It’s Comcastic, Or: I Accidentally Bought a House Without Cable
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I worked the "supervisor" desk (i was not a supervisor, just a somewhat more knowledgable rep) so would take almost exclusively irate calls.
I tried to help everybody of course, but a few people stood out from time to time as having exceptionally bad service. Bury requests that were cancelled for months -- so you have to mow your lawn around a cable and it trips your kids and gets chewed by rodents. Techs that hang a "we missed you" card on your door and then run back to the truck without ever knocking. Installers napping. Installers looking at porn. Installers going through peoples things.
For those people, I gave them free service "for life".
Deep inside the GUI app that I believe was called ACSR was the service provisioning and in every market there were all the paid services and a fairly similar list of free services that were used when the equipment was just being installed and users were brought online to test it. So they had "1.0 MB Broadband" and "1.0 MB Broadband Pilot". By moving users from one to the other, their bills would just drop to $0.
I have no idea how long this benefit endured. You'd think at some point there would be an audit or migration that cleaned it up. But I hope not. Steve Roach in Memphis and the 1/2 dozen others: I hope your cable is still free.
Yep, sure enough, an automatic cleaning script came along and killed all those cost-0 connections, cutting many student residents off from the network for a few days. My understanding is that the meeting between the Comcast rep and the head of campus IT was an instance of legendary restraint on the part of our IT head (in that everyone left the room with all their limbs still attached).
(I'm sure it helped the uni's bargaining position a lot that we were in a metropolitan area; Verizon was champing at the bit to get those accounts).
I spent a few hours putting together a single .pdf with all the evidence of comcast wrongdoing compiled together. It was 10+ pages of screenshots and explanations proving comcast fucked up and was charging me for it. I emailed Comcast explaining I was ready to forward to techcrunch if they didn't resolve the situation A.S.A.P.
Within two hours I had an email from a real person.
Long version:
There was cable to the utility pole but it wasn't actually active or connected to anything.
Tech said he would escalate to his supervisor and his supervisor would escalate to the construction department and contact us.
We ordered AT&T while waiting to hear back. AT&T install went fine but the router was complete crap for an advanced/technical person, high latency, IPTV steals bandwidth when recording more than 1 HD channel, etc.
I got sick of waiting so I sent a polite email to we_can_help@cable.comcast.com and included a google maps link of where the pedestal was and the utility pole.
I received a response the next day that they would fix it for me.
A couple days later we heard from the construction supervisor that they would be working on it with no charge to us.
A week later, a crew was out running a new line from the pedestal to the utility pole.
A few days later someone came and buried cable from the utility pole to the house.
We waited a few days to see if someone would contact us and they did and said we could proceed with installation.
A tech came and setup everything but the actual line never activated. So the tech filed a service outage ticket and left.
The next morning we had a signal and everything was working.
So ~2 weeks of no Internet, ~4 weeks of subpar AT&T U-Verse later, had a decent connection with no complaints.
Reliance on Comcast won't get you anywhere in most cases, but there are options for this guy other than selling his house.
You are massively underestimating the work involved here. Aside from the physical constraints of needing a POP installed for handoff to your random wireless bridge, what makes you think the author can "make them" do anything? And what makes you think that Comcast could effectively engineer a solution to support this one-off installation, when they can't even schedule a normal OSP drop?
Edit: rhetorical questions aside, I actually investigated this option for my parents' old home in the boonies. Comcast actively prohibits you from doing this, per their AUP (http://www.comcast.com/Corporate/Customers/Policies/HighSpee...): "Network and usage restrictions: ... sell the Service or otherwise make available to anyone outside the Premises the ability to use the Service (for example, through WiFi or other methods of networking), in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, with the sole exception of your use of Comcast-provided WiFi service"
I wouldn't call that 'actively'. They don't have any mechanism to detect this that they use. Source: shared network with neighbor for a long time.
The startup ISPs in the US get destroyed by the local monopolies: Verizon and Comcast. Even Google Fiber is only getting an upstart because they're purchasing Municipal Wires, paid for by local citizens.
The Free Market isn't magical, it has its limits.
So where there are only a few hard-to-service households missed by the mainline services, or other local geographic/infrastructure challenges, there may be no local micro-ISPs/experts, and thus only extremely expensive custom options.
