8 ms·

What is there to say? This is an incredibly obnoxious theft of attention. Comcast has perfected the art of harassing its customers with unwelcome noise for what

by rtl49 11y ago

What is there to say? This is an incredibly obnoxious theft of attention. Comcast has perfected the art of harassing its customers with unwelcome noise for what must be marginal profit. I know someone with a Comcast cable box whose channel menu forces the viewer to pass over a banner advertisement after every fourth channel. This combined with the horrible rubbery buttons on the remote means that to browse through twenty channel titles takes perhaps as many seconds. Add to this "actionable" banner advertisements displayed over the content and seemingly endless commercial "breaks" and I find it essentially unusable. On top of it all, I understand that people pay over a thousand dollars a year for this service. Comcast's flagrant disregard for customer satisfaction, or even their basic human dignity, is a striking testament to the failure of regulators to ensure adequate competition in this space.

mcv 11y ago
If this is how Comcast treats its customers, I wonder why anyone would want to pay them to be their customer. Especially a thousand dollars a years. Is this because there's no real competition in the US?
- sleepychu 11y ago
  That's my understanding. (No competition that does it any better.)
- misterbwong 11y ago
  In many areas of the country, the cable companies basically have localized monopolies on high speed internet. They claim they have competition in DSL and satellite (!!!) but these technologies just can't compete on speed in this day and age, leaving cable as the only viable alternative. From what I gather, this is one of the reasons why Google started Google Fiber.
  - throwaway7767 11y ago
    Interesting. Over here, providers are offering VDSL2, advertised as 100/100Mbit. Given my experience with DSL, that probably means about half that for the average user who is 2-3km from the DSLAM box. That's still pretty respectable. Is noone offering modern DSL in the US?
    - therein 11y ago
      Nope, sadly not. Even in San Francisco (which is pretty sad for being the heart of tech) it is cable or legacy DSL. If you are at a building that has an exclusivity agreement with AT&T, you might even end up paying them $50+ a month for 28mbit fiber. (yes, fiber terminates at my door but that's the max speed they offer)
      - mirashii 11y ago
        To be fair, there is sonic does offer vdsl2 in many parts of the city, over 100Mbit down, albeit a bit less up. There's also webpass for larger buildings which offers almost a gigabit during non-peak times. So SF isn't as dire as you make it sound, though I agree it's behind many other cities.
      - knorby 11y ago
        Well, there is Webpass for some in SF. I pay $60/mo for 100mbits up & down, and some buildings go up to 500mbits. No contracts, and I just hook up to an ethernet jack in my apartment. It is a local startup that is expanding elsewhere.
        dylz 11y ago
        Yep, webpass is greatest thing ever.. and there's also sonic.net and paxio.com and gowaveg.com depending on where you are too.
        therein 11y ago
        I love WebPass, and I used them exclusively in my previous apartment but this new building has this silly exclusivity agreement and Comcast can't make installations on this building as they somehow managed to make this residential building show up as a business address on Comcast's website. I could get Sonic Fusion FTTN but that's just rebranded AT&T, and peaks at 28mbits. I get better LTE speeds than that. I tried to bring in MonkeyBrains but the building administration refused, saying they would have to drill into load-bearing columns. Just an excuse.
- onlycommenting 11y ago
  I wouldn't say there's no competition per se, but some areas are limited based on who has lines out there. For example, the area I live in at Augusta only offers Wow! as a cable provider; over priced reseller. But, I was fortunate enough to land a decent contract- more channels than Wow! and for 1/4 the price- with Dish. Satellite vs. Cable, but I'm willing to take that trade off for a better price point. Plus there's always NetFlix/Hulu.
- ojbyrne 11y ago
  Not across the entire US, but in many places there are few or zero practical competitors. And where there are competitors, they're most likely AT&T or Time-Warner, which have similar shitty practices.
- chrismbarr 11y ago
  I live in a small town in Georgia and literally my only internet access options are Comcast and AT&T. AT&T's service here is fairly slow compared to Comcast's offerings, and since I work from home remote for a company based in Florida I have to choose the fastest options available to me, and that's Comcast. I would love to have more options, but I just don't. I only pay for internet access, I don't use their cable TV or telephone offerings. Internet alone is about $80/month. I just ran a speed test and I get 14.1Mbps down & 8.6Mbps up. I forget which speed tier I'm paying for, but I know I'm paying for much more than that! Ugh...
  - krisdol 11y ago
