I have tried repeatedly to get them to stop sending me these mailings, to no avail. I filed a complaint about it with the Better Business Bureau; not only did Comcast fail to respond to the complaint, the BBB has failed to respond to multiple inquiries from me about its status (way to go, BBB!).

I live in an area with a heavy student population, so I could understand several mailings per year at the times when students tend to move in and move out. But 16 mailings in six months just doesn’t fit that profile.

Comcast isn’t a monopoly in very many places anymore. Even if they’re the only cable company in an area (and that’s not always true, e.g., I also have access to RCN service), there’s always satellite TV, FiOS, ADSL for Internet, etc. The odds are that anybody who hasn’t taken Comcast up on their offer after receiving a few promotions in the mail isn’t going to because they already have another service they’re satisfied with.

In short, the continuous stream of promotional mailings from Comcast simply makes no sense, and anybody who’s already a Comcast customer is paying for it in the form of higher fees.

When the RCN installers came, they disconnected the Comcast cable from the side of my house and connected the RCN cable in its place.  There’s a second cable entering my basement in the same location, to which is connected an antenna cable descending from my attic (as I described here).

One evening a few days after I canceled my Comcast service, I turned on our television and discovered that none of the channels were working.  After spending about a half hour verifying that the antenna was the problem (by restarting the Media Center computer, moving the antenna cable from the computer to the TV, and checking all of the cable connections in the basement), I went outside to check the connections at the side of the house and discovered that someone had disconnected the attic antenna cable.

Apparently, the Comcast technician sent to our house to disconnect our service couldn’t handle the fact that it was already disconnected and felt compelled to disconnect something.  Either that, or he couldn’t tell the difference between a white antenna cable descending from an attic exhaust vent and a black Comcast cable connected to the house from the street, even though the Comcast cable, conveniently enough, had a tag with “Comcast” written on it.

(Oh, and by the way… Hey Comcast, thanks for almost causing us to miss the penultimate Glee episode of the season because Media Center had no signal to record it from.  Good thing Glee episodes are available on-line!)

The conversation was entirely civil, which didn’t surprise me at all.  Most of the Comcast customer service representatives (the ones in America, at least) I’ve dealt with have been both civil and knowledgeable.  Generally speaking, the Comcast employees that you and I deal with on a daily basis are not the problem.  The problem is the people higher up who have constructed a predatory, customer-unfriendly business model.

Last week when I was considering switching to Comcast, I called their sales department to ask some questions, although I wasn’t quite ready to switch yet.  A couple of days later, I received a very friendly voice-mail message from a sales representative at RCN named Lloyd.  He said it was his job to follow up on a “certain number” of sales inquiries from potential customers and wanted to speak to me to make sure that all of my questions had been answered and to see if there were any additional available offers or incentives that I hadn’t been told about.

I called Lloyd back on Thursday.  I am now a happy (so far!) RCN customer, and I a few minutes ago I canceled my Comcast service (again, the woman with whom I spoke was friendly and helpful, and she even wished me good luck with RCN at the end of the call and didn’t sound snarky about it).

Let me tell you all the reasons why I’m happy with RCN right now:

• Both Lloyd and the other sales representative to whom I spoke last week were helpful and friendly.
• When my promotional rate expires in a year, RCN will let me sign up for whatever promotional rate is in effect at that time.  Comcast doesn’t offer promotional rates to current or past (within the last two years, I believe) customers.  Lloyd said to me, “A current customer who pays his bills on time is much more valuable to us than a new customer.”
• RCN still charges only $3 per month for modem rental, not the $5 per month that Comcast recently started charging.  Furthermore, when you sign up for RCN service, they tell you that you have the option of providing your own modem; Comcast never mentions it.
• RCN’s rates are significantly cheaper than Comcast’s.
• Lloyd discounted the already promotionally discounted rate for their 10Mbps Internet service by an additional $5 per month for six months.
• RCN doesn’t charge for installation as long as you aren’t a deadbeat on utility bills (they do a soft pull of your credit report to check).
• If you aren’t happy with your new RCN service, you can cancel within 30 days and owe nothing.
• After the first 30 days, the early termination fee if you cancel before the end of your contract is graduated — $75 through month 6, $50 through month 9 and $25 through month 12.  This makes it clear that the fee is to truly to recoup their costs, not just an opportunity to screw over departing customers on their way out the door.
• I called Lloyd on Thursday.  The technicians were at my house to install my service the next day.
• The technicians called to let me know they were running late, but they still arrived within the promised time window.
• The technicians were friendly and efficient.  They replaced, without prompting, a cable splitter inside the house which they said wasn’t good enough.
• RCN has apparently stopped using overly aggressive door-to-door salesmen.  The reason why we originally chose Comcast over RCN was because of the army of RCN salesmen who kept trying, over and over and over again, to get us to sign up for service.  We haven’t seen them in our neighborhood for years, so apparently they’ve thought better of that sales strategy.  I like a company that learns from its mistakes!

