Comcast: The bloom is off the rose

I wrote previously about my positive experience switching from Speakeasy DSL and Verizon POTS service to Comcast High-Speed Internet and Digital Voice.

I’m sorry to say that I’ve had a number of rather bad interactions with Comcast since that rosy day. I’m not sure I can remember all of them, but here are some:

• A Comcast representative told me that they would refund the $4.95 charge for an unpublished number since they had not told me that there was a charge for the service when I asked about it. When my bill showed up, the charge had not been refunded. I have since been told that it would be taken care of, but we’ll see.
• I contacted Comcast to port my old Verizon number to my Comcast account. A week later nothing had been done about it. On my second call, the agent with whom I spoke said the only explanation she could offer for why the porting order was not placed was “human error.” On the plus side, when I demanded a credit for the extra week I was going to have to pay Verizon for service, she agreed and issued me the credit.
• The stability of their Web site continues to be a real problem. There have been many occasions when I have been unable to use the “Live Chat” or “Send Us Email” features of their site. Since these are their recommended methods for contacting them for support, it’s particularly unfortunate that they are unavailable so much of the time.
• Our voicemail simply stopped working recently — we couldn’t access it from home, and people couldn’t leave us messages. When they tried, they got an error message telling them to try again later. The “Live Chat” agent whom I contacted about the problem was incredibly clueless, and although he did somehow manage to fix the problem, he wasn’t able to tell me why it stopped working, why what he did fixed it, or whether I should be worried about the problem recurring.
• After our Verizon number was ported to Comcast, we were no longer able to access our voicemail by dialing our own phone number. I called 800-COMCAST to talk to an agent about this (since the Web site wasn’t working, as noted above), and the woman with whom I spoke informed me that since we were able to access our voicemail by dialing *99, she was refusing to open a ticket about the issue. I told her that while I understood that *99 was a workaround, I wanted it to work with our own phone number as well; since it had been working just a few days prior and was no longer working, something was clearly broken, and I wanted it fixed. She again refused to open a ticket about the issue. I informed her that this was unacceptable and demanded to speak to her supervisor, and in response she put me on hold for several minutes and then disconnected me.On the plus side, after this occurred, the Web site “Live Chat” feature started working again, and I was able to reach an agent that way who was both more helpful and more competent than the agent with whom I’d spoken on the phone.
• It turns out that the level of service for which I’m paying is only eligible for 384kbps upload speeds. I saw nothing on the Comcast Web site about this before signing up for service, although there were in fact references on the Web site to upload speeds as fast as 768kbps, so that was what I was expecting to see. It’s ridiculous for a service with a 6000kbps download speed to have only a 384kbps upload speed. That’s the same upload speed as my old DSL service, whose download speed was only 1500kbps!

As a result of these failings, Comcast has squandered just about all the good will they generated with their initially good service. It’s sad.