    I live in a large town (Boston) and the situation is not much different.
    - colanderman 11y ago
      If you're in Boston proper, you can get NetBlazr: http://netblazr.com/ http://netblazr.com/ (wireless mesh network) Unfortunately they don't even reach JP, so I'm stuck with Comcast.
  - supermatt 11y ago
    What are your options for satellite internet? The pricing these days seems very competitive, and although latency is (much) higher it should be ideal for the vast majority of use cases.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      It looks like they charge the same price for ~1/10 the speed and 1/20 the transfer (Does Comcast still have a 300 GB limit? That compares favorably to 10.)
    - mikeash 11y ago
      Latency is pretty important for browsing the web. No matter how much bandwidth you have, making every request take two round-trips to geosync is going to make the connection feel very slow. If low Earth orbit broadband internet ever happens, that could potentially be an excellent choice. But with the current offerings, it's always going to be the absolute last resort.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Where I am located, it is CenturyLink or Comcast. Neither are any good. AT&T is in the "area", but not MY area. So, that would be 3 bad choices.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Nobody really wants to be a Comcast customer. Comcast thrives because they're mostly the only choice or the less bad choice of two. I was a "happy" Comcast customer for years. I was in a condo where the choices were Comcast or Verizon DSL. Maybe. I called Verizon to see what they had to offer and they didn't know if I could get their DSL service or not. The best they could do was to place an order and see if it worked. Really! Even if I could get service from them, their offer was 1.5Mbps for something like $50/month. Completely ridiculous. It was like this when I moved out about three years ago, and as far as I know it's still like that today.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  The only reason I currently use Comcast, is my choices are ATT DSL at 6 mbps, or Comcast. Not that I like ATT, but when (coming in the next 6 months) they roll out faster service, I will be happy to switch.
  - Eldarrion 11y ago
    Don't like ATT either, but at least their service seems to be much more stable. I haven't had to speak with an AT&T customer support rep in over a year. Comcast, I've been doing their trial service run for two weeks now and I've already had to deal with their customer support 6+ times, 2 of which were during the installation. I think I'll probably just end up canceling before my month is up and going back to ATT. At least I knew I could rely on my connection to not crap out at random.
- johnward 11y ago
  Yes. Many markets have literally one option. My options for internet are comcast, or satellite probably? So really my only high speed option is comcast. I don't even think I can get DSL. I think a lot of markets the monopoly is even being protected by law.
- sneak 11y ago
  It's like that in a lot of places. I live in extremely central Berlin and cannot find a provider that can deliver above 25mbps for less than hundreds per month. It is a real shame that anything over 5-7mbps is considered "fast enough" by the vast majority of consumers.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- toxican 11y ago
  To give you an idea, my internet options are in my area: -Comcast (up to 100MB/s) -Century Link DSL (up to 10MB/s) -3G/4G modem (up to like 3MB/s) Then 10 minutes south of where I live, that county has deals with a local ISP who behaves exactly like Comcast, but with terrible pricing and lower caps. Also no realistic alternatives. While I could stomach the speeds of DSL (with some effort), I can't stomach the price. I'd end up paying just as much as comcast for much lower speeds. I really don't have a choice. edit MB, not mb
imgabe 11y ago
FiOS does the same thing with its cable box. I'm not sure it's every fourth channel, but doing anything with the cable guide often involves dismissing an interstitial ad on the way to whatever you were trying to do, made all the more annoying by the slow UI. TV service just keeps getting more and more obnoxious. I only got it because it came with 2 years of free HBO and was cheaper than Internet alone at the tier I wanted. There's hardly any reason to watch cable TV any more. (I know, sports. Not really my thing, but I get that a lot of people want to watch live sports)
- prjohnson 11y ago
  I can't speak for Comcast, but my FiOS boxes allow for you to turn off the initial launch/guide ad popups in your box settings. It's not the easiest of settings to find, but it's there (and enabled by default, of course). Call support (fast and helpful...not kidding) or search the online support area, which is how I figured it out and was easy to find the answer. The only persistent ad, I believe, is a single ad bar (annoying, but doesn't obstruct view) at the bottom of the channel guide, used mostly (from what I recall...I don't pay much attention to it) for promos of new on-demand releases. Love LOVE FiOS.