What’s not to like?

I got them to lower it to $75 per month, but I had to pay extra for all non-local and long-distance calls.  That was still too much.

They raised the equipment charge for my cable modem from $3 to $5 per month.  That pissed me off, so I bought my own cable modem.

Not only that, but I decided it was time to send Comcast a message for being so slimy, so I switched to Vonage for phone service for $25 per month.  You would think that would have lowered my total cost, except that when I canceled my Comcast phone service, I was no longer eligible for the special “bundle” rate on internet service, so they jacked up my internet service to $60 per month.

That pissed me off even more, so when I called today to swap out Comcast’s cable modem for my own, I also told them to downgrade me to their $40 per month internet service.

Believe it or not, what you get for that ridiculously high price is a 1mbps internet connection.  Yes, you read that right, one megabit.

Fortunately, Comcast isn’t the only game in town.  RCN will sell me a 1.5mbps connection, 50% faster than Comcast’s, for $25 per month, i.e., 37% less.  That’s not even a promotional rate.  Or, if I feel like spending $5 more per month, I can get a 10mbps connection, i.e., ten times as fast as Comcast for 25% less.  And although that is a promotional rate, unlike Comcast, RCN will let me sign up for any new promotion that becomes available after my 12-month contract is up.  Heck, even Verizon charges only $20 per month, half of what Comcast charges, for a 1mbps DSL line!

I haven’t switched to RCN yet, but I’ll probably be doing it some day soon when I’m in just the right mood.

Below is the letter I just sent the CEO of Comcast explaining how they managed to lose an $80 per month revenue stream over a lousy $2 per month.

P.S. If you decide Vonage is right for you too, email me and I’ll send you a referral, and we’ll both get a free month of service!

In a classic Gotcha Capitalism strategy, Comcast in Boston has just informed their VoIP and Internet customers that they are raising their monthly rate by $2 without actually admitting they’re doing it.

Note the text circled in red on my most recent Comcast bill:

Here’s what it says, in case you can’t read the picture (and for the benefit of search engines):

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Effective with your next billing statement the monthly equipment charge for your Comcast CDV and/or Internet modem will increase from $3 to $5, excluding applicable taxes and fees.  This change does not affect your monthly CDV and/or Internet service prices.

Let’s translate that into English: “We’re going to start charging you more for your service, but we won’t be charging you more for your service.”  Wow, it sounds stupid when you put it that way.

Maybe I’m confused, but I thought that when there was a separate line item on a bill labeled as an “equipment charge,” that line item was supposed to represent the actual cost of providing the equipment to the customer.  Since the CDV modem in my basement is the same one I’ve always had, and since the $3/month fee I’ve been paying for it up to now has probably repaid Comcast for the actual cost of the hardware several times over, how exactly is it reasonable for Comcast to raise the equipment charge?

If the charge is not, in fact, tied directly to the cost of the hardware provided to the customer, then it’s not really an equipment charge.  Rather, it is part of the service price, and it should be included in the service price rather than listed as a separate line item.  But then, of course, Comcast would have to advertise a higher monthly rate, which would scare away some customers.  And as everybody knows, if being honest about the cost of your service scares away customer, the right strategy is to be dishonest instead!  It’s a standard move for vendors competing in confusopolies.

I called Comcast and asked why they were increasing the charge.  The rep put me on hold for a few minutes and then came back on the line and explained that they hadn’t raised that charge in a long time but had to raise it to keep up with increased equipment costs.  In fact, the cost of this kind of hardware is probably going down, not up, because the US economy is flat, but I didn’t try to get into that with the rep on the phone.

Instead, I pointed out to her that the this charge was supposed to represent the cost of my Comcast equipment, and since Comcast had not replaced my equipment, nor was there any reason for them to do so since it’s working just fine and replacing it would not provide any new functionality, there was no justification for raising the fee for me.

In response, she said (no, I’m not making this up), “I’m sorry about the inconvenience of your having received this notice on the bill, and I understand that with the economy in the shape it’s in, it can be difficult to deal with increased expenses, but again, we haven’t raised this charge in a while, and we need to raise it to keep pace with new technology.”

