I’d like to associate myself with this screed

Mark says:

I don’t think there’s much differentiation between the major players.

– I had Comcast two different times for a year. My biggest complaint with them the first time around was that they hadn’t upgraded my neighborhood and so I was paying for service I couldn’t receive. The second time, it was their cost structure – they jacked up the rates after six months. I found their customer service adequate – they gave me new equipment when the old stuff broke, and they gave me money back when I pointed out that their installers had made a mistake.

– I have AT&T DSL right now. They are awful. They also haven’t upgraded my neighborhood so they wanted me to pay more for less service. They made me buy a cable modem from them, which was an inferior product that died in less than 18 months. Every time there’s an outage, they accuse me of messing with the wiring inside my own home so that they can claim it’s not their fault.

– I had DirecTV. Customer service was terrible when I was trying to buy it – somebody who lived in my house 10 years earlier hadn’t canceled their account when they moved, so I wasn’t eligible to get it until that was cleared up. Once I got it, everything was perfectly fine for 18 months until the LNB on the dish got waterlogged during a rainstorm and broke. Good thing I had a second one.

– My mom has Time Warner. They screw up all the time – weak signal, outages. One time they sent somebody to her place to fix something, and he wrote on his report that the *real* problem was that her computer was too old and that she shouldn’t receive any help anymore.

Fundamentally, the biggest problem is that these companies have stopped taking responsibility for their product actually working. And they’ve hired “technical” support people who are trained to tell you everything’s your fault. I’m an Electrical Engineer and I can troubleshoot virtually anything – but I still get blamed by them for their mistakes.Report