Revenge of the Cable Customer 397
crimeandpunishment writes "After years of poor service and poor reception, years of hoping the cable guy shows up sometime within that four-hour window, years of constant price increases ... it may be payback time for cable customers. Cable TV companies are trying to treat customers better. Considering the industry has long had some of the worst customer satsfaction ratings of any industry, it may take a while to overcome that reputation. But they'd better succeed. Cable customers are switching to satellite and phone companies in droves. According to industry research, cable companies lost five million video customers from 2006 to 2009."
The link is not safe (Score:4, Informative)
It had some chick, I had to close the tab and reload without images
Why I switched from Cablevision to FIOS (Score:5, Informative)
Overall, I got the impression that cablevision simply stopped innovating since they were the only game in town, and they did not care that much about their customers. They sure got a big surprise from Verizon, and they are calling us up every week it seems begging us to come back.
Why stop at cable? (Score:5, Informative)
Last month I got sick of my Comcast bill creeping higher and higher without my consent or notification. I cut it. I get my TV over the air and the quality is _better_ because it isn't compressed further to cram more channels into a finite bandwidth. I paid 17 dollars for an antenna and 40 dollars for a distribution amplifier. That's still less than a month's worth of cable TV. I went back to a copper landline for increased reliability and a cheaper price. I get my internet from FiOS to stream netflix and other internet videos. I suddenly find myself with entertainment that is better in quantity, quality, and price. Who needs 900 lousy quality channels all with nothing good on?
wrong strategy (Score:4, Informative)
The problem isn't when the service men show up to fix a problem -- it's that there's a problem at all. We've had internet outages 20+ times a day since Comcast acquired the local cable company. All they had to do was not touch anything and it would've been fine. But instead, they screwed it up, and have sent people to our house on 4 occasions trying to fix it. They have no idea what the problem is. They don't need help that shows up on time, they need help that can get the job done on the first visit.
Re:The link is not safe (Score:3, Informative)
Yep, cable operators suck (Score:2, Informative)
Yep, the cable operators suck big way.
Back in 2001, when I decided to go for Cogeco, Canada (their reputation was better than others), I didn't believe the mess they made me go through. The installation never happened thanks to time mismatches. And customer care rep had hard time to figure out that I am not going to be home for 24 hours and she needs to give me some scheduled time. That made me finally decide not to go for their service and I told her over phone to cancel the installation with assurance from her that I will not be charged for anything since installation did not go through.
To my horror, after a month I started getting their bills. My calls and explanations made them stop bills, but few weeks later, I started getting calls from some lady looking after Credibility issues demanding me why I haven't paid their bills yet.
I fought back with every evidence I had, discussed with their top guys and sorted it out. But looking at what I have gone through with other operators, I feel Cogeco was far better than other lot. Tells you everything.
Re:It's not revenge (Score:2, Informative)
> I've slashed my Comcast to just internet
Well, me too, but the problem is that where I live they charge the *same damn price* for internet-only as they do for internet + basic cable + VOIP. So my doing this is accomplishing exactly jack shit :-/. It used to be $10/mo cheaper for internet-only, but a few years ago they sent around a nice letter letting me know about their price increase. I called up and bitched heavily, but to no avail.
And it isn't like I have a choice of providers. There is comcast, and, umm.... satellite or dialup.
Re:Bulletproof Glass (Score:2, Informative)
In my experience, the cable companies were incompetent all around and existed only because they had local monopolies. I worked at a engineering/construction company that built cable networks. Our normal business cycle was, get hired and get plans from the cable company. Review plans then tell the cable company their plans are flawed and the network won't work. Listen to their angry rants then get them to sign a paper saying we told them so. Build network, making note of all the places their diagrams f the existing network were just wrong and disclosing to them the errors. Get paid. Wait for them to come and ask us why the network does not function. Sign second contract to re-engineer and fix the network. Rebuild the network the way we would have done it the first time if they'd listened to our engineers. All those costs got passed on to the customers and this happened for almost every single contract.
why I hate Charter (Score:5, Informative)
I hate Charter, our local cable company, with a passion. We still use them for Internet only because we don't really have another choice. As soon as something else becomes available we'll drop them like a hot potato.
I didn't hate them originally... We've been Charter customers for years - basically because that's the only option for cable TV in our town. We had Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) DSL for Internet, and Charter for TV. I wouldn't have changed anything, but we were moving out of town and couldn't get DSL there. Had to switch to Charter Internet.
On the move day we had a call scheduled with Charter.
