The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(Communications • Business)
This is a really long, sad story about one man’s search for acceptable communications products and customer service in the metropolitan Houston outback.
I present my findings for two purposes. One, as a guidepost to the many others I am sure are out there weighing their options and looking for the best available Internet broadband (which ends up involving a search for the best combination of Internet, phone service and TV content, like it or not). Mostly, my hope is that I can help someone else avoid some of the pain and suffering I endured in a switch that in some respects could be described as traveling from the Frying Pan that is Comcastic, to the Fire that is AT&T (and their Wonder Dog, Yahoo).
In the past I have, among other things, served as a communications consultant, and assisted Comcastic’s predecessor in setting up cable-based broadband service in Houston. So I think I’m qualified for my second purpose, which is to offer this posting as a free consulting session. Lord knows these guys need it, however, in my experience business advice is rarely acted upon unless it costs a great deal of money. So my expectations are low, but yet there is always hope.
The Ugly
The story began about two weeks after Hurrican Ike whipped through here in mid-September. One Saturday morning, I came downstairs to find that we had no Internet access. The weather since the hurricane had not been bad, and I presumed the system in our neck of the woods was down.
I called Comcastic tech support, and the woman who answered eventually said she would send a signal to test my cable modem. When she did, she said, the modem reported an error. So she would need to send a technician out. I doubted there was anything wrong with the modem, but she said the tech would be here between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. the next day. Coincidentally, that was the day the roofing crew was arriving to replace our roof which, as it turned out, was left pretty worthless by Ike. I knew I had nowhere else to go and welcomed the visiting tech.
You probably know where this is heading already. By 1:10 p.m. no tech had arrived. I called Comcastic and the woman who answered checked something on her end and said the guy was still planning to come by. I had been standing in the front yard “supervising” the roofers most of the day by then, and decided to sit down on the front porch with a drink and wait for the tech.
An hour later he still hadn’t showed, so I called Comcastic again. The guy who answered said “you weren’t home so he canceled the call.” Say what? Oh yeah, Comcastic support elaborated. No one was home. He knocked on the door. The door, the Comcastic support guy said, was red.
Now, Comcastic may know my door color, But I did not even go to the bathroom from 11 a.m. until after 2 p.m., and was never out of site of either the front side or the back side of that red door.
I was, by now, probably as red as the door and demanding to know from the support guy if he was calling me a liar. I think I may have used the word “bullshit” and perhaps another expletive or two. Then I demanded to be transferred to billing, where I would have made the mistake of canceling all my Comcastic services on the spot. Except, as the support guy triumphantly told me, the billing people aren’t there on weekends.
Here’s the thing: The support guy could’ve told me that the company overestimated the number of service calls their technician was able to handle that day, and some of the early ones took a lot longer than he’d expected. They were extremely sorry he hadn’t contacted me, but would put me at the very front of the service call list on Tuesday if I could just reschedule. If they would’ve given me a line like that I would not have been happy, but I would’ve accepted it.
But Comcastic, don’t turn your call center people into lying sacks of shit by telling your customers they aren’t home when they are. Some people, such as me, have a real strong aversion to paying money to vendors who institutionalize the practice of lying.
Then, to add gasoline to the fire, I got a phone call the next day from my across-the-street neighbor, who wanted to know if my Internet was down. It turns out his Comcastic Internet was down, and so was my next door neighbor’s – and his next-door neighbor. Comcastic never told anyone specifically, but I believe that while workmen were tearing off the roof of a house down the street that was pretty much destroyed by Ike, someone probably dislodged a wire or gizmo that knocked out Comcastic Internet throughout the whole damn neighborhood.
But when I called the call center, the woman who originally answered that first call knew nothing about it, and instead followed her supervisor’s instructions and told me my modem showed an error and I needed a technician. Of course, by now I realized that if the lying sack of shit technician actually had shown up, he wouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing to fix my Internet, because the whole neighborhood was down.
It doesn’t surprise me even a little bit to find that Comcastic wasn’t able to provide information from the field (where there was a community-wide outage) to the call center (where information is communicated from the company to its valuable customer base).
That’s because I set up web sites and servers and even reluctantly provided system security for a while for Comcastic predecessor Time Warner when they set up their Roadrunner broadband division in Houston back around 1998 or ’99. When people tell you that if you love sausage you’re better off not knowing how they make it, I can say that if you love broadband you’re better off not knowing how they built or maintain the system.
