OK, so I thought Comcast was bad…
After I first moved I had Cox Cable — and it was great. The installation happened exactly as they promised; I consistently got 15 mb/s down stream out of the 20 mb/s down stream burst they promised, and it was at a fair price.
Then, of course, I bought a house and moved in, and Cox didn’t service my new address — Media Com ( mediacomcc.com ) did…
So I went to the office to order service since there didn’t seem to be any way to do it online.
When I got to the office, and stood in line for about half an hour, I came to find out that they couldn’t setup cable service for me since the address had never had cable and wasn’t in their database and the person who added addresses would take two to three days to complete it. But I was told that they would call me as soon as my address had been entered.
Never received a call… so I stopped back by the middle of the next week.
My address had indeed been ordered; and I was able to order Internet service (actually TV plus Internet was $0.10 cheaper than Internet alone, so I got both — not that either option was what I’d consider a fair price).
The installer arrived within the window provided; but didn’t actually have everything to complete the installation (no outside box — so he just wired the splitter up with no protection from the elements and promised to come back within a couple days to install the box).
There wasn’t a problem bringing up the Internet (it was a self install) — I can’t tell you anything about the TV service since my TVs (to this day) still remain in the boxes from the move.
The first thing I noticed was that the connection was slow (we’re talking very slow); but I didn’t panic right away and call technical support because I knew that on many system the modem might take 72-hours to provision correctly.
After a few days I started to run speed tests… they consistently showed that I was getting around 400 kb/s down stream out of the 8 mb/s advertised (but, of course, not guaranteed). I might have been happy with 4 mb/s, but less than 2 mb/s meant that the connection would not be usable.
I placed a call to technical support and of course had to wade through all there attempts to deflect the problem as something I was doing. Finally they decided that there must be a problem and scheduled an appointment for a four hour window the next Monday (almost a week in the future) with a 30 minute notice call.
Sunday evening came around and their automated system called me to confirm my appointment. I pressed the button on my cell phone and the appointment was confirmed.
Monday I’d arranged my schedule to be around the house all afternoon… fifteen minutes before the close of their window (fifteen minutes after their notice period had expired) I called technical support.
The first thing I heard was… “we still have fifteen minutes” — then I pointed out that no, since I’d been promised a call 30 minutes before the service technician arrived that they’d officially missed the window.
A little more checking and they discovered that my appointment had been cancelled by the local office because they’d determined the problem was with the head-end and not in my home — of course no one had bother to notify me that I didn’t need to be available.
Immediately the technician offered me a credit for the missed appointment — I ask to speak to a supervisor.
The supervisor assured me that I should have been notified; but he was unable to provide me any information about when I could expect a resolution to the problem — so he committed to have someone call me back within 72-hours.
I stressed to him that if Media Com couldn’t honor simple commitments that I would switch my service to AT&T ADSL.
The week passed, and no return call – so I called in again, go a promise of a call back… and to this day I’ve never received a call back. I also filed an online support ticket that’s never been answered.
The day after I had AT&T ADSL installed (which gives my consistently 5 mb/s downstream out of the 6 mb/s promised) I returned the equipment to the local Media Com office… and was ask why — I recanted the story so that everyone waiting in line could hear it.
The woman didn’t seem to be the list bit surprised, and never offered an apology.
The following week I called up to make sure that my account was closed and to insure that the 30-day money back guarantee was honored… the person I spoke with just happen to be a supervisor and was actually the first person who genuinely apologized without me needing to underscore how pathetic their customer service had been.
I could have lived with the poor Internet service for some period of time had I believed that the company was actually customer focused and that they would honor their commitments. Further, I would have been far more willing to work with them had their customer service actually apologized right off, and made me feel that mine was the exception and not the norm.
BUT… 400 kb/s — come on… my cell phone does better than that!!!
Tags: Communications, Internet, Shit List, Technology by roger
No Comments »
