Many of you who live in downtown Fort Lauderdale experienced a ridiculous outage on Saturday; my cable and internet was down from 9am until 11pm on Saturday. Making things worse was that Comcast has a loop programmed into their voice mail so you couldn't talk to a human if you were in the outage area; they just sent you back to the main menu.
I called at 11am and they said it would be resolved by 3:30pm. At 2pm they moved it up to 7pm. I then called at 7:30 determined to find out what was going on. But I couldn't get through the loop.
Ask for a Credit
I decided to call billing and get my credit. I figured I lost a whole day of productivity, so I ought to get a full day's credit. What's that, like $6? Well if 100K people called it's real money, so I wanted to do my part.
What I found is that Comcast apparently has a record of all of your outages since your last credit or something; I ended up getting an $89. credit. She tried very hard to steer me away. "We should wait until it comes back up", she said, well knowing that once it comes back up people will likely not bother to call. "What if it's still down tomorrow?", she reasoned. I told her that I wanted my credit today, and I'd call back tomorrow if necessary. They're well trained to not give you a credit if possible. But when all is said and done, they do give you what you're entitled to.
The City Should Investigate
The Comcast person told me that the outage was due to a "Cable Down", reported by Police. Here's the problem I have. Comcast tells us that they "invest millions" in redundancy, so how could this happen? How could a cable problem on a calm, sunny day cause an entire day's outages? How much would this have cost businesses in Fort Lauderdale if it happened on a weekday?
Furthermore, what does this say about Comcast's preparedness to handle a real calamity, like a Hurricane? Are we going to be down for weeks? If it takes an emergency crew a whole day to fix one cable, what are they going to do when 100s of cables are down?
Automatic Credits
Our city officials are good at stealing our money for crony transportation projects, but what do they do to help with with our daily lives? Not much. Why do a million people have to call Comcast to get a credit when there is an outage? Why is it not Automatic? Why isn't Comcast required to give us our money back when service it out? Corruption, that's why.
If Comcast had to pay out Millions of dollars when they have a half day outage, I promise you that it would never happen. The city has control over the monopoly that it grants Comcast. They have the power to make them give us an automatic credit when service is down.
Make the utilities accountable for the service they provide. $7 / day does not begin to cover the lose productivity of not having internet or telephone service for a whole day. The way that it works now, a handful of people bother to call in for credits and it doesn't cost Comcast anything. So they don't invest in the redundancy that they should.
Previous Rants
Comcast has been pretty good for me for quite a long time, but one of the things that bothers me is that when they're "upgrading" we all pay the price with unbelievably lousy service. Other times, service is just down at inopportune times. Last night, cable and internet was down when I got home at about 11pm and it was still down this morning. It came back up at 8:15.
Call For Your Credit
I called Comcast last night and demanded a credit. They told me to call back when it came back up; I told them I'm not sitting up all night waiting; as far as I was concerned I couldn't watch TV or use the internet for the evening. I got a $10 credit, or so they told me.
EVERYONE who had their service affected should call for a credit. If 1000s of people call, it will cost Comcast a bundle, and that may cause them to do a better job. I'd like to see AUTOMATIC credits for downtime. What GOOD is government if they never do things that should be done? If automatic credits were in place, and Comcast had to give 1 Million customers a $2 credit every time they "upgraded" the service, you'd see a LOT less downtime. The burden shouldn't be on the consumer to call for a credit. Comcast knows when service is down.
As it is no. nobody bothers to call for a credit and they get away with it and it costs them very little. Call them for the credit as a matter of principle. Make them pay when service is down.
Don't buy Comcast Phone Service
I use MagicJack which is $25/year for my "landline". There's no need to pay utilities for phone service anymore. MagicJack works just as well as any other internet based phone, and it's portable. You can take it with you on vacation and plug it into your laptop and talk for free. I