[ale] external monitor & automated refund request for Comcast or other services

[Jeff Hubbs]

Seems you have expectations of Comcast that are only going to leave you 
disappointed. 

Comcast's attitude about outages affecting residential customers can be 
summed up by the Latin legal term /tuffus noogia/.  This has been the 
norm for most all residential ISPs since the beginning of time (i.e., 
the mid-1990s). 

Fortunately at my domicile Comcast outages are rare, but when they 
occur, they are frustrating because whoever I get on the phone never 
seems to have any idea why there's an outage, *that* there's an outage, 
or when the outage they don't know anything about in the first place 
will be corrected.  This is one big reason why I don't care for their 
Digital Voice service; my copper POTS is still more reliable than theirs. 

As an aside, it's very interesting to me from an engineering perspective 
just to what extent reliability was hammered into the US phone system.  
Maybe it was for the best that, at least for a while, there was an 
iron-fisted and Government-protected AT&T monopoly. 

It also gives me no warm fuzzies that while watching *analog cable*, 
there will sometimes be picture freezes and/or pixelization, suggesting 
that the problem is between a Comcast facility and their upstream source.

- Jeff

Jerry Yu wrote:
> My comcast connection went down twice this week.  (frustration!).
>
>     * They doesn't seem to have end-to-end service monitors, since I
>       was on the phone and told no outage in my service area,
>     * Worse, for acknowledged outages, Comcast doesn't automate
>       refunding customers in the affected service area.
>
> To "encourage" them to improve the up time, I think it'd be nice to 
> automate the outage->refund process.  I reckon that, if  enough people 
> (I'd be happy with >=30%) send in their refund request through an 
> automated framework/service each every time an outage happens, that 
> ought get their attention.
>
> Is there such thing exist already? If not, how one be implemented, 
> assume Comcast's "API" for refund doesn't change. This meant to be a 
> technical question, not invitation for 'yeah, mine was down too' echo.
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