It was so simple, why didn’t I just do it 5 months ago when my internet speed started slowing to a crawl? I’d been a Comcast customer for years with no complaint. But let me tell you that makes no difference when you have one :p So Verizon came today and installed fios. 20000kbps download 5000kbps upload as opposed to Comcast’s 4000kbps download & 300kbps uoload. The astounding part? It’s $2 cheaper a month..oh yeah and there’s that free month I get too. I tested it several times and I’m getting those speeds too. 20481kbps download right now. What a difference.

Edit: I called Comcast today to cancel my service. NOW they say they can meet Verizon’s deal. I said 20mb download? Then she offered me 6mbs (up from 4mbs), a free month, and $10 off each month for the next year. If I could have found a person like this just once in the last 5 months, I would still be a Comcast customer. Too little, too late might be apt but I’d have accepted that deal if they’d done it before I signed with Verizon. So yeah, too late baby.

Being the indecisive wench that I am I went back to Best Buy yesterday and canceled the Verizon deal that came with my laptop. Then after that day of totally sucky speeds, I went to their web page and signed back up for it. They are scheduled to come next Friday.

Today Comcast came for their scheduled service call. I don’t know what that man did, but he did nothing to my computer so clearly the problem was elsewhere. But he got me back to normal. I have not had speeds like this for months! Frank (ComcastCares) was sure the call wouldn’t help because according to him my signal was fine. What a wonderful thing to actually be able to load a page and do what I want. They should get a few Carl types to help with their phone techs as far as I’m concerned. So after 5 months of lousy service I am good.

Will I stay good? Should I cancel Verizon once again? Last night I moved all of my stuff off my Comcast webpages, deleted my extra email addresses, changed my emails all the places I was registered and I think I will leave it just this way now. Guess I have a few days to think about it. I still think Comcast should credit me three months for the costs I incurred and the just plain lousy service I’ve been putting up with. The only thing that has redeemed them at all in my eyes is Carl, who came and was polite and courteous and understanding and bloody well fixed the thing!

Hey Comcast, if you listen to your customers at all, give Carl a raise! He has been a better representative of your company than anyone else I have talked to since this started.

That’s sarcasm in case anyone is dense that way :p Last night Frank (ComcastCares) was telling me I had no outages and my signal looked fine.

That last spike you see? That was yesterday after I finally got back online. See the crap following that? Yep, that’s since then with my perfectly fine signal, my perfectly working router and my brand new cable modem. For $59.95 a month I find under 700kbs an unacceptable speed and that was the high! What really irks me is that they deny there has been any change when I have been a customer of theirs for years and NEVER had a complaint. I’ve had several complaints starting about April of this year and all I get is blown off. I don’t know how they can say the signal is fine and this result is what I get. Perhaps they could spend a minute explaining that to me?

Sunday night I was speeding along as per usual lately at a whopping 293kb’s download speed and 333kb’s upload speed. Do you have any idea how long it takes a page to load at that speed? I sure don’t because I finally gave up on every page I tried.

That made me determined to finally follow through and attempt to get Comcast’s help again. So Monday I get ready to call them and find out I’m not online at all. For those who don’t know, the only phone I have is Skype. Obviously if my internet worked, that wouldn’t be an issue. So, I drive to the Comcast office which took some searching since I still don’t know this city very well. I tell the girl at the window my problem and she says she can’t help me but I can use the phone at the table over there and she gives me an 800 number to call. First I get the recording asking me if I have a red light on my computer screen and trying to walk me through fixing it. I finally quit talking to the recording and so it hands me over to a real person! Progress at last! She says it will be hard to help me since I’m not in front of my computer but I wrote down her instructions so I could go home and do them all over again. (like because this time it’s from a tech it will somehow miraculously work)

• Shut off computer
• unplug router
• unplug modem
• wait 30 seconds
• plug modem in, wait for all lights to light up
• plug router in, wait for all lights to light up
• turn on computer

That is such a joke. I should so be a Comcast tech because that line of instruction is clearly all they need to know. Do you have any idea HOW many times I did that the last 3 days? Knowing that I am supposed to be present and accounted for in the blogging class I’m assisting in I’m feeling rather stressed. Of course I’d be feeling stressed anyway because I use my computer for everything!

I tried reinstalling windows because I thought maybe I had messed up something whilst deleting a few programs I hadn’t used. Now here’s the cool thing; I had an illegal version of windows xp. It worked perfectly. But I wanted to be legal so I did this amnesty thing they had and bought a valid version with a serial number. They mailed me the disk. So I put that in and did a repair install. And guess what!? I couldn’t log in at all because I was not bloody online and it wanted to authenticate it before log in so there I sat at a blank wallpaper screen! Back to the illegal version so I could at least get on my own computer and see if I could configure something to make the stupid thing work.

So next stop, I go to Best Buy and attempt to buy a phone with minutes so I can bloody well call Comcast. After about 3 hours there because the guy cannot get the new virgin mobile to activate so I can actually use it, he supposedly refunds my money. I say supposedly because I now have 2 charges on my bank card for one phone. While I am waiting for him I truly have a moment of insanity and I go buy a laptop. Thinking that I now have my Windows and computer all screwed up and perhaps that’s the problem. The guy talks me into a deal where I get $100. off the computer if I sign up for Verizon fios  while I’m at it. Well, I can’t get online and I can’t get Comcast to do anything but the same old spiel, so sure.

I go home and try my trusty new computer that I know isn’t messed up and sure enough, I’ve got 100% signal from my wireless router just like I do with my other computer! However, from the router to the internet is a big red X! Big surprise. So I go back to Best Buy to try for the phone again and this time while I’m waiting, I decide to buy a new cable modem. Because Comcast kept telling me my signal was fine and okay, the router is clearly fine so what’s another $80? Argh. I finally get my phone and yay, it’s activated. I call Comcast and give them my new modem numbers, get it all plugged in. The tech says he can’t see it. He makes an appointment for someone to come Friday to look at my outside lines. I’d like to return that modem if my old one actually works but that means calling them again with the old modem numbers and if I end up offline, well, I’m already out of minutes talking to them! Argh again.

So today, I’m sitting here wondering what the heck to do with myself until Friday when they come figure this mess out. I’m thinking of sitting in a hotel parking lot with my laptop (I read that in a crime novel, that a lot of them have unsecured wireless) to see if I can get to my bank account and see exactly how bad the disaster to my finances is. I look over at my monitor and holy cow! Skype is online! So I click firefox but can’t go anywhere because it wants to authorize me but when I click that link it won’t load. Call Comcast again and get a snotty young thing who does in the end manage to get me authorized and working. There went the last of my minutes. Now the question is, was it a bad modem? I’ll never know. All I know is that Comcast’s help should work a LOT better than this.

It only cost me $53.49 for the phone and minutes, $85.59 for the modem, Which of course if they had actually ever got their butts out here to check, I could have tested it with theirs. Who knows how much in gas running all over the place getting phones, running to Comcast office. I won’t add in the laptop, even though now I’m thinking why oh why did I do that? I did it because I freaking needed to be able to get online! It’s how I shop, it’s how I bank, it’s how I keep in touch with people, it’s even how I learn and teach, it’s how I phone.

I don’t know where to send it but I’m writing Comcast a letter asking for 3 free months for the cost of getting my internet up not to mention the bloody lousy 4 previous months where it was completely unuseable much of the time. I don’t suspect that should go to the CEO since he never responded to my last letter. But I have little faith in their customer support. The only one I’ve talked to that acts like he gives a damn is Frank Eliason at Comcast cares. Mostly I think no, Comcast doesn’t care but Frank seems to. As for Verizon, should I cancel that install or not? Who knows if I’m up for good this time?

More specifically to the ceo of Comcast:

I’m writing to you because talking with your tech help is a useless enterprise.

1. I would like to know why my service is so totally sucky compared to comcast average in my state (Indiana). That would be even at the best of times. (see attached image)

2. I would like to know why the last few weeks it’s been next to useless. (see attached image)

3. I would like to know why when I contact tech help I get the same useless spiel about resetting router, modem, my 2 gb of ram may not be enough, my 45 gb of free space may not be enough. (sorry, can’t include the canned letter I recieved. I deleted it after I saw it was the same useless information they’d given me before.)

4. I would like to know why, when they set up an appointment to come and check my wires or whatever, they never showed up at all. (I was even told that is illegal, to set an appointment and then not show, awesome, so Im calling the cops and what? Having some poor tech guy arrested?)

5. I would like to know why my daughter just signed up for internet AND tv and is paying less than I am for my sucky internet.

6. What are you willing to do to keep me as a customer? Because I am about one day away from going with Verizon fios.

Most sincerely yours,

Anita Sxxxxxxx

They were supposed to come out a couple of weeks ago to see what was up with my connection and they never showed. This was after the chat deal where I cleared my cache, reset my modem and router, rebooted, all to no avail. So yesterday I sent them an email with an image from speedtest and asked them if they could please explain to me why my speed was only about 1/3 as fast as my isp’s average in Indiana is.

I know I should have expected the packaged letter I got but for some silly reason, I actually thought I’d get some real help. They suggested I don’t have enough ram (2gb with nothing else running during the test), they suggested I didn’t have enough free space on my hd (80gb with 44gb free), they explained in excruciating detail how to clear your cache, reset modem, router, blah, blah. I thanked them for their very unhelpful canned letter. Verizon fios is starting to look a lot better to me.

I wondered wth was wrong with my homepage today. Couldn’t read the news, couldn’t get to the forum. Just kept redirecting me back to the main page.

A company spokeswoman confirmed that the Comcast Web page had been hacked late on Wednesday.

Seems to have been kept pretty quiet on the news. Most notably on Comcast’s homepage news Cnet has a blurb though.

and I ain’t lying :p

Comcast chat reset my modem. I reset my modem, reset my router, cleared my cache, rebooted and no change. If they don’t fix it Thursday when they come I’m switching to Verizon Fios I think. Not to mention both of the offers for high speed internet offered on Comcast.com are LOWER than what I’m paying for this crap. What a way to treat your existing customers.