Really? I am new to the US but I have been really happy with my Comcast. Self install was easy and quick, billing has always worked out fine, and while not super affordable, 50mbit is the fastest internet I've ever had at home. IPv6 too!
One of their techs once came out because I had bad speeds, and replaced some connectors to fix it. Later, the problem returned. I went outside on a vague suspicion and found two cable boxes left open, cables naked to the elements, discarded cable and other miscellaneous parts strewn through the grass.
In another instance, my modem wasn't syncing with their equipment, as clearly indicated by the lights on the front of the device. They wanted me to reboot my computer as a first troubleshooting step. I convinced the guy that this was not necessary, then halfway through our conversation he somehow reverted to the script and asked to reboot my computer again!
Four hour window? You wish. They'll give you "noon to 4PM" and show up at 5, without even so much as a quick call to let you know they're running late.
I have FiOS now. I've had techs out twice, once to install the service and once to upgrade it. Both showed up exactly when scheduled and were great. I've had problems with the service once so far. When I called it in, the random first-line tech I got connected to understood exactly what I meant when I told her that the router wasn't getting a DHCP lease on their end, and walked me through what was required to reset the offending equipment, with no nonsense about my computers or what browser or OS I was running or anything of the sort.
I hope your experience is different than mine, though! It could happen.
Wait until you need something fixed. I'm in a residential neighborhood and have their Business service (faster response, higher speeds, more expensive). I'm often the first one to report a problem. What kills me is that 99% of the time it's not anywhere near my modem, but they insist on sending someone to my location before they'll even do a traceroute and see where the real problem is.
I usually just keep calling until someone knows what traceroute is. Then, I plead with them to run it before making me do all the things I already did ("Please power cycle the modem" ... and wait several minutes).
And, I haven't even gotten to when they started charging me $10/mo for the router, when they told me it was included in the service. Their reason? It's not required equipment. But it is. I have a static IP and I have to use their modem. However, I didn't find this out until I bought two different modems at the suggestion of different CSRs. Thankfully I bought them from Amazon and didn't have to pay a restocking fee or postage.
So, yeah, when it works and you're in the first year, it's all good. Otherwise, they suck ass.
When I was considering switching from very slow DSL to Comcast in 2010, I looked at the Comcast business class contract for my home office. OMG that is a bad contract. You can get free or reduced installation charges for longer contract terms, but if you stop using the service during the term (e.g., you move), you still owe Comcast for 75% of the charges you would have paid for the entire term. Here is that clause:
"Termination Charges: Charges that may be imposed by
Comcast if, prior to the end of the applicable Service Term (a)Comcast terminates Services for cause or (b) Customer
terminates Services without cause. Termination Charges with
respect to each terminated Service Order shall equal, in addition to all amounts payable by Customer in accordance with Section 5.3, seventy-five percent (75%) of the remaining monthly fees that would have been payable by Customer under the Service Order if the Services described in the Service Order had been provided until the end of the Service Term. In the event the Agreement is terminated as herein described during the initial Service Term, Termination Charges shall also include one hundred percent (100%) of any amount paid by Comcast in connection with Custom Installation, as that term is defined in Section 2.6, for the Services provided by Comcast under the Service Order."
This and some other weird clauses totally freaked me out for business class. I backed off and ended up getting normal consumer class, and then relayed anything needing a static IP off a $15/yr VPS. That has worked out really well and I am a happy Comcast customer, which is a pleasant surprise for me. (Fingers crossed!)
Are you still on an introductory rate? Wait until you see the 'real' prices and after that and you will start to being the path to hating your cable provider.
There's a trick to this. When signing up on the promo rate, make sure to discuss any terms of extending the promo/getting it reissued. One of two things will happen.
A. they will say "that'll be easy, just ask before it runs out and we can fix it"
or
B. They will say "we can't do that"; in which case you ask if you can cancel and restart your service to re-get the special deals and they'll get confused, potentially ask a manager, and then say "I guess so." (they'll first make a huff about if your card appears in the system making you ineligable for the new deals, but you can fix this by either making enough of a huff, or using your spouses/your own alternate card, for example, I have a visa and a master card.)
In either case, when your deal is about to run out, call them up again, ask for the extension. There's a chance they may _just give it to you_ if the attendant is feeling very friendly, but usually you have to ask to get sent to customer retention (the magic words in all of this) and then tell retention EXACTLY WHAT YOU SAID INITIALLY WHEN YOU BOUGHT THE SERVICE THAT EXTENDING IT WAS POSSIBLE. I don't know whether it's verifiable, I just know that this pattern works, and I'd rather not be lying to them, so I always make sure to ask on the front end. Every time I've done this, in this manner (over the last.... 6-12 renewals?) I've gotten the initial price again, slight deviations from this script result only in a partial time extension/no extension at all.
