Comcast

On October 23, 2007, the Comcast Nazis came to my home and disconnected my cable. This occurred, in spite of the fact that I have never failed to pay the bill on time and, in fact, automatically pay Comcast from my checking account, monthly.

The termination time was 12:09:34 as shown in the following entries in my modem operational log.

Log entries
2007-10-23 12:09:34 7-Information Scanning frequency 693000000Hz
2007-10-23 12:09:34 7-Information Trying to synchronize...
2007-10-23 12:09:34 7-Information Synchronization LOST

Impossible
Of course, they said that it did not happen. Further, the Comcast service person on the telephone claimed that they could not send out somebody to reconnect it. I would have to apply for an appointment. I can certainly show that it did happen because the connector has been cut off the wire and a “Denver boot” and been placed onto the lightning arrestor terminal. Only the cable company disconnects services this way.

So what else is new?
That is the way it is. I work hard all day only to return home to find that my computer will not connect to the Internet and I cannot receive any cable TV channels. When I call for service, I get a response as though it was my fault and they want me to take time off from work to be at my home when they meander over to reconnect the service. Note that this company is more concerned with "How's my driving?" than providing service.

Comcast was unwanted
Initially I did not want Comcast cable service, but for Internet connectivity, I had no choice. I get good off-air channels from my outside antenna. Even before HD-TV was mandatory, I had a converter box so I could watch HD-TV from off the air, long before many people even knew it existed. However, Verizon DSL did not work because I was too many kilo feet (so they said) from the Central Office. The real reason was that the telephone lines in the area are in such poor condition that it is even hard to get voice through them. I was seldom able to connect with my work computer using a 56 kb dialup modem because the lines were so bad.

Anyway, if I wanted an Internet connection at home, I needed to get Comcast cable.

Accidents?
How could a cable company claim to “accidentally” disconnect a customer? The answer is simple. One of my neighbors’ houses has been empty for the past several months. The cable company probably was going to disconnect that service, but it was too difficult to verify that they had the correct address. It is much more important to disconnect an idle circuit than to protect customers’ interests. That is how big business now works. The customer is damned. Procedures are everything.

Discovery
When I first discovered that I could not connect to the Internet I went down into my basement and reset the cable modem. It would not resynchronize so I thought it had become defective. However, in checking it out, I ran back upstairs to see if the cable TV signal was poor. This often happens when it has been raining. I discovered that I had no cable TV signals at all, so I grabbed a raincoat and went outside. That is when I discovered that the cable had been disconnected, its connector cut off, and a “Denver boot” terminator placed on the drop. This is how the cable company disconnects services so it wasn’t an “accident” after all. It was somebody intentionally trespassing on my property, destroying my property (the lead cut off that I own), then terminating the connection.

Angry
I was starting to get angry. I could feel the blood rushing to my head. My nose started to bleed. That was only the start, when I got to the telephone I could barely see the numbers as I punched in the Comcast number. The automated answering machine said; “We really care about you…!” I was livid. My sixty-eight minutes playing telephone-tag after that didn’t help, either. They had the audacity to require that I schedule an appointment and take time off from work to greet the service technician. I explained that they really didn’t want me around when the technician arrived to repair his damage –truly.

They didn’t fix it

October 24, 2007 upon returning home from work, I discovered that Comcast didn’t bother to show up to repair their damage. Instead, they left a curt message on my answering machine about scheduling another appointment. It seems that, although nobody needed to be at my home for them to trespass on my property, cut my connector off from my cable, and put a Denver Boot termination on their equipment, somehow I need to take time off from work for them to repair their damage. I called their “Customer Care” department again and was greeted by an arrogant chap who simply quoted his “rules.” “You need to schedule a time when you will be home,” says he. I told him that the only time I will meet a Comcast employee is in court. He was not impressed. Therefore, I had to drive 26 miles back to work where I could log into my Comcast account and compose a nice email message to his boss. This is the night when most everybody else in Massachusetts is home watching the Red Sox in the World Series. Since I can’t watch television, I’m going to write a few letters, first to my town’s Cable Commission.

Next day
It's October 25, 2007 and last night while most everybody was watching the Red Sox beat Colorado in the first game of the World Series, I returned to work so I could use a company computer to write email to Comcast “Customer Care” and to the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Energy. So far, I have received no responses whatsoever. There is nobody out there. It’s not anybody’s job to fix the company’s screw-up. They just don’t give a damn. Now I am going to compose the first of a series of letters to the Chairman of the Board of Comcast, with copies to the Securities and Exchange Commission. They are a public company, you know.

