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Comment by happytiger | Hacker News Reader

Slimecast constantly lies at every tier of their organization. I won’t overwhelm you with example as they can be easily searched for, but here’s three good ones:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/comments/17cdku6/li...

https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/plan/i-was-lied-to-...

https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/customer-service/xf...

I personally have experienced the lying on every recent interaction with the company, and like many other Americans have no viable alternative providers.

I’m in no way surprised that they are using a lying terms that is clearly intended to mislead people into thinking they are doing better for their customers than they actually are. That the companies’ culture on display.

It’s so unfortunate because I have seen glimmers of what this company be in their charity work and in the occasional stepping up to help people (though there always seems to be a big stepping up when community broadband initiatives are on the table).

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I tried to get the advertised “10G” internet when it was first announced. Their website said it was available, so I called to have it set up. They “put in a ticket for [me]” and I didn’t hear back for a month. I called, they said they’d route it to the right department. A month passes. I called again. They said they can do it they just need a deposit. I agreed. They said they’d call me back. A month passes. I called again, they said they’d need to run a line to my house, but no one was available to do it that week so they’d put in a ticket. Also that it was going to cost more and they’d call me back. At this point I thought they were just bullshitting me, so I agreed. You guessed it, a month goes by. I called again, they said it would $20,000 to do the installation. I put myself on mute and laughed out loud. I agreed, and asked how I could write the check. And, wouldn’t you know it, Comcast admitted that my area wasn’t covered and that the website was inaccurate.

> I agreed, and asked how I could write the check. And, wouldn’t you know it, Comcast admitted that my area wasn’t covered and that the website was inaccurate.

that was brave.

I totally assumed the end of this story is "they charged the 20k and put me on hold indefinitely".

Comcast was the only available provider at a home I rented years ago. The router arrived and I set it up, only to find that the WiFi range was (literally) a couple of feet a most. The antenna must not have been connected right internally.

Comcast Support's response? This must be because I am not on their higher priced plan. You can get faster speeds and longer range if you upgrade! The guy on the phone refused to believe that something could be wrong with this particular router.

Ended up going to a local store where the person said it happens a lot, and gave me the "upgraded" router instead.

I found that after a month of working fine, my packet loss jumped up to 50%. Support recommended upgrading my plan.

It seems like they must massively oversubscribe their network then just drop packets based on your tier, with a honeymoon period for new customers so they don't immediately cancel.

Personally I haven't had this problem. In fact, every few months they actually increase my plan's advertised max download speed. I wouldn't say the actual download speed is as close as what they say but pretty close.

Of course the upload continues to be terrible

I use my own modem and router now but this was the case when I "rented" from them as well.

Comcast’s behavior often depends on whether there is broadband competition in a local market. That would explain your experience and the other guy’s.

Comcast is pretty much the only provider where I live.

And I was able to switch to a different ISP.

This! 2 weeks ago my internet started dropping for 1-2 minutes at a time, 3-5 times per day. The modem status page tells the tale, millions of uncorrectable errors, SNR below spec on several channels, and the event log shows all the disconnects. Neither their chatbot, nor the first level human support however will entertain any possibility except it being an issue with "the website you are using" or "your TV" or "your computer". Took maybe 30 minutes of BS until they offer to send a tech, but I have to pay if the tech concludes the issue is on my end. I eventually lost my temper and just told them AT&T is going round my neighborhood right now running fiber offering to buy everyone out of their Comcast contracts and that they have 2 choices, either they come out to fix the issue or they come out to disconnect and clean up my cable drop - their call. Suddenly a tech was available, the next day, guaranteed free of charge. The tech arrives, plugs in his test modem, says "yeah...that's not related to your equipment" after 5 seconds, shows me a huge signal drop in several frequency ranges and is actually surprised that the internet is even usable at all. Unfortunately the issue is further upstream than "our" utility pole, but he ran a new cable drop just in case and cleaned up on the pole before filing that ticket.