In response, I pointed out that since the charge clearly was not directly tied to the equipment provided to me by Comcast, it was not actually an equipment charge, but rather part of the service price, and that listing it as a separate line item was therefore deceptive advertising.  She disputed this characterization, and I did not argue the point further.

Instead, I told her that I understood this was neither her decision nor her fault, but I would like her to pass on to her superiors the fact that not all Comcast customers are stupid, and that I intended to file complaints about this backdoor rate increase with both the state Department of Telecommunications and Cable and the Mayor’s office of Cable Communications (which I have since done).  She promised to do that.

UPDATE: According to Comcast’s 2008 annual report, they had 14.9 million high-speed Internet customers at the end of last year.  If they increase everyone’s “equipment charge” by $2 per month, that’s a $358 million increase in annual revenue, tax free (since it’s an “equipment charge” and since taxes are levied separately on customers’ bills) with zero associated cost. That’s quite a bump in Comcast’s bottom line for doing nothing, eh?

I want back and forth for many iterations with an extremely persistent support representative who obviously wanted very much to solve the problem.  However, he was clearly in over his head.  Throughout our correspondence, he repeatedly claimed that (a) the problem was being caused by settings on my wife’s and my Comcast email accounts, and (b) it was “impossible” that any of the settings on our accounts could have been changed by anyone besides us.  Both of these claims were clearly wrong, and I explained to him at length why, and yet he continued to assert them both, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

When, for a brief period of time, I actually did properly receive a couple of service-related emails at my email address, the well-meaning support representative took credit for having solved the problem, despite the fact that all he had done was to make me change a couple of irrelevant settings on my account.

The more likely explanation for why the problem went away, temporarily, while he and I were corresponding, was that it was in fact fixed on the day of my EECB, but the fix didn’t take effect immediately because the recipient lists for service-related emails already in the pipeline had been generated before the fix was put into place.

As for why the problem has come back, the most likely explanation is that, according to them, they fixed a “database discrepancy” which was causing the issue, they didn’t fix the underlying root cause of that discrepancy, and either that root cause happened again, or the two databases with the discrepancy were synchronized and the fix was undone.

I have been saying all along that if they want to solve this problem properly, they should have one of their engineers working on it, not a support representative who neither understands (nor should he be expected to) nor has access to the back-end systems in which the problem is actually taking place.

Perhaps they will finally listen to me and get the right person to fix the problem now.  Somehow, I doubt it.

Here’s today’s email to Comcast:

Mr. [elided] et al,

I’m sorry to say that although the problem with service-related emails from Comcast being sent to my wife’s email address rather than mine appeared to have been fixed temporarily, it has returned.

As you can see, the attached service-related email was sent to my wife’s email address, not mine. I have yet again checked the logs on my mail server and my personal spam filter, and the message was not caught there; as before, I can find no evidence that any attempt was made to deliver this message to my email address.

Mr. [elided], you previously asserted that the service-related emails were being sent incorrectly because of settings on my wife’s and my accounts. I told you that I believed this was incorrect, and that if Comcast did not find and address the root cause of the problem, it was going to recur, if not for me than for someone else. I hope you will admit now that I was correct.

I also hope that you will now do whatever it takes to find the real cause of this issue and fix it permanently for me and whoever else is impacted by it.

Thank you,

Jonathan Kamens

Mr. [name elided],

Thank you for your email and voicemail message.

I’m sorry to say that it appears the issue with my account is not yet resolved.

Early Saturday morning, Comcast sent out a service announcement with the subject “The new Comcast.net is now live”. Like all the previous service announcements, this one was sent to my wife’s email address and was not sent to mine.

It’s disappointing that not only was your customer service organization proven to be woefully inadequate, by virtue of the fact that it took me several attempts over six months, culminating with an email blast to all of your executives, to get your attention about this problem, but now your engineering organization has also proven to be inadequate, by virtue of the fact that when the issue was finally escalated to them, they were unable to successfully determine the root cause and fix it.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

In response to this:

Date: 6 Jul 2009 9:39am

I am with Corporate Escalations with Comcast.
I want to follow up with you to make sure that the emails from Comcast are now going to this email address (it is showing as the primary).
If it is not or this is not what you consider the primary, please contact me and we can resolve the issue over the phone.
My hours are Monday through Friday 6AM to 2:30 PM MTN time.
I look forward to talking with you.
And thank you for being a Comcast customer.
An 800 # is [elided] and ask for extension [elided]
Or call the direct number below.
You can also email me with a number to call you at.