We had Vonage for phones, so I'd explained to them that they couldn't call that phone number to confirm that somebody was home. I gave them my cell phone number to call.
We waited and waited... Couldn't make as many trips with the U-Haul because somebody had to hang around the house. Nobody ever called. Nobody ever showed up.
Turns out they were calling the disabled Vonage account, instead of my cell phone.
We scheduled a second call... Made sure they had the cell phone on record... Took out the Vonage number entirely...
They showed up this time. But then they decided that we were actually some previous owner who'd failed to pay some bills. So instead of hooking up our Internet (the TV was already working for some reason) they turned off our TV.
We had to go down to the local Charter offices with various forms of ID to prove that we weren't actually that previous owner who'd failed to pay the bills. Then we got another install date scheduled. And they actually showed up to install things - about a month after we'd moved at this point.
And since we used Vonage for our phones, we were without phones (besides my cell) for that month.
Since that time we've had an assortment of issues. It's horribly unreliable. So much so that we gave up on Vonage and got everyone cell phones.
And the prices keep going up. Eventually we dropped them for TV and went with DirecTV.
The Internet performance is crap. When I call technical support I have to use my old cell phone number to look up the account, because they can't manage to update their records. Their technicians aren't even in the same state as me, so they never know if we're having issues in the local area or not. They just want me to reboot my modem - over and over again. And then they tell me that my wireless is bad, when I don't have any wireless, and try to sell me an upgrade.
Seriously, I will drop Charter Internet as soon as it is possible.
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:5, Informative)
It's true that for many people the cable company is the same as the internet company, but at least you get a better choice of programming, besides not being forced to watch ads.
Having to pay to watch advertisements is the worst trick the cable companies have done to us, IMHO. And the worst of them all is the AXN channel, where the commercial breaks grow longer and longer during the film. The last time I tried to watch a film on AXN it started at 9 pm. The first break lasted about three minutes. Around 11:30 pm, when the break had lasted for some twenty minutes, I gave up and downloaded the torrent for that film instead.
These days I seldom watch anything on TV. If I have to pay for all that programming through advertisement I have the right to get it any way I prefer, without having to watch those ads. Since in every product I buy the cost of marketing is in the price I pay and the marketing includes the ads that finance TV I have earned the right to watch those programs without having to pay again to the cable company.
Line fee (Score:3, Informative)
We're talking about cable television, not cable internet.
Except you can't get cable internet without cable television unless you pay a "line fee" that in some cases equals the price of lifeline cable television.
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
Really? TWC in SC has essentially given up in the last 2 years. No new hardware, virtually no new services, they stopped even trying to price match sattelite service, they're the most expensive ISP and internet phone period around here, most of their field techs are essentially outsourced lowest bidder crackpots who can't install anything properly or cleanly and never get the job specs and special notes clarified on their work orders, and tech support over the phone simply sucks. If they can convince you that bringing your hardware to them is what's required (even though they have in home service) they will, there's rampant mis-billing issues and problems with packages and discounts, spotty Internet bandwidth and heavy packet loss issues, and just general misinformation.
I got pretty good service from TWC during a period from 2000 - 2006. After that prices went up, discounts went away, equipment became spotty, internet prices went up without improvements in service, and eventually my complaints fell on deaf ears. Finally someone told me quite litterally "if you can get better service from Dish and AT&T at a lower price, you should switch. We no longer price match our competitors offers" so i left. I get much faster internet from AT&T for $5 less per month, got $350 for switching, combined my mobile bill and added generic home phone (with no options for only $11/month) and now get calls to all AT&T subscribers (not just mobiles) without using minutes. I swtched to Dish and instead of having 1 DVR and 2 boxes I now have DVR in 4 rooms (2 in HD), the ability to watch a recorded show in another room, more channels, and i pay $30 less per month. The only time i see image break-up is during REALLY heavy storms, and I'd still call it generally watchable with the exception of 2 local stations who's upstream satellites have issues (which also cut out on TWC btw). I simply switch over to a traditional HD antenna when its bad, but I've only done that 2 times in a year, and I only do that when something I'm trying to record is not also available on netfix, hulu, or another website.
I initially had some billing issues with Dish due to some discounts not applying properly, but they not only fixed it, they gave me a month's service free. i also had 2 installation issues they had to come back to resolve, and i got additional free time added without complaint (one case, the didn't have a ladder big enough to get to my 3rd floor, the other was a failed dish installation, a bad cable). They were on time within 20 minutes of schedule all 4 time's I've seen an engineer. TWC has shown up 4-5 hours late on more than 1 occasion, and all i can get out of them is 1 week of basic cable (not my entire bill, a whopping $9 and some change) free when that happens, and it takes an hour long phone call to do even that...
