Comcast Extorts Customers for Repairs
At about 4am this morning I was woken up by the sound of a 18 wheeler backing up down my street. I fell back asleep and found out that that 18 wheeler had snagged, cut and drug a Comcast coax cable about 200 feet down my street. Most likely this cable was not installed by Comcast to the WAC 468-34-290 standard making this incident entirely Comcast’s fault. This problem exists with many cables around town as Comcast does a poor job of maintaining their infrastructure and has adopted a “wait and see attitude” towards maintenance. This broken cable,of course, resulted in an outage.
Now you see that’s when my wife and I made the mistake of being hardworking people that get up early. So we were the first to make the call to Comcast. We found out several interesting things about Comcast.
They couldn’t even tell the internet was out. That’s how old and outdated their systems are in my neighborhood.
They were so incompetent that even though one of my other neighbors called them as well, the tech simply told him to unplug his cable modem and plug it back in, ignoring the fact that a cut cable was hanging from a pole in the street.
But the worst thing that we found out is that even when the damage was clearly not your fault, caused by another entity on the street, Comcast will try to charge you for the repair. In this case several hundred dollars. They haven’t given us an official estimate yet. Since our business, and family, rely on Zoom during the pandemic to make a living this outage will most likely result in a loss of hundreds of dollars for us as Comcast will take at least 2 days to fix our connection.
This article comes at a time when the COB, public Works Director Eric Johnston, and more than half of the pro big-telecom “broadband advisory group” are up to their old tricks and games to protect big telecom. Recently they launched a heavily biased broadband study that I’ll be writing about in a separate article. They have done this in the past to protect Comcast TV services and justify molly-coddling CenturyLink for their obviously failed, and poor quality, PRISM TV service.
So it’s not just the bad pricing, the unreliable service, the terrible customer service, and the attacks on the first amendment. Comcast will also try to make you pay to repair their own equipment when the problem is obviously on their side and effects multiple customers. You just have to be “dumb” enough to report your outage first, oh and be a Comcast customer in the first place.
Eric Johnson’s and the BAGs response to the quality of Comcast service? Well Eric has allowed Comcast to threaten BAG members during meetings when they make it clear that they believe they own our town and will tell us what, if anything, will happen in our right of way. Eric’s attitude has always been that our service is amazing and that we don’t know how good we have it.
While I’m sending this from a mobile device, waiting until Comcast decides to come out and move a cable that is a hazard to many children in our neighborhood and blocking my business, I should note that we will have to reschedule all of our Zoom students today and may lose an estimated $300. $300 would get me 3 Gigs of service in Anacortes, WA where their largely underground public fiber network is only $100 to get hooked up to and $70 a month for Gigabit service. My $100 a month Comcast service RRUL load tests at about 25 Mbits down and 3 up. With obsolete DSL being the only other option in my neighborhood, and not adequate for the needs of anyone that needs to use Zoom to run a business, Comcast has a monopoly. Which is one of many reasons they think they can get away with extortion. But they’ll never treat Eric Johnston and the power elite in our government this way, so they think there isn’t a problem. Or more likely, they simply don’t care about us.