Posts Tagged ‘RCN’

Bye bye Comcast, hello RCN!

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

In response to my recent letter to Comcast, I received a call from a friendly woman named Nancy in Comcast’s New England executive customer care office.  The call went pretty much how I expected.  She had read my letter and understood what I was upset about, but she let me vent at her about the whole thing anyway.  She said she would pass on my concerns to the people in management who are responsible for determining pricing, fees, etc.  She then offered, as a token of appreciation for the fact that I had been a Comcast customer for a long time, to give me their faster Internet service for six months at the the same price as their slower service.  I politely declined her offer.

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: (more…)

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How to lower your phone + internet cost from $80 per month to $50 per month: buy your own cable modem and kick Comcast to the curb

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Comcast was charging me $95 per month for internet and phone service.  That was too much.

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. (more…)

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