Comcast can suck it (Score:5, Informative)
While living in my last apartment I had SpeakEasy DSL which was my only connection to the outside world, because of some weird local (Houston) ordinance that parceled out cable service monopolies to multi-tenant buildings to a handful of local cableco's who survived entirely on gouging apartment customers and didn't even bother advertising their service to people with a choice (house dwellers). If I wanted TV type entertainment torrents and usenet downloads served my needs just fine, would be even easier today with Hulu, Netflix instant and Amazon VOD but I digress.
After renting a house and moving in with my GF we had to cancel SpeakEasy because we were too far from the CO and ended up on Time Warner. At the time their service was actually really good overall. The tech showed up in the middle of this four hour window and we were online within an hour. Couple times we had problems they were cleared up pretty quick. Internet service was almost as good as SpeakEasy, speed was fine, reliability was a little better but no static IP options and the uplink speed was too slow for running a server. Overall though life was good in cable tv land. Then they did that weird switcheroo with Comcast and it all went to hell. Within about a year everything started to go to crap. TV service got worse when comcast "upgraded" to their branded interactive guide service which was slow as hell to update, put in a worse and more expensive VOD feature. Internet stayed OK at first but then we had a really bad month when we were out for over a week due to a botched network upgrade on their end. They wouldn't admit that it was a network wide problem though and didn't mention a big outage on their telephone support line voicemail system but hold times were so bad they were rolling the tech support queue over to accounting (WTF?!) after an hour just to get a live person on the line which was worse because they had no information and no ability to help.
What finally pushed me over the edge was maybe a month after the huge outage when internet service crapped out again. Ten minutes of poking around on my part and I realized our modem had just lost it's provisioning because we had a solid connection but our IP had changed network routing was restricted to a private IP pool. Plugged a laptop directly into the modem and found too that DNS was being hijacked to a webapp for the installer to use to provision the modem. Should be an easy fix for phone support. First I spent an hour on the phone with a tech that not only ran though the while reboot and check that your cables are plugged in bullshit but also suggested I upgrade flash if I was having problems with internet video. After that she told me she would open a case with a higher support team. She gave me a case number and told me I'd be contacted within three days. On the fourth day of no service and no callback I got on the phone again and when I finally got through was told no such case number existed and was in fact in the wrong format for their ticketing system to begin with.
After screaming for a minute and going through the same scripted bullshit I was finally given to tier two support. She was more helpful but insisted on trying her own thing and kept assuming the problem was on my end. Every ten minutes of not making progress I'd beg her to reprovision the fucking modem but she kept insisting there was no record of my modem being moved into unprovisioned space. After a solid hour she setup a conference call with a network engineer and then fucked up the three way call and disconnected all of us. Per normal crappy tech support farms she had no direct call back number and had no ability to call out on her line. So back in the queue I went. Finally I got a support goober that just did what I told her and had her boss reprovision the modem - big surprise that solved all my problems.
Shortly after that we got a flier annoucing that AT&T was rolling out U-Verse service to our neighborhood and we signed up within the first week of availability. Tech came out on time and
Re:Why I switched from Cablevision to FIOS (Score:3, Informative)
You are going to be waiting a long, long time [wikipedia.org], as Verizon has stopped their FIOS expansion for the indefinite future. Why anyone in a FIOS-served area would ever choose any competitor for Internet service is beyond me; their sell-through rate (ratio of subscribers to all potential subscribers) on their Internet service should be way, way higher than its current 25% or so. I'm currently waiting for AT&T Uverse service to reach my area.
Virgin Media are much worse (Score:5, Informative)
Rant mode on, but it's on topic.
I live in the UK. I used to get cable internet service from Virgin Media (the only cable provider in the country, because they bought up all the others). I would *love* to have had the quality of service that you guys above are complaining about from Comcast et al.
Understand that Virgin Media works great until it breaks. Up to 50Mbps wherever you are, low latency, dropouts rare. When it breaks though, getting it fixed is a nightmare. And it *will* break. They don't keep track of what models of modems they've given people; they never send existing customers new hardware to replace obsolete models; they change the wire protocols without notice; they push broken firmware updates.