It makes you wonder how many people are limping along with half-broken internet just because they don't know how to debug this and force their way through Comcast's support wall and there not being a competitor they can threaten to switch to.

At this point, whether I’m speaking to my ISP or Amazon, I tend to demand a supervisor immediately, and in many cases, a supervisor’s supervisor. I refuse to speak to someone whose entire job is to _prevent_ me from receiving effective support.

Thankfully and not surprisingly the new nationwide competition from both t-mobile and Verizon 5G Home Internet services are hurting comcrap (xFinity) and charter (spectrum) broadband numbers. With T-Mobile and Verizon continuing to expand their 5G home offerings comcrap wil be less and less the only game in town.

I'm not a gamer but stream YouTube and other streamers 6 to 8 hours day. T-Mobile's 5G home internet worked great for me.

Amazing how many companies in all industries try to do the tactic of "our product/service isn't meeting basic standards? Give us more money to fix it".

I'm frankly only ever willing to be upsold when I'm very satisfied with something and would like even more satisfaction in my life.

I moved into an apartment and kept the plan the previous resident had. They also sold us the non-xfinity router they had st a discount.

My roommate and I had spotty internet at various times of day. We measured it and it was way below what our plan claimed. The previous tenants had no such issue. Comcast refused to believe the problem was on their end and claimed my router was too old. This went on until I bought a new router just to prove a point (new router did nothing).

They finally send a repair guy out. He’s there for 5 minutes before diagnosing the problem: the cables were water logged to hell and back. He fixed it in 20 minutes and was gone.

When I moved to a comcast area around 2014, I brought my own modem and they wouldn't let me connect over the phone without an "internet installation kit". I didn't need an install tech to come out since the place was already wired. I think it was about $29, and when the box arrived, it was literally a piece of paper with a url to go to for instructions. Absolute slimeballs.

I had a similar experience with them: they swore they had to have an installer plug the modem in, agreed to waive the $120 fine, and then it came back every month and I had to call their executive office to get it corrected. That last part did double duty because they never once billed at the quoted rate in the year we lived in that area.

Where I live now, Comcast has competition from Verizon and RCN. Starting a few blocks away, it’s only them. Shockingly, neighbors on the no-competition side report the same kind of routine casual fraud but it never happens here.

That sucks. Back in 2021 I moved and decided to get new equipment myself instead of renting. It all was plug and play. Even now when I get an occasional outage they can do the reset for me through their mobile app. No issues.

They thanked me for my loyalty as a business class customer when I moved by charging me money for equipment I had returned + continuing to bill me after I cancelled and had moved away from the location. I ended up having to go through a local regulator to bludgeon them into submission, at which point an upper management level Comcast employee called me on the phone and begged me to sign a paper to make the regulatory complaint go away.

I refuse to ever live somewhere Comcast-only.

They are the HOA of the Internet world.

I’ve had the exact same equipment scam happen. I ended up paying the first time. The second time I had a full video of me walking into the office (because at the time you had to return the equipment to the actual office, couldn’t ship it) and it took only a few months to get resolved.

I don’t think there are many places that aren’t Comcast only. I briefly lived in an area with fiber-to-the-home. It was the same general cost as Comcast, but so much better and the service was rock solid reliable.

They are a national disgrace, especially after all the money put into rural broadband initiatives and fiber optics rollouts somehow managed to produce basically… nothing. But I’m sure they weren’t involved.

And what’s happening is plain as day. Check this quote out:

> Comcast’s lack of broadband growth started last year, when the largest U.S. internet provider reported no additions in the second quarter of 2022 for the first time in the company’s history. Since then, Comcast has reported net broadband losses in three of the last five quarters.

> Comcast executives have pushed investors to focus on broadband’s rising average revenue per user (ARPU) growth, driven by price increases and upselling packages, rather than net additions. Comcast’s residential broadband ARPU rose 3.9% in the quarter.