Long story short version; you know comcast is terrible when you have enough experimental data to draw out some crude state diagrams of how to get around their terrible support.
(I also have decades of stories of getting charged for them to repair nonworking internet that was their own fault, lying about services I asked for, charging me for services I didn't sign up for, and taking up what is at this point probably man-weeks of my life just trying to resolve billing and service issues.)
Man. This did not set out to be such a rant, guess there was really some latent Comcast hatred in there...
In my area where there is no competition they refuse to do this anymore. I used to do this each year with my cable/internet bundle but whatever I did I could not get them to budge. I ended up canceling my cable, which usually leads to a phone call from some customer rep offering a discount, but it did nothing. I think they are to the point that they don't care in markets where there is no competition.
Monopolistic tendencies. High prices. OK quality. Terrible customer service. They're repeatedly ranked among the worst companies in the US in customer service and they've actually gotten lower scores than the IRS in the American Consumer Satisfaction Index.
In the ACSI Comcast's Internet service gets a score of 62 - the lowest of any ISP measured.[1] The IRS gets a 75 for individual e-filers and a 64 for self-employed and small business filers (scores are lower for big business and paper filers)[2].
Yeah, I am aware of their customer satisfaction ratings. I've no intention of switching away from DirecTv for enterntainment TV, but I pay $39.95/month for 3Mbs download, just tolerable for one video stream with nothing else going on. Seems like every couple months AT&T sends me a splashy brochure begging me to sign up for U-Verse but when I actually tried, it was, "oh, soooo sorry you are just that tiny bit too far from a central office for us to promise anything better than 3Mbs..." (in their own customer demo center the video on display was clearly posterized and pixellated -- not confidence-building). So I am kind of driven to consider "xfinity" for internet only. (Or moving. Perhaps to Europe.)
I just switched from AT&T U-verse to Comcast 30Mbps because my newly purchased house can't get U-verse. However, almost everything (streaming, gaming, downloads, etc) has been poor since I switched. Usually at the 1Mbps mark. Major internet speed tests show my speed as 30Mbps, but unpopular ones show my speed as 1Mbps. As if Comcast is throttling everything else, and giving very high priority to major speed test servers. I've talked to their customer service multiple times, but no luck.
Oh, and this is after spending at least a total of 5 hours (I had to call them 7 times. Yes, I was counting!) with their customer service over the past few months trying to get them to mark my newly purchased modem from Amazon as my own modem, and stop charging me a modem lease fee.
If there was even a single competitor that could provide me even decent internet service, I'd switch to them today!
It's impossible for me to change my Comcast password ... let me explain. I have a "custom" email address for my Comcast account. I have never used the Comcast provided email or login (customer for 10+ years). Many years ago when I signed up I managed to setup my own email and have used it ever since.
Fast forward 5 years and I'm attempting to authenticate an iPad TV app with my Comcast account and I have a brain freeze on my password. I attempt a reset and it doesn't' work. I try again, and again, from differing machines and finally call. Long story short they have no record of my email and can't reset the password. My only option is to revert to the Comcast supplied email which I have never used and don't even know.
Luckily I remembered my password and was able to simply move on but was shocked that there was simply no official way for me to retrieve or reset my password yet I have an account that still works (even for billing)
Support will reset your password if you verify your information with them. I just had to do this for my mom so she could watch the Olympics on her ipad.
I tried (via telephone) and they basically told me it was impossible, they had no record of my email in their system. This could have been simply incompetent support, however as I successfully guessed my old password I didn't feel like wasting another hour explaining my situation to a new rep with a small likelihood of solving or even improving my situation.
Apparently they did more. On 8th Feb, I had these two IP addresses checking out my who.is page.
64.246.165.10
216.145.14.142
I was certainly only curious, because it was a unpublished website with deny-all for all robots., so tried a reverse-ip using Who.is; To my surprise, the who.is page for the above two I.P. didn't load, thought it was maybe my connection, but then, when I used Whois.net to end up with the same result, I knew something was going on.
It was only after I googled the I.P address I found some dutch reverse I.P sites that said it was from comcast servers. Though I have nothing worth hiding, and it was just a testing ground for me, this was apparently not nice. I only got to know about the hack yesterday.
Perhaps they bulk collected data, using comcast servers?
Those IPs have nothing to do with Comcast; they're not owned, hosted by or routed through Comcast. They both resolve to whois.sc -- a whois lookup site; indexing whois records is what they do.
# nslookup 64.246.165.10
10.165.246.64.in-addr.arpa name = www.whois.sc.
# nslookup 216.145.14.142
142.14.145.216.in-addr.arpa name = www.whois.sc.