jerf 11y ago
"I know someone with a Comcast cable box whose channel menu forces the viewer to pass over a banner advertisement after every fourth channel. This combined with the horrible rubbery buttons on the remote means that to browse through twenty channel titles takes perhaps as many seconds." How weird is it that the equipment is still so slow? I mean, in 2005 I was grumpy about how slow cable TV gear is. Now it's 2015 and seems like it's exactly the same, whenever I see it. What is so hard about using processors with clock speeds measured in megahertz and not kilohertz nowadays? I swear, Comcast is probably paying extra to some supplier holding the last supply of their specialized MegaSlowz chips with the SuperProprietaryFeature that you Can't Reimplement Anywhere Else.
- matwood 11y ago
  X1 is finally a modern TV UI, but the boxes are sooooo slow.
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    Plus you can only get it (at least in my area) if you subscribe to extra services that I don't need like VOIP. CableCard could've been a viable alternative and spurred a market for DIY and third party cable tuner/decryptors but it was poorly implemented and support from cable providers is typically awful so for most people it's just not worth it. I came close to ordering a Ceton CableCard tuner card several times so I could stick a small form factor PC in the entertainment system and get the nice setup I used to have before they killed off all of the unencrypted digital QAM channels. Unfortunately, the standard is so encumbered that hardly any software can support CableCard (one popular option was the now-deprecated Windows Media Center). Back when QAM still came through unencrypted, I could pay for cable and hook it up to my cheapo Hauppauge card and use WMC as a great program guide and DVR setup. Even back in the Win Vista days it was vastly superior to anything on a cable box. Then they moved everything to encrypted and my tuner got repurposed for watching OTA stuff on my PC. Now I just pay for cable/internet but watch everything streaming on legit sites or torrents. Yeah, I know...but it works better and I'm still paying for it so even if it's not legal, I don't feel that it's immoral.
douche 11y ago
That's the number one reason I bought one of these HD Homerun cable tuner boxes[1]. Once I have a VLC playlist setup with the stream urls to each channel, switching channels is almost as fast as in the old days of analog cable TVs. Maybe another 4 hours of work got me a little web application that shows the TV guide information pulled from an API, and is hooked in with the VLC web interface to switch channels with a click. [1]http://amzn.to/1S6nHjA http://amzn.to/1S6nHjA
johnward 11y ago
To be fair the "X1" has a much better UI/UX and digital buttons. Plus the voice search (you talk into the remote) works exceptionally well. There is no lag. I might say I actually like it. I was shocked that it came from comcast. They actually have some comcast lab product where you can play games using your smartphone as the controller. I think it's beta but it wasn't that bad when I tried NBA Jam. Source: comcast is my only internet option so I bundle.
kdamken 11y ago
Actually using a Comcast cable box to watch things in 2015. I can't understand it. An Apple TV with a netflix and hulu account get you 95% of the way, with 100X better of a user experience. Or if you don't have $100 to spare, you can always connect your laptop to your tv.
- scient 11y ago
  Will it solve wanting to see live sports and all the "good morning" shows I watch while prepping to go to work and do I get the new episodes of shows on their release day?
  - kdamken 11y ago
    For sports it looks like there are some online, subscription type options. Still, I'd say that sports and morning shows would fall under the 5% not covered, but if those are super important to you then I could see that being an issue. Hulu is pretty good about getting new shows up pretty quickly, usually the day after. I'm usually able to live with not seeing a show the minute it airs.
qudat 11y ago
> Comcast's flagrant disregard for customer satisfaction, or even their basic human dignity, is a striking testament to the failure of regulators to ensure adequate competition in this space. I'd argue that government regulations have done nothing in this space but reinforce coercive monopolies. I think you're taking the wrong approach, we need to deregulate this space and allow real competition to thrive.
- superuser2 11y ago
  No one's getting the capital to climb on to every telephone pole, dig up every street, etc. Deregulation just leaves Comcast to do whatever it wants. I'd love to see massive consoldiation of the reserved-for-government portion of the EM spectrum so we could reasonably do this wirelessly.
  - nostrebored 11y ago
    Except for Comcast, at&t, and time warner, who have been getting massive subsidies to improve infrastructure to far beyond what it is today. I think the case could be made that this prohibits new players from entering.
- JamesBarney 11y ago
  I'd be interested in examples where deregulated utilities have worked out well.

