How bad is Comcast?

[RhyssaFireheart]

Cheddar, any idea on when fios will be in the far NW Burbs of Chicago? We're considered Northern Illinois region, and depending on the company, the Chicago market.

Not gonna happen, hombre.

So there is no chance of getting it?  I'm not sure if I'd be considered far NW suburbs or not (Crystal Lake/Lake in the Hills/Algonquin), but for a chance of getting FIOS, I'd switch from my AT&T DSL.

[Chimpy]

The upper midwest in general is probably not going to get Verizon FiOS ever. This was Ameritech land, and Ameritech is part of SBC AT&T now so you will have to settle for U-Verse if/when AT&T spends the money to deploy fiber to your node and allow you to purchase it. (Though I know people who have it here in Champaign in the one neighborhood it is live and they like it a lot. Not nearly the top end speed potential of Fiber to the home FiOS, but it is still better than Comcast speeds here)

[Cheddar]

The upper midwest in general is probably not going to get Verizon FiOS ever. This was Ameritech land, and Ameritech is part of SBC AT&T now so you will have to settle for U-Verse if/when AT&T spends the money to deploy fiber to your node and allow you to purchase it. (Though I know people who have it here in Champaign in the one neighborhood it is live and they like it a lot. Not nearly the top end speed potential of Fiber to the home FiOS, but it is still better than Comcast speeds here)

There are plans to address the cost of deploying to rural areas; due to my position with the company I cannot discuss it, though. 

Rule of thumb: if you have AT&T locally you WILL NOT get FiOS.  If you are in an area that falls under the Frontier deal you WILL NOT get FiOS.  Sorry.

[chargerrich]

Man what I would pay to have FIOS in my area!

Had comcast for over a decade when I lived in the suburbs, generally very reliable service provided you never have to call them. Seriously... worst customer service on the planet, bar none.

But I recently bought a house and 11 acres out in the country (40 miles outside of Kansas City) and am damn lucky to have DSL from Embarq. Going from 16mbps to 6mbps kinda sucks, but I have not really noticed unless I am streaming HULU while all my kids are too (and my wife is playing farmville on facebook)... which happens regularly 

Hoping FIOS or ATT UVerse gets here someday, until then I am told I should have access to 10mbps DSL next year when they install a new DSLAM.

[Khaldun]

It's interesting. The standards for customer service in IT/telcom businesses are incredibly bad in general. I can think of only a few genuinely good experiences involving tech support or customer service for any kind of product or service of this kind, compared to the kinds of customer service I've seen in lots of other consumer-products businesses. But Comcast really stands out for me and it appears others as achieving a special kind of shit service. That's an accomplishment. It must take effort to be worse than the crappy industry standard.

[Engels]

So, a buddy of mine that lives in Redmond WA says he has FIOS from Verizon. Something about it piggy-backing the Microsoft line?

[Cheddar]

So, a buddy of mine that lives in Redmond WA says he has FIOS from Verizon. Something about it piggy-backing the Microsoft line?

Did you read anything in this thread?

Also, we do not share "lines" with MS.

[Engels]

Yeah, I read the articles. I thought it was all about the infrastructure already existing. I imagine FiOS is a name for a type of infrastructure (fiber?) and if its already in place in Redmond, then it being purchased by Frontier wouldn't mean that it goes away, just that it goes by another name. If that's wrong, its not because I didn't read the article, I just don't know enough about the issue. So, like, chill.

[MahrinSkel]

I ditched Comcast because they were jacking my bill up every year, continued to charge me for phone service that hadn't worked after the first month for the next 2 years (because it was part of the installation bundle and the computer said it worked perfectly), and had oversold the local loop so that the internet connection went to shit promptly at 6:45 every night, give or take 10 minutes.  I switched to AT&T for DSL and phone service ($50 combined after the intro), and DirecTV ($108, but that's with two movie packages and 7 receivers, including one HDTV DVR with 100 hours of HD capacity, nearly half my bill is equipment rental because I need a TV in every bedroom, plus the living room and a separate kid's TV area, because a few extra bucks to keep them from squabbling is worth it).  That's more than $100 less than I was paying for Comcast, and with the sole exception of download speed (which I could fix by coughing up another $20/month for high-grade DSL, or $50 more for business grade) the service is superior in every way (I've lost TV reception exactly three times in heavy thunderstorms, all less than an hour, I had multiple hour outages every couple of months with Comcast).

If I had taken the DishTV/AT&T bundle deal, I'd be paying about $30 less, but I didn't like their stock dish (smaller, so more weather interruptions) or the DVR, and I couldn't upgrade the DSL service separately without losing the bundle price.  On major WoW patch days, when 3 different computers are trying to download half a gig, it's a pain, otherwise I find the equivalent of an old-school T1 perfectly adequate even if the other geeks do poke fun at me for it.