Tech support is outsourced to India. It's manned 24-7, but wait time is at least half an hour at all times. The "people" at the other end of that phone line are barely more sentient than M-x doctor. Diverge from their script, even the tiniest bit, and they'll tell you you're not supported and hang up on you. To get through their script, you must either lie to them or unplug every single piece of gear you have except for a Windows PC connected directly to your cable modem. You then spend half an hour having them tell you to unplug and re-plug all the connectors and reboot it five times. At the end of their script there's still a 50% chance that they'll tell you your PC must be broken and just hang up on you, rather than agree to do anything about it at all.
If you're lucky, you'll get sent an "engineer". He won't have a 4 hour window of arrival -- oh no, it's all day, any time between 8am and 6pm, and his best trick is arriving at 9am THE FOLLOWING MORNING. When he arrives, he's woefully underprepared, with only about a third of the equipment he ought to have (he will complain about this). He will fiddle with your modem, attach a meter contraption to the cable, and possibly change the little widget they fit inline with the cable to make up for the signal strength being too high. If you're unlucky and this does not work, he'll spend a few minutes using *your* phone to ring someone and explain to them that he doesn't understand what's going on, he'll noncommittally say "they'll look into it", and he'll leave. If you want to chase up (and thence have a hope that they'll sort things out), it's back on the phone to India, but the goon at the other end doesn't seem to understand the concept of records -- so you're back to square one!
Last year I was unlucky, and had a problem that was slightly non trivial. I counted. After three visits by these "engineers", SEVEN hours on the phone to India, one whole week waiting for second level support to ring back -- and they rang while I had something on the boil on the kitchen, I asked them to call me back in ten minutes, I never heard from them again -- they still had no idea what was wrong. After a month of no service despite constant chasing I rang the sales line, and cancelled, and told them precisely why. My call got escalated immediately, and the manager offered to send along one of the engineers who handle their much more expensive business service to take a look, but in a further two weeks' time; I cancelled my contract anyway, but accepted the engineer appointment since it was free.
Seven weeks after my connection had originally broken, and one week after I had DSL fitted -- slow, but with real support (www.aaisp.net.uk -- they're very good) -- the proper engineer arrived, picked up my cable modem, fiddled with it for a couple of minutes, and said "yeah, there's a return path fault on the modem. I can replace it if you'd like." I spent some time staring at him open mouthed before I managed to explain to him why I wouldn't like him to do that. I think he was pretty shocked at the quality of service I'd received.
Never, ever, ever use Virgin Media.
Re:Sports over Internet? (Score:3, Informative)
Requiring a PC to watch is a nonstarter -- it'd have to be some kind of magic box with HDMI output.
There are a couple solutions for that. One is Logitech's Google TV box. Another is Acer Aspire Revo, a Wii-size PC with NVIDIA graphics and HDMI output.
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In My City (Score:3, Informative)
Video-to-TV box and laptop are configured to OpenDNS. They worked the moment I wired in. Upstairs box, newly rebuilt, started getting Comcrap's "we hijack your traffic" crap-DNS info
You know OpenDNS redirects [wikipedia.org] NXDOMAIN too.
Re:Day late and dollar short... (Score:3, Informative)
really?
try doing the math sometime.
you'd be surprised.
don't forget to add fuel at $3.00/gallon.
a simple exercise would be baseball.
4 games a month (i per weekend basically)
$15.00 per ticket for the cheapest possible seat x1
that's $60.00 month.
now throw in a few extra shekels for getting there and back, say $5.00 per visit and you're at $80.00/month.
and baseball is one of the cheapest sports to attend.
try going to an NFL game for less than $50 each trip.
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:4, Informative)
"This is Slashdot not 4chan."
There but for the grace of mods go we.
From an insider (Score:3, Informative)
I work for a small cable carrier with roughly 8,000 subscribers. Competing with Dish and Direct TV is a nightmare for the cable industry as a whole. Satellite providers are not regulated in the same way as cable providers despite offering the same product to the end user.
Our area is roughly 40% retired old white people and 40% Hispanic. The FCC prohibits a cable carrier from offering a $20 package with just Spanish language channels like Dish Latino. Instead, we must first sell a customer a basic and an expanded basic package before allowing the customer to buy any kind of premium or special interest tier. When you throw in all the national networks that are only sold by the package to the cable company, we can't be competitive.
For instance, we have a very small population that actually cares about MTV or VH1, but we can't offer Nick which is very popular without the first two. ESPN is one of the worst. Roughly $4 of your monthly cable bill goes straight to that one channel. But, to carry ESPN the cable company and eventually the customer are required to buy the other ESPN channels like ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNews, etc. at $0.50-$1.00 each
I'm not going to say cable companies are a misunderstood hero, but article in the OP barely scratches the surface of the issues.