by rtl49 11y ago

mcv 11y ago

If this is how Comcast treats its customers, I wonder why anyone would want to pay them to be their customer. Especially a thousand dollars a years. Is this because there's no real competition in the US?

sleepychu 11y ago
That's my understanding. (No competition that does it any better.)
misterbwong 11y ago
In many areas of the country, the cable companies basically have localized monopolies on high speed internet. They claim they have competition in DSL and satellite (!!!) but these technologies just can't compete on speed in this day and age, leaving cable as the only viable alternative. From what I gather, this is one of the reasons why Google started Google Fiber.
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  Interesting. Over here, providers are offering VDSL2, advertised as 100/100Mbit. Given my experience with DSL, that probably means about half that for the average user who is 2-3km from the DSLAM box. That's still pretty respectable. Is noone offering modern DSL in the US?
  - therein 11y ago
    Nope, sadly not. Even in San Francisco (which is pretty sad for being the heart of tech) it is cable or legacy DSL. If you are at a building that has an exclusivity agreement with AT&T, you might even end up paying them $50+ a month for 28mbit fiber. (yes, fiber terminates at my door but that's the max speed they offer)
    - mirashii 11y ago
      To be fair, there is sonic does offer vdsl2 in many parts of the city, over 100Mbit down, albeit a bit less up. There's also webpass for larger buildings which offers almost a gigabit during non-peak times. So SF isn't as dire as you make it sound, though I agree it's behind many other cities.
    - knorby 11y ago
      Well, there is Webpass for some in SF. I pay $60/mo for 100mbits up & down, and some buildings go up to 500mbits. No contracts, and I just hook up to an ethernet jack in my apartment. It is a local startup that is expanding elsewhere.
      - dylz 11y ago
        Yep, webpass is greatest thing ever.. and there's also sonic.net and paxio.com and gowaveg.com depending on where you are too.
        therein 11y ago
        I love WebPass, and I used them exclusively in my previous apartment but this new building has this silly exclusivity agreement and Comcast can't make installations on this building as they somehow managed to make this residential building show up as a business address on Comcast's website. I could get Sonic Fusion FTTN but that's just rebranded AT&T, and peaks at 28mbits. I get better LTE speeds than that. I tried to bring in MonkeyBrains but the building administration refused, saying they would have to drill into load-bearing columns. Just an excuse.
onlycommenting 11y ago
I wouldn't say there's no competition per se, but some areas are limited based on who has lines out there. For example, the area I live in at Augusta only offers Wow! as a cable provider; over priced reseller. But, I was fortunate enough to land a decent contract- more channels than Wow! and for 1/4 the price- with Dish. Satellite vs. Cable, but I'm willing to take that trade off for a better price point. Plus there's always NetFlix/Hulu.
ojbyrne 11y ago
Not across the entire US, but in many places there are few or zero practical competitors. And where there are competitors, they're most likely AT&T or Time-Warner, which have similar shitty practices.
chrismbarr 11y ago
I live in a small town in Georgia and literally my only internet access options are Comcast and AT&T. AT&T's service here is fairly slow compared to Comcast's offerings, and since I work from home remote for a company based in Florida I have to choose the fastest options available to me, and that's Comcast. I would love to have more options, but I just don't. I only pay for internet access, I don't use their cable TV or telephone offerings. Internet alone is about $80/month. I just ran a speed test and I get 14.1Mbps down & 8.6Mbps up. I forget which speed tier I'm paying for, but I know I'm paying for much more than that! Ugh...