That the author describes his residence by County, rather than some incorporated town/city, is a strong indicator that even though he's in the Seattle area, he's very possibly in a very low-density, rural area. He might even be on well-water and a septic-tank, rather than utility water/sewer.
How did you manage to convince them to do that? Where did you mount the radio? How did you power the radio? Every time I've needed something unconventional from the local cable company, if it isn't some pre-existing procedure, they won't do it.
Verizon still employs its own unionized workforce of service technicians for cable connections; Comcast outsources that to multiple competing front-line service contractors.
This isn't a system that can't ever work, but Comcast has not yet solved the problem of keeping communications channels clear and coordinated among different competing contractors who have no incentive to cross-communicate with each other (not only are they not rewarded for it, but the incentive system of free markets is actively structured so that if one contractor looks bad, others indirectly benefit). It leads to all sorts of little micro-aggressions; when I had Comcast hooked up at a previous residence, the contractor had to climb the ladder to the pole twice because the junction plugs that should easily wire my house to the main trunk were not only detached, but removed (likely by a previous contractor, because hey, free plugs). He had to go down and get new plugs and splice them in.
In contrast, everyone is on the "same team" at Verizon, structurally and legally. You leave the junction plugs there because the next guy who comes along and needs to connect the service again is your coworker.
It's a shame that none of that matters to this individual because of the way the service local monopolies are structured in the U.S. Living near a major metropolitan area, I'm lucky enough to have my choice of the two vendors around here.
One as you said are in-house and unionized, these guys seem to mostly handle the apartment complexes and large installments.
The other group handles regular houses, or off-one jobs when the market is exploding.
I've spoken to techs on both sides, and they both confirmed with mild disdain the existence of the other group.
Just an anecdote.
... which is a shame, because it's actually something I consider to be a distinguishing factor in their service options.
Enjoy it while you can. It probably won't last.
I don't think Verizon wants to be in the cable business anymore. I'm not sure why. But it's been many years since they stopped bringing FiOS to new areas.
I had excellent FiOS service from Verizon. Then they sold entire states, including mine, to Frontier. Comcast is 100x the company that Frontier is. Comcast is A+ compared to Frontier F-.
The problem is, it's fairly expensive to dig cable to a single house, and it's just not worth it for the cable company to dig. If we decide that broadband is a necessity, some sort of municipal broadband or government oversight is absolutely required to guarantee that each person has access, because the market sure won't.
Do you have a copy of the ordinance, by chance? Exclusive cable franchises are illegal under federal law. If you're litigious, you might be able to get the ordinance overturned.
"A franchising authority may award, in accordance with the provisions of this subchapter, 1 or more franchises within its jurisdiction; except that a franchising authority may not grant an exclusive franchise and may not unreasonably refuse to award an additional competitive franchise. Any applicant whose application for a second franchise has been denied by a final decision of the franchising authority may appeal such final decision pursuant to the provisions of section 555 of this title for failure to comply with this subsection."
Theoretically, a pre-1992 contract negotiated before the law was passed might still be in effect. In practice, these contracts had 5-10 year terms and expired long ago.
In practice, this meant that the deal with Mediacom was "exclusive" since the market was small enough that no other provider would be willing to roll out the full set of services offered by Mediacom (another provider might have been willing to offer basic services to capture cost-conscious consumers). I'm not sure what the federal law says about this sort of thing.
> because the market sure won't.
What market? You have no market there. A monopoly is not a market. Your free market hatred is showing.
She told me she gets two of these cards a year to hand out when she's trying to sell someone advertising time but that client isn't buying because they're upset about some problem they have with their personal Comcast service. She gives them a card, Comcast then forces themselves to fix the problem, and she can make a sale.
So I asked her why Comcast doesn't treat all their customer's problems this way. She laughed.
I was always curious if they use them as a quality control step for their regular tech service, or just as a feel-good empowerment thing for the hoi polloi.
For several months, I had been working unsuccessfully to get Comcast to fix my home connection which would drop several times a day. (Modem losing sync, down for 5-10 min usually.) A friend lived in the neighborhood, and we figured out something interesting was up when we saw each other drop from IRC at the same time.