Here’s just one little episode from that era, germane to today’s story:
Shortly after we got the Roadrunner system up and running, Time Warner took about 30 people who’d been working in their main northwest Houston call center, moved them to a corner of the room and designated them as the Roadrunner support center.One day I wandered back to see how they were doing. One of the guys with whom I was acquainted was on the phone, and I listened as he offered help. “Go to the top of your browser and find the ‘tools’ button,” he said. “Then press ‘preferences,’ then ‘advanced.’”
I noticed he wasn’t looking at his own web browser while speaking into the phone. His computer screen was blank. He was reading from a card. I had an aha moment.
“Tony,” I said, “you don’t have Internet access, do you?”
No, neither Tony nor the other 29 members of the Roadrunner support center had Internet access. Yet they still could be quite helpful, as long as the Roadrunner customers’ problems were the same ones for which solutions had been printed on about 15 index cards.
So no, it doesn’t surprise me even a little bit to find that Comcastic wasn’t able to provide information from the field (where there was a community-wide outage) to the call center (where information is communicated from the company to its valuable customer base).
But I digress.
Three days after the company called me a liar, I spied a Comcastic tech on a pole in front of my house. For about 120 seconds, I had Internet. Then it went out. The tech left for a half-hour, then was back on the pole. I went out to get my mail and glower at him, wondering if he was the lying sack of shit who failed to show the other day. He just stared back at me. Neither of us spoke, each sizing up the other. He was vulnerable up there on the ladder, but he had big tools in his belt that could have been effective at bludgeoning. It looked like a draw.
A couple of minutes later he left, and presto! the Internet was back. But as a Comcastic customer, I was already gone.
Or so I imagined.
The Bad
The day after Comcastic called me a liar, I called up AT&T to see what the other monopoly could provide in the way of communications services out here in the Hinterlands. It took an hour. I found out later that every call to AT&T takes at least an hour. The difference between AT&T call centers and Comcastic call centers is not so much the time – because Comcastic is pretty good at making you wait, too, while they re-route your call to Bangladesh. But (and this part isn’t bad) once you get someone at AT&T, more often than not they will be courteous, and will usually try to solve whatever communications dilemma you’ve fallen into.
So after awhile I was actually able to order AT&T phone service, AT&T television (via their partner Dish Network) and AT&T DSL.
The AT&T phone tech showed up first. He was supposed to arrive sometime between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Instead of driving by to assess my door color and then going home, the guy actually showed up shortly after 8. And (pay attention Comcastic) he actually called me up about 10 minutes before he got here, to tell me he was coming.
I won’t bore you with the particulars of my aging house and the weirdly crappy phone system that had been in use here before we bought the place. Suffice it to say that only one of the phone jacks still worked, but not very well because when my Labrador retriever died four years ago and I buried her in the side yard, I cut the phone cable in half with a shovel. Rest in peace.
So the phone guy had to string another line from the street, which he left laying on the ground for a work crew to come bury. I could plug the line in to my wireless phone system and it worked, although a little crackly, which I figured was from lying on the ground or something. The phone tech actually gave me his cell number (Comcastic, can you believe this?) and told me that if I had any problems I should just call him so I wouldn’t have to wait for an hour for Bangladesh.
The Dish guy was scheduled to arrive between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. two days later. He may have known what color my front door was, but he showed up anyway and called me 10 minutes before arrival.
He was very efficient and expert, and had my new satellite system up in running in an incredibly short period of time. For a while, my heart was joyful as I saw Comcastic fading away in the rear-view mirror.
I drove to the Comcastic service center in Rosenberg with their cable box and a smile on my face, and informed the woman inside that I was canceling Comcastic cable and telephone service.
Where’s the cable modem, she wanted to know. I had kept it, because something way down deep inside told me to hedge my bets and keep Comcastic Internet until I was really, really sure AT&T would come through with the DSL. It’s good to listen to your inner voice (unless it starts telling you to commit acts of violence, in which case a second opinion probably is warranted).
Apparently the Comcastic lady had never heard of anyone canceling cable phone but not canceling cable Internet. She told me pretty firmly that it couldn’t be done. I asked to speak to her boss about it. Eventually she called someone, they exchanged incredulities and she went through about 17 computer screens saying things like “but I don’t see any way to override the frequency position…oh, I see it now…OK…”
At the end I was free from Comcastic TV, phone and the discount I got on my bill for bundling three services together. And I had AT&T phone, Dish TV and, very soon, the discount I would get for bundling three AT&T services together.
Or so I believed.
I will barely bore you with the fact that the telephone line strung along the ground was by now producing so much crackling that when I called AT&T two weeks later to find out why they were two weeks late installing the DSL we could not hear each other speak and so I first had to call AT&T repair so they could send another phone tech out to fix the line, and how that call took an hour but the tech was really good and not only got the job done in expert fashion but recommended a really good local veterinarian.