- krisdol 11y ago
  I live in a large town (Boston) and the situation is not much different.
  - colanderman 11y ago
    If you're in Boston proper, you can get NetBlazr: http://netblazr.com/ http://netblazr.com/ (wireless mesh network) Unfortunately they don't even reach JP, so I'm stuck with Comcast.
- supermatt 11y ago
  What are your options for satellite internet? The pricing these days seems very competitive, and although latency is (much) higher it should be ideal for the vast majority of use cases.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    It looks like they charge the same price for ~1/10 the speed and 1/20 the transfer (Does Comcast still have a 300 GB limit? That compares favorably to 10.)
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Latency is pretty important for browsing the web. No matter how much bandwidth you have, making every request take two round-trips to geosync is going to make the connection feel very slow. If low Earth orbit broadband internet ever happens, that could potentially be an excellent choice. But with the current offerings, it's always going to be the absolute last resort.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Where I am located, it is CenturyLink or Comcast. Neither are any good. AT&T is in the "area", but not MY area. So, that would be 3 bad choices.
mikeash 11y ago
Nobody really wants to be a Comcast customer. Comcast thrives because they're mostly the only choice or the less bad choice of two. I was a "happy" Comcast customer for years. I was in a condo where the choices were Comcast or Verizon DSL. Maybe. I called Verizon to see what they had to offer and they didn't know if I could get their DSL service or not. The best they could do was to place an order and see if it worked. Really! Even if I could get service from them, their offer was 1.5Mbps for something like $50/month. Completely ridiculous. It was like this when I moved out about three years ago, and as far as I know it's still like that today.
brianwawok 11y ago
The only reason I currently use Comcast, is my choices are ATT DSL at 6 mbps, or Comcast. Not that I like ATT, but when (coming in the next 6 months) they roll out faster service, I will be happy to switch.
- Eldarrion 11y ago
  Don't like ATT either, but at least their service seems to be much more stable. I haven't had to speak with an AT&T customer support rep in over a year. Comcast, I've been doing their trial service run for two weeks now and I've already had to deal with their customer support 6+ times, 2 of which were during the installation. I think I'll probably just end up canceling before my month is up and going back to ATT. At least I knew I could rely on my connection to not crap out at random.
johnward 11y ago
Yes. Many markets have literally one option. My options for internet are comcast, or satellite probably? So really my only high speed option is comcast. I don't even think I can get DSL. I think a lot of markets the monopoly is even being protected by law.
sneak 11y ago
It's like that in a lot of places. I live in extremely central Berlin and cannot find a provider that can deliver above 25mbps for less than hundreds per month. It is a real shame that anything over 5-7mbps is considered "fast enough" by the vast majority of consumers.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
toxican 11y ago
To give you an idea, my internet options are in my area: -Comcast (up to 100MB/s) -Century Link DSL (up to 10MB/s) -3G/4G modem (up to like 3MB/s) Then 10 minutes south of where I live, that county has deals with a local ISP who behaves exactly like Comcast, but with terrible pricing and lower caps. Also no realistic alternatives. While I could stomach the speeds of DSL (with some effort), I can't stomach the price. I'd end up paying just as much as comcast for much lower speeds. I really don't have a choice. edit MB, not mb