So, Comcast comes in to discuss their RFI response, and I raised the question of plant monitoring and proactive maintenance. "If there was a problem which affected multiple customers, do you take measures to detect this?"
When they answered in the affirmative, I raised my issue and asked them to elaborate.
The problem was fixed the next day, turns out it was a failed weather seal on something nearby.
We bought a house that didn't have cable or DSL in a somewhat rural area -- the sellers were using 3G, satellite Internet, and dialup (!). They assured us that the only reason they hadn't had cable installed was the high cost they'd been quoted for running cable on the property (understandable as the house is almost 1/4 mile back from the street), and the cable company concurred that they'd be able to do the work, "no problem," and quoted a fee that didn't seem all that bad in the end (we took it into account when negotiating the price of the house).
Nevertheless, we made the sellers agree to a contingency - cable co. would successfully complete the work (on our dime, of course) and hook us up before the closing, and the total amount wouldn't exceed what we had been quoted. If the contingency wasn't met, the sale would fall through and we'd get our deposit back.
That contingency clause relieved me of a lot of stress over the next few months. Everything turned out OK in the end, but it was touch-and-go for a while.
Cable co. accepted the order with no problem, did a survey I guess, called us and said they wouldn't be able to do it. They were persuaded (not sure how -- agent took care of it) to reconsider, but then came back with a quote that was at least five times higher than before. Cue lots of emails and phone calls. It was helpful having an agent who lived in the community. In the end a local contractor dug the trench for us at a very reasonable price, cable co. came down on their estimate, and the work actually was completed at just under the original quote. The dirt was literally being shoveled back over the trench on the day of the closing.
As I recall it was actually a few days later that the cable guy came to do the inside wiring and "flip the switch," so strictly speaking the contingency (cable installed and working) wasn't satisfied by the closing, but we assumed we'd be OK at that point, and there were in fact no further hitches. We moved in and have enjoyed a (mostly) reliable, fast connection ever since. But we would absolutely have walked away, even though it was our "dream house," had we not been able to get the cable pulled. The contingency clause gave us the assurance that we could do that with no penalty. And, had it turned out that the work could be done but only at 5x the price, we could potentially have used the clause to negotiate a concession from the seller to cover the costs.
In this instance, the buyer was 100% convinced that the property had the service of interest and was told it did by the local monopoly in charge of providing such service. There was no work to be done before the closing because Comcast won't hook up Internet to a property for someone who isn't the property owner or resident.
What you're describing would be a bit like taking out a contingency on the house actually having running water after you physically walked through the house and checked the taps and toilets, just on the off chance that the water is actually not coming from the local muni water source, but instead from an on-property aquifer that a previous owner had tapped and painstakingly routed into the house's internal plumbing, and immediately after closing the sale that aquifer runs dry.
Real people don't go to that level of contract detail.
I guess my point is that being "100% convinced that the property had the [feature] of interest" based solely on a phone call is pretty risky when you're talking about a purchase as large as a house and a feature as important (to him) as ability to get broadband internet. I totally understand and sympathize with his plight (I was screwed in basically the way, actually, many years ago, though it was a rental rather than a purchase, and DSL rather than cable, and it did work out in the end in that case too). And the degree to which he was jerked around by Comcast here is almost unreal. I could feel my blood boiling when I read the story. But in the end, I don't think he is going to have any actual legal recourse. He said this was his first home purchase; I imagine next time he will insist on seeing the connection in action next time, or getting that contingency clause in if not!
In any case, your analogy doesn't really fit the situation. The seller didn't have cable, or, presumably, any fixed broadband internet service. (That in itself is a bit of a red flag; I'd think most households who can get internet service at a reasonable price these days already have it.) The situation you describe -- well, it's hard to imagine it happening, because the seller would clearly have been legally obligated to disclose that the water was from a well and not municipal, and in any case the buyer would, one hopes, have hired a home inspector who would have noted this (and probably detected issues with the well as w... umm, in addition). But it doesn't sound like the seller hid the fact that there was no internet service currently at the house, which means there's no liability there.
So this is more like buying a house with no running water at all, with the knowledge that this is the case, and then getting a verbal promise from the local water company that they'd be able to hook you up. If you were to buy a house under conditions like this, I maintain that you probably would want a contingency clause on installation of the water.