> “As we continue to manage this balance, we expect ARPU growth to remain strong and our primary driver of broadband revenue growth with somewhat higher subscribers losses expected the fourth quarter compared to the 18,000 loss we just reported in the third quarter,” Comcast Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said during the company’s earnings conference call Thursday.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/26/comcast-broadband-worries.ht...

They’re not even interested in expanding broadband footprints anymore, just getting more revenue out of existing customers. And they are completely upfront about it.

Sorry, but I haven’t had one good interaction with this company, and I don’t think I’m alone.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/comcast-is-americas-most-hated-co...

> I don’t think there are many places that aren’t Comcast only.

Really? There are entire states (and countries) without a Comcast presence.

I’m sorry I was only speaking of the US, as this is a US company.

> You already knew that home broadband competition is sorely lacking through much of the US, but a new report released today helps shed more light on Americans who have just one choice for high-speed Internet.

> Comcast is the only choice for 30 million Americans when it comes to broadband speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, the report says. Charter Communications is the only choice for 38 million Americans. Combined, Comcast and Charter offer service in the majority of the US, with almost no overlap.

> Yet many Americans are even worse off, living in areas where DSL is the best option. AT&T, Verizon, and other telcos still provide only sub-broadband speeds over copper wires throughout huge parts of their territories. The telcos have mostly avoided upgrading their copper networks to fiber—except in areas where they face competition from cable companies.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comca...

Also, “broadband” being 25 mbit is their lobby’s choice and definitely should not be a legitimate threshold in the modern world.

Then add that even though others operate in different regions, they generally do not compete for high speed service or are very poor at delivering it, thereby not actually presenting an alternative even though they “officially” do.

Also, be clear that these two companies, that dominate areas of the US, collude.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/comca...

https://corporate.charter.com/newsroom/comcast-charter-annou...

https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/comcast-charter...

While 30 million is too much, that’s less than 10% of the population. In the most populated areas it’s most common to have a duopoly. Sucks but “I don’t think there are many places that aren’t Comcast only” is not close to being accurate. They’re not even the dominant provider in Texas and New York. If anything it makes it easier for them to survive, antitrust below the national scale is much harder to apply.

It’s not a real number.

> At least 49.7 million Americans only have access to broadband from one of the seven largest cable and telephone companies. In total, at least 83.3 million Americans can only access broadband through a single provider.

> Over the past two years, federal stats suggest that Charter and Comcast have an absolute monopoly over fewer households, but we think this is mostly a mirage resulting from how the FCC reports data. A significant number of the census blocks showing new competition are likely only partially served.

https://ilsr.org/report-most-americans-have-no-real-choice-i...

That’s more accurate but much of the “good data” comes from the providers themselves.

Don’t know why you’ve got such a pro-Comcast / Charter bent, but I assure you they aren’t worth defending.

The fiber broadband association themselves reports over 70 million household availability for fiber. That just doesn’t square with your original statement.

> Don’t know why you’ve got such a pro-Comcast / Charter bent

Kindly go fuck yourself. Stick to facts without baseless accusations.

DSL / wireless does not count. Very, very few homes have access to fiber. Most homes only have coaxial broadband, and most of those are only served by Comcast.

While it could be better, 70 million households is not 2x very few. I can only imagine you’re going off very outdated information.

Of those 70 so million with fiber available about 30 million actually use it.

I do not believe 70M households have fiber available. I have searched many, many houses in many, many metros, and the ones with fiber are few and far between.

The FCC map is not reliable at all. You only see that fiber is not available when you search the address on the ISP website and it returns with the option for DSL. Even in the region I live now, the FCC map says fiber available in most of the city, but in reality, it’s only the newer housing developments. 90% are older homes in developments from a couple decades ago, and they only have coaxial.

The common factor in fiber availability is a housing development built after 2005 or even 2010, or built so long ago that the utilities are overhead and maybe they could string up fiber for a sufficiently low price.

Any home in any development built 1970 to 2010 with underground utilities that did not already have fiber will most likely not have fiber.

Also, any apartment building from before ~2010 will not have Ethernet wired to the apartment, only coaxial wires, and the apartment building owner is not going to wire it up for fiber, even if fiber is run to the building itself.