Epilog
Using Email, I contacted Christine O'Toole of the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable. She responded requesting additional information which I supplied. Christine then contacted Judith Davis of Comcast’s Executive Customer Care.

Judith Davis had a technician go to my home after normal working hours and reconnect the service. She sent me an Email follow-up message to verify that everything was working. She also said that she would compensate me by placing a month of courtesy service on my account.

The service technician who repaired the damage was not the one who had disconnected the service. This was evident from the fact that he did not know if the service had been disconnected at the pole, at the house, or both. He was relieved when I reported that the cable worked after he reconnected it at my house. He did not have to climb the pole in the dark.

It turns out that everyone outside of the normal “Customer Care” channels who responded to my complaint did an excellent job of helping to fix a problem that should not have occurred. The normal “Customer Care” channels failed in all aspects of customer service.

Comcast throws email away
I was taking a one-week vacation from work and needed to finish some documentation upon which I was working. Therefore, I emailed the document from my work account to my Comcast Email account. The document was about 1.4 megabytes in length and consisted of a Microsoft Word document. The document never appeared in my Comcast email account and the sending account received no error messages. In other words, I was assured that the email was sent by the server at work; however, Comcast simply threw the document away. Because of this, I needed to drive back to work and retrieve the document by sending it to my Yahoo email account and, just in case they throw stuff away too, copy it to a floppy. This meant that I traveled 90 miles because of Comcast’s arrogance. Therefore, I wrote Comcast a message:

Original Message
I sent email from work, with an attached document that I needed to work on at home. It never arrived. Why do you throw my email away? This was important. I now have to drive back to work to get the document on a floppy.

Comcast Answer
Hello Richard,

Thank you for contacting Comcast. I sincerely apologize for any unpleasant experience you had recently with your Comcast service and thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.

We need to hear about any unsatisfactory situations in order to correct them and to enhance our level of customer service. I have forwarded your comments to the appropriate members of our development and management teams for further review and action. We appreciate that you took the time to help us keep our commitment to quality customer care. I understand you have questions about the limitations that are set on our SMTP servers. The limitations on our servers were put in place to manage the amount of e-mail that is transmitted through it. This is done as a means to stop spam and other unwanted e-mail from inconveniencing our subscribers and slowing down mail delivery.

The following are restrictions placed on the SMTP servers to assist in the elimination of spam from the Comcast mail servers:

* There is a maximum number of recipients that you can have in the To:, Cc:, and Bcc: fields, a maximum number of times you can click Send per minute, and a maximum amount of messages you can send at one time. Due to security concerns, we cannot reveal the actual limitations as disclosing these limits may allow persons running a spamming server to spoof these limits and send mass e-mails.

* Once our mail server detects that multiple addresses in your To: field do not exist, an error will be generated and the e-mail will not be sent to any other recipients.

Comcast has established two levels of throttling to manage outbound traffic, however we may place additional restrictions on the SMTP servers as situations warrant:

If you attempt to send too many messages over one connection, you will be required to end the connection and establish a new connection. When this happens, you will receive the following error message: "450 requested action aborted: too many messages on a single connect". In most cases, you will send a single e-mail over one connection. For example, in Outlook Express when you click Send/Receive to send a message, one connection is established and one message is sent.

If a source IP attempts to make too many connections to the mail server within a minute, there will be a "cool-off" period where you will lose the ability to connect to the server to send more messages. When this happens, the error message, "Too frequent connects from , please wait shortly" will show. You establish a connection every time you hit "Send/Receive" in Outlook Express.

The size of your mailbox is 250 MB. Any e-mail you send or receive including text, attachments, and header information must be less 10 MB as that is the size limit for an individual e-mail. Since text, coding information, along with header information adds about 35% to the size of e-mail, I suggest you avoid sending or receiving an e-mail larger than 7.5 MB.

If this doesn't resolve your issue to your satisfaction, please reply to this email for further assistance.

Thank you for choosing Comcast.

Sincerely,
Josh
Comcast Customer Care Specialist

Customer Care?
This is just another example of Comcast's complete lack of customer service. They throw away my important email, then make excuses with some technical mumble-jumble designed to make it sound to the uninitiated like what they are doing is a good thing. By the way, Yahoo Mail which is free, did not throw away my email.

Design defects
Often it is convenient for a company with discovered design defects to blame the users. Sometimes this gives the company a chance to fix their problems. However, some companies such as Comcast continue to have design and implementation defects that cannot be covered up. Even their own web pages experience severe problems because of these defects.