And for what it's worth our cable company (not Comcast, but another big one) had absolutely no problem starting the work (once they agreed to do it) for us before we were the owner or resident. If they had, we would simply have made the contingency something like "seller is obligated to have internet installed, for which the buyer will pay, prior to closing."
This is what Kafkaesque actually means.
Maybe he should have just submitted phantom requests from every address on his street under different pseudonyms. Eventually someone might have made the mistake of initiating the construction... or a regional manager may have unlocked the project due to perceived demand!
If the story's author files a complaint with the FCC or the municipal cable-governing entity, this problem will be fixed rather quickly.
The Verizon hotspots may have a 30gb/month cap - so buy two. John Woo rules apply - use the first 'till it runs out, then switch to the second.
Try combining multiple sources of connectivity with a load-balancing router, or similar. These can be set to send certain types of traffic via more optimal routes, so you reserve scarce/expensive bandwidth for applications/destinations which need it, and send other traffic across cheaper, slower or uncapped routes, etc etc. Combine satellite, mobile (cellular) Internet, wireline DSL, community wifi, even dialup into the mix.
Look at wilder wifi options too - if there's no connectivity at the house, do you have line-of-sight to somewhere which is better connected? Point to point antennas, high gain receivers, etc. More and more options to throw into the pot.
Obviously, it's all a lot of trouble, and is bound to be expensive - but given that the author was already considering paying some or all of the substantial Comcast buildout fees, even the most complex of these alternatives is still likely to be cheaper - and if it means not having to sell the house you love, then that has to be worth a thought.
Basically, they have a monopoly on a service covering an area, and they're refusing service. That's utterly stupid.
They don't: http://www.codepublishing.com/wa/kitsapcounty/html/Kitsap14/....
See: 14.32.010 Terms of franchise.
"(2) Any franchise granted pursuant to this chapter shall be nonexclusive and shall not preclude the county from granting other or further franchises or permits or preclude the county from using any roads, rights-of-way, streets or other public properties or affect its jurisdiction over them or any part of them, or limit the full power of the county to make such changes, as the county shall deem necessary, including the dedication, establishment, maintenance and improvement of all new rights-of-way and thoroughfares and other public properties."
If he's 2,500 feet from the nearest equipment, he's probably living in a low-density area that's not worth anyone's while to serve.
Years ago I lived in an apartment block with 9 apartments in the front building and 9 in the rear. This was the dialup era and I wanted (and assumed I could get) a 2nd line so I didn't tie up my primary line all the time. Turns out the telco had only run 10 lines to the rear building for whatever reason and I guess someone was using the "spare" already.
Interestingly, this was in the deregulation era. The guy I spoke to felt bad and explained to me how now they couldn't by law provide more lines for free. In the spirit of "competition" they had to price it "fairly". Oh well. It was a rental and I moved a year later anyway.
The second time was in the DSL era (which is still the case in Australia). The ACCC (sorta like an FTC/FCC hybrid) had decided that ISPs were allowed to install their own DSLAMs in the telephone exchanges.
Well that worked well in some exchanges and not well in others. Some ran out of space for racks very quickly. There was no spare capacity for me there. However I did get put on a waiting list that resolved very quickly. Now this was in the very early days of ADSL where it was still pretty unusual. I've heard some horror stories about how it is now in some parts of the country.
Anyway...
There must be other people in their street/area who also aren't serviced by Comcast. Can't Comcast justify wiring up the street by adding a bunch of new customers?
Also, the author mentions reading the franchise agreement but doesn't say anything more about it. I assume that means Comcast isn't required to service his area or at least isn't required to provide 100% coverage?
And Comcast wants to merge with TWC? They can't manage their current network. Why on earth should we trust a combined entity will be any better?
Yeah. If I crap on a pile on crap, I wont get gold. I'll just get more crap.
(He mentioned DSL providers, too, which are their own brand of fun.)
As silly and frustrating as that is, "I don't know" is a much better answer than, "Yes, absolutely" that turns out to be false.
"I don't know" would've saved OP tens of thousands of dollars that he will soon be paying to sell a house he just purchased.
Serviceability is a complicated question. There's engineering issues (how far from existing plant is the address?); there's legal issues (is servicing the address required under a franchise agreement?); there's logistical issues (is this a subdivision where the HOA won't let us dig up; is it a multi-dwelling unit where the property manager won't let us run wire)?
