Comment by lazzlazzlazz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazzlazzlazz | Hacker News Reader

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Sounds eerily similar to my experience with Comcast over the last decade. I've had collections filed against me for service at addresses I've never lived at, countless service disruptions, weird, rude, and tardy technicians, incomprehensible customer service agents, unreturned equipment fees for items I bought, etc.

Comcast is a blight and the cost on the American economy as a whole is underestimated. They would simply not exist in their present form if there was a diverse, competitive telecom industry.

Perversely, fighting for a healthy telecom industry seems like it might be one of the few things Democrats and Republicans could ideologically agree on, yet the truth is that no progress is even in sight. The relative lack of importance of ideology is highlighted in cases like this, where the excess of lobbyists are the only true source of influence.

Att overcharged me for two months. I called to asked them about it, and they said they upgraded me to a new service. I told them my speed hasn't changed and I would gladly accept the new price if they increased my speed. They agreed.

For two weeks I had half the speed, I called them many times and got disconnected. I couldn't stay on the line for 45 minutes on a work day. When I finally got a hold of them, they apologized and fixed the issue. They promised me a free month of service. That's where things got interesting.

Maybe it was a bug, but every month, I got credit instead of a bill. So every month I was getting -20 dollars. A whole year passed. I never complained. If it was a good company I would report it. A year and a half into it, it was fixed. I got a call to ask me if I was paying my bill.

I answered "totally"

Ideology isn't the issue. We vote on individuals who encompass a variety of causes, rather than on the individual causes themselves. So we'll vote because candidate A is in favor of lax gun control, or candidate B is in favor of more readily available abortions, or whatever other hot button issue is most important to us, or who encompasses a selection of important issues better than 'the other guy'; to very few of us does "has a sane position on how to regulate the telecom industry" overrule that.

So every candidate is faced with "I can accept these huge campaign contributions from telecom companies, and not hurt my chances at winning, or I can decline them to take a stand against the telecoms...and do nothing to help my chances at winning". Of course they take the money, of course they vote to keep the money flowing to them.

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