[ale] OT: DeKalb Sets Public Meeting On Comcast

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 02/18/2010 06:40 AM, Geoffrey wrote:
> krwatson at cc.gatech.edu wrote:
>> DeKalb Sets Public Meeting On Comcast
>>
>> DECATUR - DeKalb County will hold a public meeting on Friday, Feb. 19
>> at 6:00 p.m. at the Manuel J. Maloof Auditorium, 1300 Commerce Drive,
>> to discuss Comcast Cable Communication's desire to renew its
>> franchise with the County.
>
> Comcast is by far the worst company I've ever dealt with when it comes
> to 'no customer service.'

On the residential side, I have to agree.  They are pretty awful 90%+ of 
the time.  Most of them think that 'ping' is a special purpose utility 
that only they have access to to 'ping' (e.g., reboot) your CM, and 
virtually nobody at the residential help desk can properly file a ticket 
for a routing issue, even if you spell it out for them.  They are, it 
seems, trained to always blame the customer's wiring for any issue that 
comes in to the help desk that isn't something stupidly trivial like an 
email password reset.  Back when they provided NNTP service, they didn't 
know how to support that, either, even though it ought to have been in 
their support database and searchable by keyword.

Nowadays, I am actually rather happy when I call Comcast for technical 
issues.  The business class people know what ping and traceroute are, 
know how to recognize when your issue isn't CPE or wiring (and know how 
to recognize when you have actually troubleshot those things), and are 
generally pretty easy to talk to.  Whereas before, I would have to go 
and say "Uh-huh, I did that, yes, I used MSIE, of course I checked that 
the coax connections are tight, by the way did you get the part where I 
can ping Google but not Slashdot, and did you get the part where the 
traceroute dies at Level 3", now I can say, "Hello, I am having issues 
getting to this particular list of places on the Internet.  There 
appears to be a routing issue located <wherever>.  Can I send you the 
traceroute logs, or can you run a traceroute to verify it?"  and they do 
so, and they don't so much as mention "resetting my cable modem" or 
"please check that your coax and Ethernet connections are snug" or any 
of that crap.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                    ☎ (404) 492-6475