It's not like houses are built in a structured, systematic manner. In most of the country, property developers just put up subdivisions at random.
You're right though, "we don't know" is the right answer.
Sure, it could be a hard question to answer. It's also a question whose answer is part of their core business. If they can't obtain the answer somehow, why do they even exist?
I'd have been fine with "Because of X, Y, or Z, I have to pass this off to department Q and they'll get back to you in a day or two." But that's not what they said.
Edit: I should clarify that the local wiring was all in place. Verizon phone service was available (and I had had it at one point, although not at the time of the call). Nothing needed digging or drilling or any sort of wire running at all.
Your question needs to be handed off to someone so they can specifically research your situation and get back to you with the results.
It sounds like specifically in your case, their system allows the techs who take new cable signups to enter your data in the system, and then it will return weather your house is serviceable, not serviceable, and with what type of service options are available if you can in fact sign up. Doesn't sound like a very strenuous process from the customer side.
They told me the only way to find out was to actually sign up, then maybe it would work or maybe it wouldn't. There was no way to get an answer in advance.
I just expect companies to be able to tell me what kind of products they can offer. If it takes some work to get an answer, then I expect them to do that work. I don't think this is at all an unreasonable expectation.
You seem to have an issue with how I handled this situation but I have no idea why. What exactly do you think I should have done here?
You don't pay and I'm sure they don't expect you to pay (for what exactly? You've stated they don't even know if you are serviceable at this point).
Again, the two options I was presented with were: 1) stop and be left with a "I don't know" answer 2) start the process to install service. You seem to either think there must have been a 3) start the process to find out what kind of service I could get, or that 2 is a good enough equivalent to 3. Neither is true.
Sounds like this is being over complicated just to complain about how terrible ISP's are.
AT&T has a database of the line rate/quality that the last person who had service was able to achieve.
That doesn't mean it's accurate though. Quality can have gone down due to rotted shielding, new sources of interference, etc.
But, this is certainly not isolated to Kitsap county or Comcast. Now I live in the other side of the state, in Walla Walla, and I assure you that Charter is just as bad, even when you pay for a business-class connection. It seems once you get outside Portland/Seattle, the population density isn't such that the cable providers (or other potential internet providers) are much interested in the infrastructure investment. For the big guys like Comcast, Charter, etc - HQ is far far away and has no idea of the local situation. The only option I've found is to become buddies with the local field guys (and there are only like 2 for the 4 county area over here...).
Frankly, while the isolation and quiet of the peninsula is nice, you are better off selling your house anyway unless you are willing to hold it for 20+ years and hope that King/Pierce/Snohomish are finally so full that people have no choice but to move to Kitsap county. House sales are horribly slow and values barely move.
I had very similar experiences with Time Warner depending on who I talked I would get different results. It seemed like the main corporate office was not able to see notes that the local office entered and vice versa.
Might be a good idea for the next house.
Comcast could be held accountable for other reasons, but not by a contingency.
The blogger seems to have adequate grounds to file a civil fraud suit, wherein he might ask that he be made whole for the losses sustained as a result of the misrepresentation, or compel Comcast to act to make their false statements truthful. Basically, pay for the aggravation, or do whatever it takes to provide service to the house, at their own expense. I'm not a lawyer, but this guy should definitely go for a consultation with the ambulance-chasingest, billboard-advertisingest attorney in his county.
And then demand a jury trial. There is no way that any given 12 people from the jury pool could see the facts of the case, and not want to curbstomp Comcast into oblivion.
Today's unregulated quasi-monopolies are some progress. Can we get the government monopoly back? The thing is - it worked extremely well!
From a 1976 SNL skit: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Government monopoly wasn't nirvana by a long shot.
I'm a little shocked that the author would go through all this back and forth with a company with a reputation like Comcast, and never once ask the previous owner of the house.
Realtor couldn't care less, no wait, they have an incentive to lie. Comcast couldn't care less.
The owner does care, because they become liable if they misrepresent the property.
Never spend a ton of money without doing the leg work yourself. Don't trust other people, especially people who have zero incentive to be accurate or truthful.
I have coax to and in my house. I've never ordered cable service so I have no idea if it works or is connected to anything. I have DSL service I'm happy with, and rabbit ears on my TV.
So, I am now the proud owner of a CradlePoint LTE modem, upped my data through AT&T since they were having a promotion to 30gb a month. It's a change in my browsing habits but 30gb is more than enough for work stuff and at the end of the month if I have 10gb to spare I go after those videos I wanted to watch.
We verified service (twice) before buying the house. Called to schedule an install and found out service wasn't available to our house.
Long story short, I was lucky enough to get a great technician and he schedule a drop bury VERY quickly. I got a call from Comcast's corporate office within minutes of his request. It took about 3 weeks for them to run a new RG11 line from the street to the house, but it's all up and running now.
I also work from home, so I was forced to use my 4G connection briefly as I waited.
I feel your pain. Good luck!!
The biggest problem is latency and there are two factors that impact latency: 1) Distance (the satellite is really far away) 2) Contention (it is often a TDMA system so your packets have to wait for the next available time slot, in a busy network this can cause problems)
Bandwidth isn't the primary concern, it is usually quality and latency. They are tightly related but latency is something that always limits you because it makes VoIP, VNC and gaming difficult.
The DSL was a slightly better deal, so we had them in to install it, and it wouldn't push more than a few bits. After several service calls, they eventually gave up. We were too far away, even though their modelling showed our distance as fine.
So we call up the cable company (Comcast, of course) and our unit is too far from the service point. They set up an appointment with engineering to install a new pole and such. Six months later, we have cable service finally run. Not speedy, but at least they didn't give me the runaround.
It's too bad Clear didn't work out; saved my bacon. These days I'd have to get wireless internet service through one of the mobile phone companies, which is not nearly as good a deal. But it would still work.
Anyway, it's a mess. And a good lesson to assume you can't get service until you actually have it, both in residential and commercial settings. But then there was the time with my home service where the DSL office got slowly further away until they couldn't give me service any more...
The Dude: He fixes the cable?
Maude: Don't be fatuous, Jeffrey.
Not sure where the reputation for great customer service comes from. At least in the telco/cable space I have not witnessed it.
Most was customer service reps who didn't care, were powerless, badly trained, outsourced or (often) all of the above.
http://www.rvmobileinternet.com/verizon-unlimited-data-plans...
There are obviously other options. My neighbor uses a Verizon hotspot. Satellite is technically an option. But the data caps are really sad since we like having Netflix and other streaming services as our primary entertainment. 25-30 gb is really not something I'm looking forward to. Might settle for bad DSL I guess. I hope at least that is in the area.
At the old house, Comcast was utterly incompetent (took forever to finally get a wire run from the street over a pole in the yard and stapled to the house, but they never did follow up to install wire and a modem in the house), and AT&T was the bomb.
At the new house, AT&T was utterly incompetent (could not even get voice to work, let alone internet), and Comcast rocks.
Every neighborhood has its weird historical setup, I guess.
I feel your pain--Comcast is the devil.
Now I am curious why this owner hasn't decided to contract out the cable himself from house to an an appropriate connection point? I am not sure if his house is 2500 feet back from the road or merely 2500 ft from the nearest drop. I have seen many a farm where the main residence is quite a run from the street so this could be similar.
So the dynamic we have (and expressed to some extent in your comment) is:
(1) Comcast is a crappy company that people hate/distrust;
(2) Because of that hate/distrust, people support policies like federally-mandated net neutrality; but…
(3) Such federal regulation, even when it provides some consumer protection, also makes the crappy monopolist even more entrenched and sluggish, as was the case with 'Ma Bell', the 60s/70s airline industry, 20th-century rail/truck shipping, etc.
I'm angry at Comcast about this shit.
However i'm even more angry at the author about it.
He did not even try once to even get a supervisor, when he should have been throwing the book at Comcast by week 2 latest. How is a company supposed to learn and improve if people like this guy let them get away with literally lying to customers without punishment?
Don't blog about it on the internet. Record phone calls, pressure agents to give you their full legal names, push to get supervisors. And get a damn lawyer.
Every bug report you get, you had better be damn thankful for. Each one represents an uncounted number of customers who just gave up on your product. Comcast is lucky this guy decided to document the precise way in which the system failed him; he gave them a roadmap for improving it.