Or how AT&T Broadband is another nation unto itself and separate from AT&T Telephone, probably the better to avoid being sliced into pieces by the FCC or something, so when the phone line was clear enough to accommodate human conversation I was passed through six people in my quest for find out when the hell I was going to get DSL but after an hour and four minutes I felt the best thing for my blood pressure would be to just quietly hang up.
Twenty minutes later (Comcastic, I must be lying, right?) the last person I’d talked to at AT&T called back, apologized for the long wait and informed me she’d sorted everything out and, you know, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. etc., etc.
So eventually DSL was installed and with it, joy returned to my heart. But my inner self strongly suggested keeping the Comcastic cable modem. Just for awhile, just in case.
Here’s where the bad comes in. Now, this may not seem important to the reader, but I have worked, seemingly bathed in the Internet for about 15 years, and over the course of time I have come to operate various web sites, retained various URLs and obtained a certain number of useful email accounts for which I not only have extreme fondness, but with which I cannot do without. Without going into boring geeky detail, I have various email accounts automated, in a manner of speaking, so that when certain email messages arrive from certain entities, certain things automatically happen. My productivity is enhanced a great deal through this automation.
Well, it turns out AT&T likes partnering with everyone, rather than learning how to provide certain communications services itself. When it comes to DSL, at least in the Houston outback market, AT&T partners with Yahoo. If you imagine that might spell t-r-o-u-b-l-e, you are correct, human.
If you make the mistake of loading up the software that comes with your AT&T DSL modem, you’ll find Yahoo trying to take control of your email and otherwise inserting themselves into fissures in your web browser.
AT&T insists on setting you up with an email account – which Yahoo controls. Between the two companies, they have decided that they really, really need to control all the outgoing email that anyone using their DSL service cares to send. My strong belief is that this is so they can make sure whatever spam reaches your email accounts comes from their favored spammers rather than unauthorized spammers, but that’s another story. They don’t tell you up front that you won’t be able to use your own outgoing email servers, and in fact you only find out after an expert Google search in which it is revealed that if you want to even send email at all that originates from email accounts other than the AT&T/Yahoo default account, you will have to have such accounts “verified.”
Only if you choose to use Internet tools made by anyone other than Microsoft, the verification doesn’t work. And neither do the email accounts you’ve spent years automating and perfecting.
It also turns out that so many customers were annoyed by this insipid policy that, for a time, you could call any Tier 2 or 3 AT&T tech support person and they could flip a preference switch removing their company’s blockage of certain computer ports and thus allowing you to bypass the Yahoo smtp servers. But now they will only provide this service if you have a “business” account.
Which is to say (and listen up AT&T, I’m talking to you) they want a bribe before providing the same level of service every other major Internet service provider gives you by default: The freedom to use the pop and smtp email servers of your choice. AT&T appears to have allowed Yahoo to convince it to go down this merry path, and they also seem convinced that they’ll reap some kind of benefit by allowing Yahoo to try to hijack customers’ web browser preferences and insert themselves into places such as your default search engine.
Listen up: All this does is piss people off. It may keep Yahoo from shedding market share a fraction of a percentage point less quickly than they did last month, but it does nothing for AT&T but create a big, fat bale of ill will that wasn’t there the day before.
In my case, it caused me to cancel AT&T DSL service less than 48 hours after it finally was installed. Internet service that doesn’t allow me to do what I want and need to do with email is very similar to no service at all. In the end, it was preferable to continue using Internet service provided by a company whose collective idea of customer retention is to occasionally accuse them of lying.
The Good
OK, I’m having to strain a little bit to find it, but here it is:
→ I was able to penalize a misbehaving vendor by cutting my business with them by 66%, although they made a small amount back by overcharging me for no longer bundling service with them.
→ I have Dish Network. I really like satellite TV. Even though it is one of their most basic packages, I find it superior to Comcastic in many ways, not the least of which being that it is not provided by Comcastic.
→ My communications service eggs no longer are in one basket. If one of these monopolies finds new ways to under-perform (and Lord knows they try), I can easily shift services to the other.
→ I have clearly identified a niche market that an enterprising company could exploit, particularly an upstart provider of wireless Internet access. I know of entire neighborhoods that would willingly make the switch.
→ I have a new DSL router that not only serves as a useful paperweight and conversation starter, if you put it up to your ear you can hear the ocean.
→ I have a telephone company land line running into my house again, which should remain intact as long as I bury all future dead dogs on the other side of the house.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 06, 2008, 09 26 am
