Comcast high-speed internet

No, not in a human building-bridges mending-fences rediscovering-relationships kind of way. Not really wanting to do any of that at the moment, or for that matter, on most days. I’m just wanting my internet connection to remain stable for longer than an hour at a time.

I have had nearly perfect service from Comcast High-Speed Cable Internet since I switched from Earthlink DSL a few months ago. Until the last couple of weeks, which have not been quite so perfect. My husband mentioned some outages during the day, but didn’t give me too many details as to when or how many or how long. I hadn’t experienced any at all during the early morning and evening hours. I asked him to keep track, and kind of forgot about it until yesterday, when periodic outages started. Today, things were fine until early afternoon, and then the connection would go out approximately once an hour.

The customer service reps I spoke to were friendly and really did try to be helpful, but I didn’t get a sense of great knowledge either. The second one said he would need to send out a tech to the house. Oh, joy. My whole goal in doing the self-install was to prevent any Comcast tech from ever touching my network. I figured if it did not work, I’d move on to try another provider. And if it did work, it would keep working. Looks like I might have been wrong about the “keep working” part. So sad, because it was really looking good there for a while.

I’m checking around online to see if there are any known issues and fixes that don’t require me to allow a Comcast tech into my house. That is, if my connection will stay up long enough to allow me to do so!

And there is always the chance this is happening somewhere between my home and the mothership (for DSL that would be the central office but I have no idea what they would call it for cable, or if they even have the equivalent of a central office) and will go away by the time I get a chance to complain again. I would be good with that, so let’s hope maybe that is the case.

(NaBloPoMo | May ‘09: 25 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 121 of 274)

Just a short follow-up to yesterday’s post, because that is all I have the time and energy for tonight, giving credit where credit is due.

I have never had a great opinion of Comcast. I do not know how it is in other cities, but here in Chicago, you do not have a choice if you want to have cable television. You have a choice between cable and satellite, yes, but there is only one cable company serving each area. So providing superior customer service does not need to be a priority for any cable company.

I have a much better opinion of Comcast after adding their high-speed internet during the whole fiasco with Earthlink. I still have issues with their rather-high pricing, but that’s all at this point.

After the freakshow of a phone call I received at work from Earthlink, just before leaving for home, I called Comcast customer service and spoke to an American person residing in my local area to find out what I needed to do to add high-speed internet service to my existing cable television service. Among the options given to me was to purchase a self-install kit at Best Buy. I stopped on the way home to do that. The associate at the store told me to call Comcast to activate it once I got home. She thought it took about 3 days to activate service. Fortunately she was wrong. I called the activation number and spoke to an American technical service person who told me the line would be active in just a few minutes since I already had cable television service. And it was.

Total time from no ‘net to nothing but ‘net: less than an hour, including the stop at Best Buy.

Credit where credit is due. That was a great and painless experience provided by Comcast. Wish everything could go that easy.

Trying to stay connected

Giving credit (4 of 31/39 of 274)