Thank you for your time.

[name elided]
Corporate Escalations
National Customer Service Deployment Center

Mr. Kamens

We can contact you the next time we send a service email to ensure you properly receive it. If that is something you would like us to do just let me know.

Regarding the data discrepancy, our first task was repairing your account. We will continue to look into this in a broader way as you suggest to seek a root cause and repair any similar discrepancies that we find.

I agree with your remaining questions/comments pertaining to customer service. There is no explanation for our failure to respond and properly escalate. We will perform a root cause on this aspect of the issue by looking at the history of you calls and use the learnings to improve.

These root cause investigations are part of our normal process for an escalation of this type because it clearly shouldn’t take this level of exposure for you to receive proper support and issue resolution.

Once again, I apologize for the issue and associated inconvenience. Please let know if you would like us to contact you to confirm the next service email.

Thank you,

Mitch

Although I’m obviously not pleased that it took six months and an EECB to get this issue resolved, I can honestly say that, at least today, Comcast exceeded my expectations.

A few hours later, less than eight hours after the EECB,  I received a voicemail message from a Comcast employee indicating that the issue had been caused by a “database discrepancy” which was now fixed.

Here’s the email message I sent in response to that voicemail message.  I don’t actually expect a substantive response, but I figure it was worth a shot:

To: “Bowling, Mitch” <Mitch_Bowling@cable.comcast.com>
Subject: Re: Comcast sends service announcements to wrong email address for six months, ignores customer’s efforts to fix

Mr. Bowling,

I received a voicemail message from Paul Fratz at your National Service Desk about 25 minutes ago indicating that my issue had been resolved.  I hope that he is correct, although of course I have no way of knowing for certain until the next service announcement is sent out by Comcast and I receive it.  On the other hand, let me ask you this: if the issue was resolved incorrectly, such that now neither my wife nor I are properly subscribed to receive service announcements, how will I know?

In any case, there are much bigger issues than just ensuring that I personally am properly subscribed to receive service announcements.  In particular:

• I’m sure you will agree that it is highly unlikely that I am the one and only Comcast customer with this issue, although I may be the only one who actually noticed it.  Has your team taken steps to determine what other customers are impacted by a similar database discrepancy and corrected the issue for them as well?
• Will your team be searching for the root cause of the database discrepancy and fixing it so that similar discrepancies are not introduced into your databases in the future?
• Why did it take six months and an email bomb to all of Comcast’s senior executives for me to get this issue resolved?  In particular:
  • It is not acceptable that your email customer service representatives were incapable of resolving this issue or escalating it to people who could resolve it.
  • It is not acceptable that your New England Executive Customer Care department ignored me when I solicited their help at getting this issue resolved.
  • It is not acceptable that Nancy Tardif in your national Executive Customer Care department ignored me when I responded to her email.

  
  Will the service failures I experienced be investigated and addressed so that I and others receive better service from Comcast in the future?

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

Mitch Bowling
General Manager and Senior Vice President, Online Services
Comcast

Dear Mr. Bowling,

For over six months, Comcast has been sending important service announcements to the wrong email address associated with my account.

Briefly, you have been sending service announcements to my wife’s address, which is a secondary address on our account, and not sending them to my address, the primary address on the account.

I’ve contacted Comcast repeatedly to try and get this fixed, and yet it keeps happening, most recently in an email message you sent today with the subject, “Free Tips & Tools to surf safer this Summer.”

Here’s the time-line of my efforts to resolve this and your failure to provide acceptable service:

• January 1:
  • I contacted your customer support department through your Web site and went three rounds with them in email, each of which was less helpful than the one before.
  • After your customer support department failed, I sent an email message (attached) to your New England Executive Customer Care department.
  • My message was ignored.
• April 13: I sent you a letter, a copy of which I posted on my blog, which gets thousands of hits per day.
• April 14:
  • I received an email message from [elided] in your Executive Customer Care department.
  • I sent a response to Ms. [elided]’s message, explaining in detail why her answer to me was useless and had done nothing to solve my problem, and posted it on my blog.
  • My response was ignored.
• July 2: I am sending this “executive email carpet bomb” (to borrow The Consumerist’s term) in an attempt to get someone at Comcast to actually solve this problem, and of course I will be posting it on my blog as well as submitting it to The Consumerist.

So, are you going to continue to ignore me, or are you actually going to fix the damn problem?

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens