Thursday, December 15, 2005
Broken pipeline? It's Comcastic
Sorry this blog wasn't updated sooner, but my broadband connection to the Internet, which is advertised as always being on, has been broken for the last few days.You didn't read about it in your local newspaper, though, because despite its monopoly, Comcast is under no obligation to announce its mistakes publicly.
In fact, the only mention of yesterday's outage - which lasted from 8 a.m. until 1:30 this morning, was hidden on a "help" page deep inside the company's Web site and wasn't posted until mid-afternoon.
Therein lies the rub.
Burying the notice on a help page for Comcast users doesn't really help customers who have no access to the site. Nor does the company's phone system, which merely announces that engineers are working on the problem and that you should go pound sand until they're done.
With cable TV monopolies like Comcast now selling phone and Internet services, its time to consider re-regulating this industry.
Not because of the unjustified and highly suspect six percent increase in TV rates Comcast has requested.
Nor for its refusal to provide customers a la carte TV channel selections (Do I really need two televangelist stations and three Spanish channels?)
But for its failure to provide reliable service while acting very much like AT&T before its federally mandated breakup in 1984. Take for example, a pair of national outages in April, which were not even publicly acknowledged until days later.
I've had a Comcast cable modem for four years now, and let me tell you, their service sucks.
The only way to get your point across to the company is to consistently demand that your calls are escalated to a manager, and then demand that they give you a rebate for that day's service.
Which is what I've done for the last five days. I hope other customers did too.
Thanks to Juno and Netzero's free hours on a dial-up modem Wednesday, here are yesterday's postings on Comcast's Web site (http://www.comcast.net/help/?CM.src=Navigation):
Pennsylvania
General Outage - Resolved at 12/14/2005 11:07:28 PM EDT
(PA Metro/Bensalem - RDC - Connection to the Internet is currently unavailable. Our technicians are aware of the situation and are working to resolve the issue. This outage was logged at : 12/14/2005 7:09:00 PM EDT.)
National
Scheduled Maintenance
(Comcast Engineers will be performing network maintenance in your area. This may temporarily affect your Internet connection. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. This outage was logged at : 12/14/2005 8:00:00 AM EDT.)
Scheduled Maintenance - Completed at 12/14/2005 6:40:34 PM EDT
(Comcast Engineers will be performing network maintenance in your area. This may temporarily affect your Internet connection. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. This outage was logged at : 12/14/2005 8:02:00 AM EDT.)
Scheduled Maintenance - Completed at 12/14/2005 6:40:13 PM EDT
(Comcast Engineers will be performing network maintenance in your area. This may temporarily affect your Internet connection. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. This outage was logged at : 12/14/2005 8:04:00 AM EDT.)
Scheduled Maintenance - Completed at 12/14/2005 6:14:08 AM EDT
PA Metro/Levittown - Comcast Engineers will be performing network maintenance in your area. This may temporarily affect your Internet connection. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. This outage was logged at : 12/13/2005 11:14:00 AM EDT.)
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The Daily Rant by Dave Ralis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
The Daily Rant by Dave Ralis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
