Tag Archives: cable

Comcast again

Technology, ,

Question of the day- Is Comcast screwing with us?

A few weeks ago we switched to Comcast for telephone, cable TV and internet. So far I have to report that I’m not delighted. We’ve had at least three outages of the internet and two of the telephone. The technician who came out last week told me it was because we had “too much signal” coming into the house – it caused what I invisioned as a potential broadband heart attack. We had high-speed hypertension. Cable clogged coronary. The way to fix it was to have a “line guy” come out and reduce the incoming signal.

After that the phones and internet went out again. I called and the phone technician said the only thing he could see was too strong a signal coming into the house. While we were on the phone it fixed itself.

Earlier this afternoon I noticed that most of the lights on my modem were out. For a while I could still connect to the internet, but then even that was messed up. I called Comcast and talked to a friendly person on the phone. Again, while I was on the phone the problems cleared up.

So, while the issues may be very temporary, they are still issues. I make my living by being connected to the internet. A slight hiccup and I lose data. We never had this issue with RCN.

Maybe we should have tried Verizon Fios.

Too late now, we have a 2-year contract with Comcast. (And that’s subject for another post)

Changes

Technology

Despite the issues I encountered with my mom’s Comcast installation at Christmastime, I made the decision to move our service from RCN to Comcast. We’ve been happy enough with RCN except for their price hikes. We signed up with them a couple of years ago at a reasonable price. When our year of cheaper prices was up they also implemented a Digital Vision tier that we had to get because we had an HD converter box – so instead of just having to pay about $7 more for the HD converter, we had to pay $27 a month for it.

We’ve wanted a DVR for a while (and even tried to install a DVD recorder ourselves – with no success) so I called RCN to find out how much more a month the DVR service would be. They wanted nearly $20 more a month for that.

I tried to compare prices online and couldn’t so called Comcast to see what they could do. With their service we now will have an extra converter box, a DVR, HBO in addition to Showtime & Starz (the best of the movie channels) and online management of our voice mail (something I’ve been wanting for a while). All this for about the same, or less than we were getting with RCN. Of course it is a special offer – only good for a year or two, but still – we will be saving a little. By the time they’re ready to charge us more we can move to FiOs or something else.