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Comment by linuxfan | Hacker News Reader

I'm sick of comcast and its hidden fees. Their promotion last for one year and they never inform the customer (conveniently) soon after it expires. The bill keeps piling up and when you call them one day to cancel, they feed you some bs on downgrading to a basic package or even reducing your current internet speed.

I had AT&T U-verses before switching to comcast and AT&T are no saints either.

Is there a company that's honest with its customers?

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I'm confused...

I've signed up for promo plans from Comcast before, and made a note in my calendar it is expiring. Never had a problem with pushing for another promo when it is about to expire. If there is, then I'll reduce my service or switch providers (if I need to), but there is never any surprise that a promo is for a specific duration and when that ends I'll be paying the full price.

What DOES get me is their constant rate hikes outside of promotions, and that is a completely separate issue.

They bill for services they haven't provided. Let's say you order Comcast October 10th and tech arrives and installs everything October 15th. When you get 1st bill, it will include October 10-15 period, when you actually did not have any service and were waiting for one. Happened to me recently. I think this can be a subject of class action lawsuit.

Comcast is immune to class action as decided by AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. You may never sue them in a court of law in the US.

> AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, 563 U.S. 333 (2011), is a legal dispute that was decided by the United States Supreme Court.[1][2] On April 27, 2011, the Court ruled, by a 5–4 margin, that the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 preempts state laws that prohibit contracts from disallowing class-wide arbitration, such as the law previously upheld by the California Supreme Court in the case of Discover Bank v. Superior Court.[3] As a result, businesses that include arbitration agreements with class action waivers can require consumers to bring claims only in individual arbitrations, rather than in court as part of a class action.[4]:708–09 The decision was described by Jean Sternlight as a "tsunami that is wiping out existing and potential consumer and employment class actions"[4]:704 and by law professor Myriam Gilles as "the real game-changer for class action litigation".[5] By April 2012, Concepcion was cited in at least 76 decisions sending putative class actions to individual arbitration.[6][7] After the decision, several major businesses introduced or changed arbitration terms in their consumer contracts (some of which were based on the consumer-friendly terms found in the AT&T Mobility agreement), although the hypothesis of massive adoption of consumer arbitration clauses following the decision has been disputed.

-- Wikipedia

TLDR: Class-action lawsuits against Comcast are not allowed because they include a class-action waiver in the consumer agreement.

This happened to me and they absolutely refused to refund me the 5 days I waited for a tech to show up so he could throw the switch. Absolutely mind boggling.

The fact that you have to do that to keep a reasonable price is why people are upset about it.

My experience with Google Fiber would point to customer service antithetical to that which is typically found in ISP's like Comcast. Not sure if that speaks to honesty per se, but it is definitely a welcome change.

My experience cancelling netflix was pretty painless too.. just a few clicks on the website, done... their "come back" emails were only every few months too, unlike some services where you'll get more than one a week for some time. After they had picked streaming service back up again, I re-joined... been pretty happy with them overall.

In Washington, I've been pretty happy with Frontier. Well, "happy" might be a bit strong. Frankly, I rarely give them much thought. $60/month for (I think) 35Mbps up and down. Every single time I've actually checked it, it was indeed what they claim, and it rarely goes down. (About once every couple of months it'll go down for an hour almost exactly at 2300 or midnight; I assume some kind of maintenance.) I don't have to call them once a year to keep the same rate; bill shows up, I pay it, they keep giving me solid, no-bullshit service. Of the few times I've called for support, it's been a small wait and they quickly fixed the problem. My feelings about Frontier are about the same as I have toward the city water utility: I turn on the "tap" and internet comes out, I pay the bill on time every month, and rarely do I give it another thought. That might sound like damning with faint praise, but I think it's the highest praise possible.

Contrast to Comcast, my old provider. Fluctuating rates, horrendous customer service, advertised speeds that are nowhere near reality (I had 12Mbps package back in the day; it rarely was good for more than 3Mbps), and as reliable as an old Fiat. Oh, unlike the city water utility, do I have feelings about Comcast. The last time they were at my door I told the salesman I'd do without internet before I'd give another dime to them. Ironically, Comcast were the ones running billboards about how horrible Frontier would be when Verizon gave up on fiber and sold it to Frontier. Yeah, well, I've been a Comcast customer and I don't see how it could possibly be any worse. Turns out Frontier is just fine.

But you're not going to get Frontier unless you live in western Washington outside of Seattle, so this probably isn't much help.

I have Frontier as my ISP at my rural home on the outskirts of Cleveland. The speed isn't amazing (10 Mbps down, good enough for our streaming needs), but is at least fairly consistent and pretty cheap. Service has been pretty decent too, line faults are usually addressed within a day.

But I've heard that experiences with Frontier are a very localized thing and can be pretty dramatically different from place to place. Which at least contrasts to TWC and Comcast, where people pretty universally seem to despise dealing with them.

This county (Medina) is actually crawling with dark fiber infrastructure, with some business and gov't utilization. I'm patiently waiting for a residential service ISP to pop up. As far as I know, there are not any municipal agreements that would block it.

Sorry about the outage two years ago, I was a new network engineer then and deleted all the residential DSL customers on one of the major Frontier routers in Washington. Lesson learned: never touch anything you don't fully understand

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