--Dave

EDIT: To be fair, AT&T did just try to fuck me by upgrading the firmware on the DSL modem to be incompatible with any of the four home gateway routers I had (something involving DHCP), trying to force me to buy their home networking package.  But one old POS Dell the kids used to use and a download of Ubuntu fixed that, the modem has absolutely no way of knowing how many computers are behind the one it can see because they're on a different network.  Probably a lot of less tech-savvy people in my neighborhood are cursing under their breath and coughing up for the upgrade.

[Hoax]

That's another damn fine point about Comcast, the price you pay is always going up.  Always.  They fuck about with pricing and bundles and changing which channels you get and what you need to do to get the channels you had back all the goddamn time.  Fuck I hate Comcast.

[Chimpy]

Comcast has not really raised their internet rates at all since I was last an actual paying customer (my name on the bill), but their TV rates have gone up considerably. In fact, I think their internet rate has gone down a couple bucks since I last had it.

But their customer service aparrently is still on a whole abyssmal. I had a customer thank me for calling him back to verify his connection was working 6 days after his original call because he had never had such a response from a "big company like AT&T or Comcast".    Of course, I had to then tell him we are by no means "big" having less than 100,000 total customers nationwide.

Ahh the joys of working for an ISP.

[Sheepherder]

On major WoW patch days, when 3 different computers are trying to download half a gig, it's a pain, otherwise I find the equivalent of an old-school T1 perfectly adequate even if the other geeks do poke fun at me for it.

Download it once and share it over your local network.

[Sky]

What company doesn't jack rates? I finally went with Time-Warner's phone package because Verizon wouldn't stop jacking up my basic rate (just landline, no long-distance package, since I don't call long distance but maybe a couple times a year). But Time-Warner also has rate creep, for the tv stuff. The internet and phone are actually very competitive.

At this point I'm just going through my TW emails to figure out who I need to notify when I drop those fuckers. ESPNHD went out again Sunday. Again. Should I stick with that or save $60/mo for a year and get Sunday Ticket....hmm...

[Samwise]

What company doesn't jack rates?

I don't think I've ever had my rates for DSL jacked up on me.  No download caps either.

Of course with my cheapo DSL plan I don't get nearly the bandwidth I'd have with cable, but I'd rather have 1MB/s and be able to use all of it all month than 100MB/s and get cut off or surcharged after a couple of hefty Steam purchases.

[Viin]

Of course with my cheapo DSL plan I don't get nearly the bandwidth I'd have with cable, but I'd rather have 1MB/s and be able to use all of it all month than 100MB/s and get cut off or surcharged after a couple of hefty Steam purchases.

I've never run into any surcharges on my cable internet. I download games a few times a year, so maybe that doesn't mean much. I *have* redownloaded most of my steam games over the course of a weekend, but didn't see anything extra on the bill for that.

I think you'd have to be consistently excessive to garner any attention from the bandwidth cops.

But then again, I can't find many download sites that let me download at 1MB/s or faster anyways!

[Stormwaltz]

What company doesn't jack rates?

I don't think I've ever had my rates for DSL jacked up on me.

Not entirely applicable, but Shaw Cable in Edmonton never raised its prices in five years of service. Further, they increased everyone's bandwidth from 6 to 9 Mbps for free the year before we left.

[Sky]

Not entirely applicable, but Shaw Cable in Edmonton never raised its prices in five years of service.

See how that dirty socialism destroys capitalism?

It's every companies god-given right to screw its consumers as hard as they possibly can.

[Sheepherder]

Shaw was nice, while I was still in Winnipeg.

[Chimpy]

Comcast never raised my internet rates. They did raise my cable rates about once a quarter though.

[Samwise]

Of course with my cheapo DSL plan I don't get nearly the bandwidth I'd have with cable, but I'd rather have 1MB/s and be able to use all of it all month than 100MB/s and get cut off or surcharged after a couple of hefty Steam purchases.

I've never run into any surcharges on my cable internet. I download games a few times a year, so maybe that doesn't mean much. I *have* redownloaded most of my steam games over the course of a weekend, but didn't see anything extra on the bill for that.

My understanding is that in practice, most ISPs don't actually surcharge you for going over their limits, but in their Terms of Service they reserve the right to start doing so at any point.  This seems to get buried in the fine print, along with the limits themselves.  Even if they don't ever use it, I don't like the idea of having the sword of Damocles hanging over my head constantly.

[Righ]

edit.  Also, keep in mind with Verizon FiOS/DSL you can now get free wireless internet (5,000 hotspots from coast to coast and growing) for the mid to upper tiers.  I am looking forward to testing this out.

Hilariously not offered to Verizon's cellular users because they're scared of people using WiFi to cut phone bills. However, they don't object if you use the WiFi service to reduce your AT&T T-Mobile bill. Result? Verizon get billed by Boingo so that their customers can surf and VOIP on iPhones and Androids.

Rule of thumb: if you have AT&T locally you WILL NOT get FiOS.  If you are in an area that falls under the Frontier deal you WILL NOT get FiOS.  Sorry.

