First published HERE by Paul Hinks’ Blog on July 31st.

I’ve had comcast cable and broadband for a few months now. The broadband service is fast (when it works) although it seems that DNS services are slow and the overall effect is pretty sluggish. But nothing has been bad enough to make me put in the effort to change providers. Recently we moved house, and the guy who connected us up decided to give us a new cable box and modem, although he left the old ones with us for some reason. I called them last week to get somebody out to pick up the old ones, and to run a new cable while he was there.
I got home last night to find out that neither my cable or broadband service worked. I called comcast and was shuttled between about ten people before reaching a tech support person who told me that he could see that my services had been cancelled by someone in billing because my equipment had been returned. This was almost funny, but he said that since billing was closed he could not do anything about it, I’d have to call back in the morning. A simple database update and he’s be able to turn it back on in five minutes, he said. Thus I got an entire evening without broadband. But then this morning I call billing who tell me that I was the one who cancelled the service, that I have no equipment because their system shows it was returned, and that it will require a technician visit to the house with new boxes to restore service. I protest that I have boxes – please just mark the account as opened and transfer me to somebody with a brain in tech support. Nothing doing. I got nowhere with the guy for five minutes (Him: “Please give me the serial number of your box” me: “I’m at work and can’t give it to you” Him: “So you don’t have a box”). I finally called him an idiot and demanded to talk to a superior, at which point he cut me off. What does it take to get a company to employ reasonable intelligent, or even remotely helpful, people to answer its phones? Anyway, I’m going to calm down a little and try again. But I’m also going to order DSL from speakeasy about whom I hear nothing but good things, so I really will be canceling comcast in about two weeks.