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Let me tell a tale. Recently I was cancelling my comcast for wave. I was charged an early cancellation fee of multiple months service (The cancellation was du

Let me tell a tale. Recently I was cancelling my comcast for wave. I was charged an early cancellation fee of multiple months service (The cancellation was due to moving out of my apt at end of lease to a house for which comcast did not offer service). The early fee was not on my original contract; and was apparently added without my consent in the interim, and the lower level managers intended to enforce despite their inability to even provide me service. I refused this and continued to escalate until I got a surprisingly high tier manager who talked like a techie and seemed to understand a thing or two and had a degree of self awareness (when told "Thanks for your help, I'm sorry you work for such a shit company since your good effort could be better used in better actors" he responded with "yeah I know; at least it pays the bills"). He made ALL my problems disappear and listened to my complaints of a decade with Comcast, and why I'd never go back, seeming legitimately remorseful and sad that the company has been generally anti-consumer, promising that they were pushing to improve things and acknowledging the pain I felt to the degree of comping multiple months+fees. So my question. Is that an act? Or is this another poor middle manager trying to do his best? Are they really so tuned out as to how much ill will they're generating such that I had "not comcast" as a prerequisite to the massive act of _buying a house_? And to the other half of that question; how can we make them feel the pain more as consumers? (legal action of course but in addition.) As a tech influencer I do all I can to try and tell people about the great local ISP alternatives in my area if they aren't aware, but it seems like comcast lives in its own little bubble where the realities of good consumer practices just don't apply. (or maybe I'm being pessimistic and the hammer will drop in a few decades, I don't have many good prior historical examples with similar enough context to extrapolate, if anyone else does I'd be curious)

wernercd 10y ago
I've found that they just like to make it harder to get stuff fixed or changed in favor of the customer. Let me tell a tale: I've been with my fiance for ~10 years now. We've had Comcast for ~8 of the ten years. We had a "full" internet/cable package for ~6 of those 8 years. Every year - like clockwork - she would get a bill after the "year" intro period and the price would go up. I'm not sure of the numbers but from ~100 to ~150 or somewhere in there. Why like clockwork? Because every year she would call and say "cancel the package... oh? you'll extend it? AND add another pay channel bundle? Okay... talk to you next year". With each year it got harder and she had to fight longer - sometimes through multiple calls. When it got escalated to cancellation managers they would inevitably change their minds. It finally got to the point last year that we actually canceled everything except for the ABSOLUTE basic cable. No HD. Only half of the channels (no MTV, HGTV, etc). The reality is simple: It's them or... dialup? Satellite? couple other crappy options. The joy of "monopolies". They know that people who want channels MUST go through them. Thankfully Netflix, Amazon Prime,... plex :) have picked up the slack so we actually aren't bother much by the loss of HBO and the like...
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > The reality is simple: It's them or... dialup? Satellite? couple other crappy options. The joy of "monopolies". OTA channels + indoor antenna. Workes pretty well for me. We watched the Olympics that way, and more recently the presidential debates.
- ajtaylor 10y ago
  Don't forget about HBO Now, which you can watch on your computer or a Roku (at the least).
adrr 10y ago
You can probably get out of the contract with this new policy as its a change to the underlying contract. Call them up and say you don't accept the terms of the data cap.
- paulmd 10y ago
  Doubtful. If you read the fine print you have always agreed to a data cap ("reasonable" data usage which they defined as 300 GB per month). They just didn't enforce it in most markets.

wernercd 10y ago

I've found that they just like to make it harder to get stuff fixed or changed in favor of the customer. Let me tell a tale: I've been with my fiance for ~10 years now. We've had Comcast for ~8 of the ten years. We had a "full" internet/cable package for ~6 of those 8 years. Every year - like clockwork - she would get a bill after the "year" intro period and the price would go up. I'm not sure of the numbers but from ~100 to ~150 or somewhere in there. Why like clockwork? Because every year she would call and say "cancel the package... oh? you'll extend it? AND add another pay channel bundle? Okay... talk to you next year". With each year it got harder and she had to fight longer - sometimes through multiple calls. When it got escalated to cancellation managers they would inevitably change their minds. It finally got to the point last year that we actually canceled everything except for the ABSOLUTE basic cable. No HD. Only half of the channels (no MTV, HGTV, etc). The reality is simple: It's them or... dialup? Satellite? couple other crappy options. The joy of "monopolies". They know that people who want channels MUST go through them. Thankfully Netflix, Amazon Prime,... plex :) have picked up the slack so we actually aren't bother much by the loss of HBO and the like...

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> The reality is simple: It's them or... dialup? Satellite? couple other crappy options. The joy of "monopolies". OTA channels + indoor antenna. Workes pretty well for me. We watched the Olympics that way, and more recently the presidential debates.
ajtaylor 10y ago
Don't forget about HBO Now, which you can watch on your computer or a Roku (at the least).

adrr 10y ago

You can probably get out of the contract with this new policy as its a change to the underlying contract. Call them up and say you don't accept the terms of the data cap.

paulmd 10y ago
Doubtful. If you read the fine print you have always agreed to a data cap ("reasonable" data usage which they defined as 300 GB per month). They just didn't enforce it in most markets.