Verizon will get the Frontier lines back fully when they have to take over the bankrupt Frontier who they will have a 68 percent share of. Around three years is what I give it.

[Cheddar]

Verizon will get the Frontier lines back fully when they have to take over the bankrupt Frontier who they will have a 68 percent share of. Around three years is what I give it.

 

[Sky]

So ESPN was blacked out again last night. I called TW and bitched, they said it was an NFL blackout (goddamned Bills anyway). I mentioned that it was a regular thing, she checks and of course there's a problem with my line. I ask if that means I have to take an afternoon off work to sit around waiting for their subcontractor to show and she says they can narrow it down to two hours. I tell her to make a note about the problem in my file and go ahead and get a hold of me when they can narrow it down to a precise time, when I'm not at work.

I wish I could act like some of these corporations, tell my boss....yeah, I'll try to get to that problem on your computer. Let me give you a two-hour window when I might be there in a couple weeks.

[slog]

Verizon will get the Frontier lines back fully when they have to take over the bankrupt Frontier who they will have a 68 percent share of. Around three years is what I give it.

I could be wrong, but I don't think they can force Verizon to do that.

[jason]

Comcast never raised my internet rates. They did raise my cable rates about once a quarter though.

Comcast's TV rate shenanigans is why I have switched to being an Internet only customer with them and now watch all my TV through online sources (Hulu, Netflix, network sites, the occasional torrent).  I'm just glad I've never cared for watching sports on TV, so I don't mind being a day behind the broadcast for my entertainment.

To get the best rates from Comcast (and many service companies these days) you need to cancel, or at least threaten to.  They will almost always offer you a better "retention" rate to keep you on, or you just go without for a month and come back on one of their specials.

[SnakeCharmer]

Not entirely applicable, but Shaw Cable in Edmonton never raised its prices in five years of service.

See how that dirty socialism destroys capitalism?

It's every companies god-given right to screw its consumers as hard as they possibly can.

Got a 401k?

[Sky]

No. 

[Big Gulp]

No. 

Screw 401K's.  You'll get sucked dry by the fund manager's fees and their supposed great returns don't add up to much.  If your company offers one contribute just enough to hit their maximum matching (if they have such a scheme), and open up your own IRA.  I like Vanguard's funds, particularly their index funds.

[JWIV]

No. 

Screw 401K's.  You'll get sucked dry by the fund manager's fees and their supposed great returns don't add up to much.  If your company offers one contribute just enough to hit their maximum matching (if they have such a scheme), and open up your own IRA.  I like Vanguard's funds, particularly their index funds.

This is exactly what I do.  The free money from the company match is good, but my IRA's overall performance has been quite solid.

[Sky]

I work at a relatively small library, there is no match. Also, as a non-profit, we have to run through 403(b), which at least was changed to allow things other than annuities.

[Cheddar]

Verizon will get the Frontier lines back fully when they have to take over the bankrupt Frontier who they will have a 68 percent share of. Around three years is what I give it.

I could be wrong, but I don't think they can force Verizon to do that.

The Government can.  This exact scenerio is playing out even as we speak...

Google/Wiki "Fairpoint"

[Hoax]

Comcast never raised my internet rates. They did raise my cable rates about once a quarter though.

Comcast's TV rate shenanigans is why I have switched to being an Internet only customer with them and now watch all my TV through online sources (Hulu, Netflix, network sites, the occasional torrent).  I'm just glad I've never cared for watching sports on TV, so I don't mind being a day behind the broadcast for my entertainment.

To get the best rates from Comcast (and many service companies these days) you need to cancel, or at least threaten to.  They will almost always offer you a better "retention" rate to keep you on, or you just go without for a month and come back on one of their specials.

This.  But I love sports, I still don't own a tv though, bars + myp2p.eu are how I get my live sports fixes.  That and friends who have tv.

No. 

Screw 401K's.  You'll get sucked dry by the fund manager's fees and their supposed great returns don't add up to much.  If your company offers one contribute just enough to hit their maximum matching (if they have such a scheme), and open up your own IRA.  I like Vanguard's funds, particularly their index funds.

Yeah matching funds is the only reason to play.  Its not even that good of a reason.

[Sky]

No, it's a great reason. Your money is making an instant +100%, what other investment pays that much up front?

[Hoax]

It really depends, some companies force you to do some pretty whack shit to get matching funds or only let you keep them if you meet xyz criteria.  You are right though I probably overspoke but I've seen and heard of some stupid conditions to get/keep matching funds.

[Cheddar]

According to PC Magazine readers, Verizon FiOS took top honors, with an overall score of 8.7 (luckily for Verizon, PC Magazine didn't rank carriers based on billing accuracy). The next closest competitors were Cablevision and Cox, who scored 7.8 and 7.8 respectively. As is usually the case with consumer surveys, Comcast and Charter Communications brought up the rear with respective scores of 6.9 and 6.5.