These numbers are from the FBA themselves, I don’t see how it is in their interests to lie that way (they have anticonsumer reasons for not doing so, this is not a defense). I’m more inclined that you’re experiencing sampling bias. Infrastructure is clustered - fiber or anything like that is not “few and far between”. More like large swaths have coverage within deserts. If you’re always looking two doors from the house in the desert, it too does not have water.

I would personally never buy a house with comcast only and would likely not without fiber (I currently live in a Uverse/Shitcast ghetto which essentially leaves me with only one option). I sympathize with the shittiness of US broadband but I see no reason to stretch the facts, they suck regardless. And we do not represent the normal customer. In reality wireless options and even comcast are options to people if they compete on price, and fiber does have to compete with those in the real world.

> These numbers are from the FBA themselves, I don’t see how it is in their interests to lie that way. I’m more inclined that you’re experiencing sampling bias. Infrastructure is clustered - fiber or anything like that is not “few and far between”. More like large swaths have coverage within deserts. If you’re always looking two doors from the house in the desert, it too does not have water.

I don’t know why they would lie either, maybe they are using FCC maps since that is the best data they can afford. And given the low rates of new construction, I still doubt the figures, given the economics of a business installing fiber in older neighborhoods with underground utilities.

I would love to be wrong though, as I also nix living in any place only served by coaxial internet.

> In reality wireless options and even comcast are options to people if they compete on price, and fiber does have to compete with those in the real world.

Yes, which is why installing fiber has to be a taxpayer funded effort by the government, because it will never make financial sense for a business to spend all that money to install the infrastructure and have Comcast just lower their prices to below the fiber business’s installation costs.

I bought my own router and modem before I signed up for their service as they were the only internet provider in my apartment building at the time. I viewed it as a preemptive measure against bullshit equipment rental fees. Everytime I have had to interact with them since they have tried offer me extra services (none of which I want) for free or reduced price if i would use their shitty box.

Did you get hit with the “no bandwidth cap” if you use their equipment or the $15 a month charge for using your own equipment or a combination thereof? Because that’s their official policy in many places (it’s insanely unethical and barely hidden consumer exploitation of fees).

I have that where I am... Total bullshit. But I make sure I use it as much as I can, download tons of stuff to just delete it 30 seconds later.

Ditto

Please tell us that you didn't sign!

Oh hey, they tried this exact thing on me one time too. They were all over me for it, then went totally silent after I got an attorney friend to write them a nastygram. I really shouldn't be surprised it's a pattern of abuse - they must get away with it pretty often.

Exactly the same here: We had Comcast Business for at least a decade, and cancelled it ~Oct after switching to city fiber. They wanted me to ship back the equipment by taking it to a UPS store, didn't have to package it up or anything, just hand it to staff.

I took photos of the gear in the UPS store. We worked for a few months with them to try to get it cancelled after that, eventually they said we didn't ship back all the gear, there were 2 wifi boxes we didn't return. We never had Comcast WiFi. We made a couple more back-and-forths saying this, and eventually they relented, but during this time I think we were charged $600-900 bucks (2-3 months of service) that we couldn't use (because we returned the modem) but they wouldn't cancel because we still allegedly had the WiFi gear.

> I ended up having to go through a local regulator to bludgeon them into submission

I would love to hear more in details on this. I feel like I am going to have to do something like this but not sure where to begin the research.

I forget exactly what I did, but it was an FCC complaint. Here's what one of Comcast's executive customer relations officers sent me after the FCC complaint was processed (with parts removed):

I am writing in response to the FCC file received in our office on December 2, 2014 regarding your request for the disconnection of your Comcast Business Service. I apologize for the inconvenience and frustration this has caused.

I have forwarded your concerns to the Business Services Group and you should be contacted by a representative concerning this issue. If you have any further questions, please contact me at ----------, ext. ------- and I will be happy to forward any questions or concerns you have to the correct group. Thank you for your time.

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