For instance, it is well known that Comcast “throttles” data-flow in their networks. What are not well known is how they do it and what problems it causes to the user. Every time you click on a web page, a TCP/IP connection is made with a server somewhere. TCP/IP guarantees that all the data being sent somewhere will eventually get to the destination. What happens when an intermediate host like Comcast throws data away? It takes many seconds for an end-point client (your computer) to discover that the data are missing. Once it is discovered, the client sends a message back to the server, requesting another packet of data. This whole operation may take several seconds. In the meantime, Comcast can sandwich in, what it thinks are higher priority, data in the space normally occupied by the data you are trying to receive. The result is that you wait with a partially written screen like this.

Comcast is stealing your time so they can make more money by letting higher-paying data get in front of you, while you are waiting in line. It is similar to what airlines do when they have over-booked a flight. The difference being that with an airline you can be compensated for missing your flight or you can take another. With Comcast, you are screwed, you take what crap they provide, or you cancel the service and end up with no Internet connectivity at all in many communities.

More Comcast mail theft

Comcast continues to throw my Email away. Many people have sent me important technical documents needed for my work and Comcast just throws them away, never putting them in my mailbox. This theft of my property in considered the correct way of doing business by Comcast. It is done, so they say, to protect against spam. If I was wealthy and could afford to buy a lawyer, I would sue Comcast and I’m sure I could win. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do except complain, with the complaints falling upon deaf ears. I sent several US Postal letters to the Comcast headquarters in Philadelphia and got no response. They don’t answer letters so one can see how important they think mail is. Certainly Email has lesser importance. I really don’t know how a company would ever think that when they were entrusted with conveying a message to a customer they could just throw it away. The logic is well beyond me. Furthermore, the arrogance demonstrated by the persons at the corporate headquarters is also well over my head. I have sent First Class Mail to Michael J. Angelakis, Arthur R. Block, Esq., Stephen B. Burke, David L. Cohen, Brian L. Roberts, and Ralph J. Roberts, all at the address listed in the United States Securities and Exchange Commission reports, to wit;

Comcast Corporation

1500 Market Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19102-2148

I have never even received a “form letter” response. The arrogance is overwhelming. Their complaint department, that can only be accessed through this web-page, https://www.comcast.com/corporate/customers/contactus/contactus.html, results in canned responses with no practical value. See above, I have presented the response of a Comcast parrot, when I complained about the theft of Email.

Data bandwidth limiting

Of course, it is not just that Comcast throws mail away. If that were my only problem, I would use any of the free mailers on the Web. In fact, that is what I had to do. The major problem is that Comcast will not allow me to use enough bandwidth to complete writing a typical web page screen. For instance, the picture to the left is a typical BLOG screen. It is partially written (see the blue bar at the bottom-right), and then my computer waits for as long as a minute until I can proceed. This is because Comcast throttles data-flow by throwing incoming data packets away.

They deleted my Web-Mail
Comcast’s response to my complaints has been to delete all my Web-Mail messages, folders, and contacts! I complained that only a small portion of the Email that I sent to my contacts was actually delivered. I also complained that much Email that was sent to me also never arrived in my Web-Mail account. The complaints fell upon deaf ears as I wrote to the Philadelphia office as well as the on-line Email so-called help.

Today, February 13, 2008, I got an Email response from the Boston office of Comcast. I was going to save it in one of my on-line Web-Mail folders. That is when I discovered that the folder was missing –as well as all the others, plus my contacts. Basically, everything in my Web-Mail page is gone including, of course, the evidence of all the blacklisted Email messages I sent that were returned because Comcast was blacklisted by various mail-clients around the country. How can a communications company get away with this? Of course that’s a rhetorical question. They are unregulated and have access to your bedroom. Therefore they can do anything they want. It’s really just that simple.

Want Comcast?
Anybody thinking about Comcast Cable service should do a few minutes of research. Here are a few examples of a reason not to do any business with this obviously-failing company.

Comcast shares hit new 52-week low
Comcast 3Q profit and shares slide
Comcast to raise local cable fees
Typical Comcast - cable television problems - Internet problems - poor customer service experiences
Comcast is deliberately interfering with customers
Comcast technician caught sleeping on a customer’s couch
How (what) is Comcast doing in your community?
Another Comcast BLOG

Read about my book.

Comcast

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

No mail anymore

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Comcast reconnected

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Comcast disconnects again

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Comcast Cable

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