I would toss out free installs left and right. I would use it as a way to make the customer happy without them even asking half the time. The money is in the subscriptions not the installs.

Here's the reason why people don't like Comcast: Comcast has discovered the maximum amount of profit when compared to customer satisfaction and overhead. If they spent more to genuinely improve satisfaction, they would lose customers due to higher prices, and thus lose profit. If they lowered prices, then they would lose too many customers due to lower satisfaction, or they lose profit. Comcast is a business, their goal is to make money, not to make people happy.

On that note, if anyone has any questions specific about cable modems, hit me up. I might be a bit rusty as it's been a few years, but I used to be one of the best in the company at what I did =D

 

Their guys are the best in the biz! They drill a hole, "oh."
Those jackals drilled 7 holes in my house, I sh*t you not
And they ran the cables in plain site on the back of my house. They didn't bother to run them along the eves. I have a white, upside down "T" made of coax, on the back of my house.
People ask about it, I tell them it's what makes time travel possible.

 

+1

Not just Comcast, I think Roadrunner/Time Warner are scoundrels too.

 

Thats BS. Cox cable has self install which was easy. I just got Fios and it was a litttle expensive for the install, but the guy had to run fiber and stall a large interface box and stuff.

 

Direct TV guy did a point to point run across my basement, looks terrible. If I had noticed while he was doing it I would have said something but at the time I was more concerned about have TV. Yeah, I am addicted and can only go so long without it. When he was done he told me all I had to do was call the office and have them turn up my service. Turned out he installed the WRONG DISH FOR MY SERVICE (HDTV). Another guy came out days later to install the correct one. Didn't let him leave until I was seeing pictures.
Check this out. I got a coupon for 1 free movie when I signed up. So I ordered several movies over a several month period but they were not showing up on my bill yet so I called because I didn't want to get hit with a big bill and to use the coupon the movie had to appear on my bill. The coupon was also about to expire. Turns out they somehow had me set up (no phone line hooked up) to get free movies with no way for them to know. They corrected the "problem" and now I can't order movies unless it detects a phone line connected to it. I lost free lifetime movies all because I wanted to get that one free movie.