imgabe 11y ago

FiOS does the same thing with its cable box. I'm not sure it's every fourth channel, but doing anything with the cable guide often involves dismissing an interstitial ad on the way to whatever you were trying to do, made all the more annoying by the slow UI. TV service just keeps getting more and more obnoxious. I only got it because it came with 2 years of free HBO and was cheaper than Internet alone at the tier I wanted. There's hardly any reason to watch cable TV any more. (I know, sports. Not really my thing, but I get that a lot of people want to watch live sports)

prjohnson 11y ago
I can't speak for Comcast, but my FiOS boxes allow for you to turn off the initial launch/guide ad popups in your box settings. It's not the easiest of settings to find, but it's there (and enabled by default, of course). Call support (fast and helpful...not kidding) or search the online support area, which is how I figured it out and was easy to find the answer. The only persistent ad, I believe, is a single ad bar (annoying, but doesn't obstruct view) at the bottom of the channel guide, used mostly (from what I recall...I don't pay much attention to it) for promos of new on-demand releases. Love LOVE FiOS.

jerf 11y ago

"I know someone with a Comcast cable box whose channel menu forces the viewer to pass over a banner advertisement after every fourth channel. This combined with the horrible rubbery buttons on the remote means that to browse through twenty channel titles takes perhaps as many seconds." How weird is it that the equipment is still so slow? I mean, in 2005 I was grumpy about how slow cable TV gear is. Now it's 2015 and seems like it's exactly the same, whenever I see it. What is so hard about using processors with clock speeds measured in megahertz and not kilohertz nowadays? I swear, Comcast is probably paying extra to some supplier holding the last supply of their specialized MegaSlowz chips with the SuperProprietaryFeature that you Can't Reimplement Anywhere Else.

matwood 11y ago
X1 is finally a modern TV UI, but the boxes are sooooo slow.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  Plus you can only get it (at least in my area) if you subscribe to extra services that I don't need like VOIP. CableCard could've been a viable alternative and spurred a market for DIY and third party cable tuner/decryptors but it was poorly implemented and support from cable providers is typically awful so for most people it's just not worth it. I came close to ordering a Ceton CableCard tuner card several times so I could stick a small form factor PC in the entertainment system and get the nice setup I used to have before they killed off all of the unencrypted digital QAM channels. Unfortunately, the standard is so encumbered that hardly any software can support CableCard (one popular option was the now-deprecated Windows Media Center). Back when QAM still came through unencrypted, I could pay for cable and hook it up to my cheapo Hauppauge card and use WMC as a great program guide and DVR setup. Even back in the Win Vista days it was vastly superior to anything on a cable box. Then they moved everything to encrypted and my tuner got repurposed for watching OTA stuff on my PC. Now I just pay for cable/internet but watch everything streaming on legit sites or torrents. Yeah, I know...but it works better and I'm still paying for it so even if it's not legal, I don't feel that it's immoral.

douche 11y ago

That's the number one reason I bought one of these HD Homerun cable tuner boxes[1]. Once I have a VLC playlist setup with the stream urls to each channel, switching channels is almost as fast as in the old days of analog cable TVs. Maybe another 4 hours of work got me a little web application that shows the TV guide information pulled from an API, and is hooked in with the VLC web interface to switch channels with a click. [1]http://amzn.to/1S6nHjA http://amzn.to/1S6nHjA

johnward 11y ago

To be fair the "X1" has a much better UI/UX and digital buttons. Plus the voice search (you talk into the remote) works exceptionally well. There is no lag. I might say I actually like it. I was shocked that it came from comcast. They actually have some comcast lab product where you can play games using your smartphone as the controller. I think it's beta but it wasn't that bad when I tried NBA Jam. Source: comcast is my only internet option so I bundle.

kdamken 11y ago

Actually using a Comcast cable box to watch things in 2015. I can't understand it. An Apple TV with a netflix and hulu account get you 95% of the way, with 100X better of a user experience. Or if you don't have $100 to spare, you can always connect your laptop to your tv.

scient 11y ago
Will it solve wanting to see live sports and all the "good morning" shows I watch while prepping to go to work and do I get the new episodes of shows on their release day?
- kdamken 11y ago
  For sports it looks like there are some online, subscription type options. Still, I'd say that sports and morning shows would fall under the 5% not covered, but if those are super important to you then I could see that being an issue. Hulu is pretty good about getting new shows up pretty quickly, usually the day after. I'm usually able to live with not seeing a show the minute it airs.

qudat 11y ago

> Comcast's flagrant disregard for customer satisfaction, or even their basic human dignity, is a striking testament to the failure of regulators to ensure adequate competition in this space. I'd argue that government regulations have done nothing in this space but reinforce coercive monopolies. I think you're taking the wrong approach, we need to deregulate this space and allow real competition to thrive.

superuser2 11y ago
No one's getting the capital to climb on to every telephone pole, dig up every street, etc. Deregulation just leaves Comcast to do whatever it wants. I'd love to see massive consoldiation of the reserved-for-government portion of the EM spectrum so we could reasonably do this wirelessly.
- nostrebored 11y ago
  Except for Comcast, at&t, and time warner, who have been getting massive subsidies to improve infrastructure to far beyond what it is today. I think the case could be made that this prohibits new players from entering.
JamesBarney 11y ago
I'd be interested in examples where deregulated utilities have worked out well.