Tag comcast problems

So I had a trial hosting account with Dreamhost.  They bill themselves as being a host that specializes in WordPress shared hosting.  The control panel they present customers is not the standard Cpanel variety you will find most places.  Supposedly this is a custom control panel they wrote themselves.  I have to admit that I actually prefer Cpanel.  I found the Dreamhost panel dated and not very efficient.

Getting a site up on Dreamhost was easy enough but it wasn’t long at all until the issue that caused me to cancel popped up, performance.  Response was consistently poor, with some clicks requiring a 10 second wait until anything happened.  It got bad enough that I contacted support multiple times.  Each time they said they found an issue that they corrected.  After these support contacts, the site performance would be better for a short while only to return to sluggish city shortly thereafter. I can only assume Dreamhost either doesn’t monitor server performance very closely or their shared servers are overpopulated.

There were other things that annoyed me about Dreamhost like having to pay extra if you wanted phone support.  Basic shared accounts are relegated to email only support with a response within 24 hours. (shitty)

So anyway, I pulled the plug on Dreamhost today although I did keep the domain name I registered with them, I might utilize the name going forward.

IX webhosting actually seemed good in comparison to what I saw at Dreamhost, scary.  I’d really like to host with wpengine.com.

So after my epic waste of time with Comcast on the phone last week, the end result of which was my getting Blast internet and digital tv service for 49.99 for 6 months, my single convertor box arrived yesterday.  My plan was to hook it up to the tv in the bedroom, enabling me to have conventional cable tv access in one room of the house.

To make it work I needed to spend some time in the sweat box attic, redirecting one of the dozen lines of coax I have in the house to connect to the Comcast feed, which has been used exclusively for internet the last couple years.  After doing this I hooked up the cable box and let it sit for awhile as directed in the instructions, presumably for it to configure itself on the Comcast network.

So I went back in later and turned the TV on, I was supposed to be seeing an activation screen.  Instead I saw nothing.

I unplugged the box and plugged it back in.  The LED’s on the front of the box went through a series of flashes and on screen I saw messages about the box booting up.  However after the boot screen went away I was once again returned to blackness.  WTF?

I immediately had a theory as to the source of the problem.  When I went internet only with Comcast, a tech put a filter on my feed from the pole that blocked the frequencies used for tv service.  In my phone discussion with the clueless woman last week, this was never brought up and I am 100% sure that physical filter is still in place.

So it was later at this point, I fired up an online chat with a Comcast rep named Mary.  I explained the background as well as my the reason I suspect it is not working.  She proceeds to totally ignore the information I gave her and starts going through her script.  “Are the cables tight, unplug the box, blah blah”

I explain to “Mary” that I did check all of these things and that I have a decent amount of experience when it comes to connecting AV equipment.   She ignored that information as well and just kept spitting out items on her checklist.

Mary’s final diagnosis was something is wrong with the brand new box which I am 90% sure is not the case.  She said she could have a technician come out, ON FRIDAY.  I laughed out loud out at the idea that Comcast had so many problems that the quickest they could get to me was 4 days later.

I shared my amusement with Mary at Comcast’s inability to address my problem in a faster manner.  She said if I wanted I could go to the local Comcast office and swap the box. Great, so I get to go out of my way to swap a box that I am sure is not the problem, awesome.

I chose the latter option. I am hopeful I will get someone behind the desk that actually listens to what I tell them and arranges to have a tech take the filter of my feed.  Of course it probably is a pipe dream.  I knew when I hung up the phone last week the odds of this going as planned was slim to none. Nice of Comcast to meet my expectations.

So I posted some of my online chat interaction with a Comcast rep yesterday.  This interaction was spurred by my seeing the latest bill from Comcast which had rocketed up to more than $60 for just internet service.  When Ali and I first split I had secured a 12 month promo rate for internet that was dirt cheap, $29.99 although it was for the “Performance” internet which is not as fast as their “Blast” service. So anyway, just as I have done in the past, I utilized Comcast’s online chat system to try to secure a new promo rate, $60 for just internet is pretty outrageous in my opinion.

So as you read the chat log you saw I made no progress with my online interaction with Willmore.  The best he could offer was a measly $5 off the full rate and when I asked to be transferred to his supervisor to further pursue things, he flat out refused.

You keep hearing how Comcast is losing market share by the truckload.  I was sort of surprised Willmore was so willing to piss me off.  His suggestion was that I contact the local office to see if I could get a better deal which made no sense.  Comcast is Comcast, why do I need to jump around the same company looking for a better deal?

So I got off the chat finally after wasting at least a half hour and called up my local office.  I explained that I needed to save money on my internet bill else I would have to look at lower cost alternatives like Century Link DSL.  The guy I talked to said he wasn’t seeing any good promos available but suggested he transfer me to the “retention” department since they supposedly have more flexibility.  I said fine.

I was on hold FOREVER, I bet it was 10-15 minutes until someone picked up.  Evidently Comcast has quite a few people that need to be “retained”.  The woman I got on the phone was nice enough but it became quickly apparent she either was not all that sharp or had just started there and was getting trained.

She had absolutely no grasp of what options she had available to her, she was just flipping through screens and asking me the same questions two, three, four times.  For whatever reason I never flipped the prick switch on for this woman, calling her out for being absolutely terrible at her job.  I guess because I could tell she wasn’t trying to be incompetent. I just patiently hung on the phone for a long, long, long time.

In total I think I spent close to an hour on the phone with this woman, literally smacking myself in the forehead in frustration with the receiver towards the end.  Who knows, maybe this is an intentional maneuver by Comcast, man the phones with incompetent people so you get so frustrated you just hang up and pay the damn bill.

So the end result of all of this was my getting Blast internet and digital cable for 49.99 for 6 months.  As you may know, my house has been running off of an HD antenna for quite awhile, I have no real need for conventional cable tv anymore but if they are going to throw it, fine.  I might hook it up in one room of the house although it will take some creative tweaking of my attic splitter configuration.

Needless to say, the experience yesterday lowered my already low opinion of Comcast.

Yesterday was my last night with the girls, Ali flies home today.  Just as I have many times in the past few days, I hung out in the back yard with the dogs for an extended period of time.  Nicki really seems to enjoy yard hang out time now, as much if not more than anytime I can recall in her life.

She loves to alternate between chewing on sticks, rolling around on and eventually sleeping in the grass.  After Sadie and I went inside, Nicki remained in the yard happily snoozing away.  She particularly loves laying on the St Augustine parts of the yard.

After awhile I went back outside and snapped a couple pictures of her, this was my favorite.

Part of my time outside was spent shooting various footage for this month’s BB forums challenge, take a look at normal mode here if you like.

So I had a full day planned for my mid-week day off.  I had scheduled Comcast to come out between 7am and 10am to disconnect my cable tv service.  I also planned to coordinate that with getting my antenna hooked up to the house.  I also had to collect stuff from the two sheds to be offered up at the yard sale on Saturday.

So I got up when Ali got up to go for her soon to become traditional Thursday morning run around 5:15 am.  I figured I may as well be up in case Comcast showed up early even though I knew it was a remote possibility. 7 am came and went.

I decided to get dressed and head outside to work on burying my antenna line from the shed to the house.  About half way through the process I decided I would turn the event into a live justin.tv broadcast.   There are a few funny moments in the 18 minutes of footage.

The first is around the 4 minute mark.  I had just got done describing the edger I was given by my great uncle years ago to bury the cable.  I spoke affectionately of how even though it was 30-40 years old it was still quite useful to me.  Then almost on cue, the handle breaks.  I was pissed. The other moment is towards the 17:30 mark.  You can just watch that for yourself.

Throughout the broadcast you will see me mention various times how Comcast had not arrived yet even though it was now after 9am.  I was annoyed but not surprised by their tardiness, after all this was Comcast I was dealing with.

So 10 am came and went and I still had not seen a Comcast van in my driveway.  I still refrained from calling right away, again telling myself Comcast rarely does what they say. Finally when 11 am came and still nobody was there I had enough and picked up the phone.

I was thrilled when I got the message “Due to unusually high call volumes your expected wait will be more than 10 minutes” as I held the phone to my ear.  I was on hold for 20 minutes getting angrier by the second when I heard the call waiting sound on the phone.  Figuring the likelihood of Comcast picking up as still slim I switched over to the other line.

“Hi this is Comcast.  We are just following up to perform a survey on how your service call was” WTF???!!! I said that that’s funny, I was on the other line waiting on hold with Comcast to find out where the hell the tech is, he never showed up!

The woman was embarrassed and said she would find out what the problem was.  After holding for another couple minutes she came back and apologized.  She said a tech should be there within a half hour.  I asked her if she found out what the delay was and why it wasn’t important for Comcast to let customers know when they are going to be late.  She had no answer for either.

Well I hung up, now genuinely angry.  Comcast has tied me to the house for half a day.  I ran the speech I was going to give the tech when he arrived through my head.  Well the half hour timeframe expired.  I waited another full half hour until I decided to follow up again, befuddled at how they could make a SECOND promise of an arrival time and miss it.

I called back and again got the “we have too many people calling and complaining and not enough people to handle them” message.  I said f it, hung up and got on the Comcast web site to do a live chat with someone which only took a minute or two to start.

I banged out my frustration on the keyboard, telling the guy we were now more than two hours past the appointment window and nobody had shown up.  He looked at the information on the call and typed back – “Mr Duffey, the call has been completed and closed”

What?  I never saw anyone?  The virtual rep tells me that the tech put a filter out at the pole on the road that blocks the tv signal but still allows internet to pass through.  As this reality dawned on me I was even more annoyed.

I banged out more to the rep. “Why am I told that I need to be home for this call when the tech doesn’t even come to the house?” “Why was I told on the phone that a tech was going to be out in a half hour if the call was already closed?” and finally “Part of the call was supposed to be the tech picking up the cable cards that were in the Tivo’s, now what?”

The only thing that he could account for was a customer is requested to be home just IN CASE it is necessary to get in the house.  Um ok fine but then would it not make sense to let the customer know that the call is done if you aren’t going to knock on the door?  The lack of common sense in the way the situation was handled was baffling.

So if wasting half of my day waiting was not enough, the rep told me to get credit for the cable cards (and cable modem) I would need to return them to the local Comcast office 20 miles away.  Gee, I get to make a road trip as well to fix your lack of responsibility? Great! Thanks! I just shook my head as I closed the chat window, thinking how fitting that even my attempt to break free of Comcast was marred by yet another bungled effort at customer service on their part.

Like I said I also was returning their cable modem that I was being charged $5 a month to lease.  I finally put Jeremy’s old cable modem into service.  I made a stop at the Comcast office early in the afternoon.  I was helped by a fittingly grumpy woman at the desk that was as friendly as a gargoyle.  I shoved the Comcast equipment across the desk to her, got my receipt that proved I turned it in and got the hell out of there.

Getting all of the yard sale stuff together wasn’t much fun.  I drove the truck into the back yard and used it to load up the stuff.  In addition to unwanted items I threw in a couple plastic shelving units that I broke apart into individual sections to give me additional “table” space.  We have a ton of stuff to unload.

My OTA HD project was a total success.  After burying the cable I attached it to an unused port on the grounding block used for the satellite dish.  After connecting that line in the attic to the splitter I went inside and reconfigured the Tivos for antenna only operation.  The picture quality through out the house looked great, I was very happy with the end result.

Having such a large antenna definitely paid off in this situation.  Being able to push that signal through all of that coax, split it and still get high signal level on all of the tv’s in the house is largely because this antenna is able to pull in digital air transmissions so well.

I also added some plugins to my playon.tv installation to pull in content from various online sources.  I need to get some sort of DLNA compatible device to grab this stuff back in the bedroom.  In the great room I can use the Wii for this purpose although navigation of the playon interface through the Wii is a bit clunky.  Streaming video over the Wii’s wireless connection is less than ideal.  I would much prefer to have it hard wired to my home gigabit network.

It’s kind of ironic that I am back to using the same method for my TV reception that we used in Gouglersville growing up in the 70’s.   However in that situation we only were only able to grab literally 4 or 5 stations and somewhat grainy versions at that since our location near the bottom of a valley blocked good reception from the broadcast towers.

Getting to enjoy crisp digital HD on my 73 incher instead of a snowy picture on a 25 inch genuine wood grain console unit is another large improvement from my tv viewing experience 30 years ago.