Missing Link

Yesterday morning I came down to my home office and noticed I couldn’t access any websites. Nor Could I sign on to Instant Messenger, check email, or do anything I normally do in the mornings. Being a network engineer I started troubleshooting – I checked my router ( an apple xserve ) to find it had a self assigned IP address. Following that trail I checked the cable modem (which is directly connected to the xserve) and it LOOKED like everything was fine. Obviously things were not. I reset the cable modem, but there was no change except that now the “Online” light on the modem never made it to solid, it just stayed flashing. Since that meant it wasn’t getting a connection from Comcast, I decided to give them a buzz to see if there was an outage in the area. There was not.

The support representative I spoke with (Martin), informed me that there were no outages in the area and tried to query my modem. He didn’t succeed (probably owing to the fact that it couldn’t get a connection) and informed me a tech would have to come by to figure it out. But the first available time would be Thursday morning. Since I work from home and use VoIP for my office phone, this was bad news. VERY bad news. In fact, it was one of those scenarios I dreaded happening. Due to my living arrangements, which I won’t go into here though some of you are aware of them, I hadn’t previously tried to get business class cable. Though after a phone call with one of my roommates it came out that it probably made sense to get it.

And so I called back in to comcast and plodded through their (horrible!) voice menu system. The same system that helpfully informed me, after I had selected the options to go to the department i was looking for, that i had an appointment scheduled in the system for thursday, and that i could press any number of buttons to get status info or cancel it, or press 4. I pressed 4 and was deposited at the…. MAIN MENU. it made me go through the stupid voice menu system TWICE to get to my destination. But get there I finally did. Everything seemed to be going just fine, they offered business service in my area and asked questions to get the account set up. They then told me they were transfering me to my account manager. A minute later they came back on and told me they had John (the account manger) on the line and were handing the call off. John then told me “they transfered you to the wrong person, I’m from the Philadelphia area, not Indianapolis, so I’m going to go ahead and transfer you to the right place”, I shrugged it off as a simple mistake and waited… Only to hear “Your call could not be completed as dialed, please hang up and retry the 800 number”. Since I had dialed in using 1800comcast, I figured it meant that number (it didn’t it meant the 800 number for BUSINESSES, which nobody told me about). So I dialed back in to finish the process. I dove through the 12 menues and finally reached…… voicemail. I shit you not. VOICEMAIL. This was not outside business hours, this was just before 4pm eastern time and there is no excuse for letting calls go to voicemail.

Regardless, I left a voicemail and numbers where they could reach me. I never got a call back. Around 5 I decided to call in again and see if I could reach anyone. I still got voicemail. I decided to call in and try different options to get to a human, and see if THEY could get me where I needed to go. I finally got to someone who said they could forward me to who I needed to talk to, and tried. They then came back telling me that they couldn’t connect me, they had gotten voicemail too. I was told to try calling back later that night if I could, or in the morning. As I was out later that night I opted for the morning.

I got up this morning and puttered around for a little while before sitting down to call Comcast and get the rest of this business account set up. I called in, gave the reference number I was given yesterday and was given my account managers name (finally I have a name at least), and transfered to the correct department (actually, i was transfered back to the main menu, and told which options to press to get to where I wanted to go…. why they couldn’t transfer me to that department themselves I don’t know). The second person I talked to confirmed my information again, then told me she would transfer me to my account manger…. only to come back on the line 15 seconds later to tell me she didn’t have his phone number, and would have to email him and have him call me back. That was three hours ago.We’re fast approaching 24 hours on this, which I think is ridiculous. All I want is to get service set up. I’ve done this plenty of times, for business accounts, and never had this kind of trouble.

A lot of people I’m sure probably would wonder WHY I would even continue to use Comcast if the service is so… bad. I would GLADLY move to something different if it were possible. DSL isn’t available in my area (too far from the central office), and there aren’t anything like Verizons FIOS available here. AT&T has it’s UVerse service here now, but it’s likewise not available in MY area of the city. Simply put, it’s Comcast or dialup. I have no option but to deal with this kind of madness.All I want is to finish the setup of my freakin business account, I’ve tried doing so FIVE TIMES in the past 24 hours and it’s not been successful yet.

It just sucks horribly that there’s no real competition here. Sure there is Bright House cable in Indy now, but they serve different areas of the city than Comcast, there are no areas (to my knowledge) that are served by both (thus giving you real competition). It’s hit or miss whether you can get DSL either. Where is the real consumer choice here?If Comcasts service is “Comcastic”, then the definition of “Comcastic” must be “that which sucks really, really, bad”

Update: I’ve found out since posting this that AT&T now offers U-Verse service at my house, looks like Comcast isn’t the only game in town anymore. I’ll be giving them a call to see what they offer.

Update2: Exercised my consumer rights – I have bitten the bullet and ordered U-Verse. It’s being installed on the 4th. I can’t wait.

[tags] Comcast, Comcastic, Poor Customer Service, Cable Internet, Business Broadband [/tags]