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You forgot to mention that after paying tons of money for the digital, premium, and hi-def TV service itself, they have the gall to further charge you $5-$20 for every single television in your home so you can see what you've already paid dearly for.

I think I've heard just about every pitch trying to get me to sign up for one service or another and just about every reason imaginable to get me to leave on service and sign with someone else. I am a very diligent shopper and no salesman can get me to fall for a bait and switch or to buy options I don't need. I spend a lot of time considering my needs and how they fit in with the providers. Having an extensive technical background means I have never had to call a help desk or have a service person come and look at my equipment, so that end of the complaints don't apply to me. The additional sur charges and state taxes tacked onto your bills do need to be spelled out in the contracts as they can add some very expensive amonts to your bill that you can't really complain about.

Yeah, there are headaches all around... BUT... Some perspective should come into play as well? For example, the guy that only wanted his French-speaking channel and got Spanish-speaking channels as a part of the package? Guess what? The cable companies have to PAY for the channels they provide to their customers, and it's a good bet the company made a deal that allowed them to carry non-English speaking channels grouped together. Otherwise, that ala' carte French-speaking channel for the handful of customers in his city that wanted that same channel might see the TRUE cost, and stop complaining when it's several hundred dollars a month less to just ignore those channels they don't want to watch!



And while its nice to THINK that all tech support is horrible, trust me, the stories about the customers far outweigh them in stupidity and frequency of occurances! If you talk to ANYONE who works in tech support, they can EASILY tell you multiple stories of customers calling in who didn't plug in the power/turn on the device/called to complain when the power was off, etc... Typically several a week or a month. And it gets dumber from there. (A google search for tech support horror stories and find the stories from the support point of view will give a good background - and then multiple by TENS of THOUSANDS of techs around the country with similar stories, and you'll get the daily support agent's experience!)



Technology is improving with voice interaction, and for many companies, and for the more typical issues, simply following those instructions DO work. Its amazing how many people I've spoken to who were just finishing up the automated steps and were back online after following the steps before I finished verifying their identity, but who had been too impatient to wait to see if the steps worked. And yes... sometimes re-booting solves the problem.



I'm sorry that your PC didn't automatically re-connect after you've left it on for 4 months and last night's thunderstorm caused your power to go out too, but perhaps the fire department showing up after your house caught fire (following the lightning strike) and causing water to soak your computer from the fire hoses and roof they had to open up with their axes might have contributed? I'm so sorry, but that's not covered in your warranty - You might want to call your insurance company. (True story.)

Hey everybody, try this new "mistake" Comcast is pulling on for size on some of its customers in Connecticut lately. If you order their "bargain" package of three services, you get Video on Demand installed by "mistake" (an extra $12 per month charge goes with it).THEN, in order to get this "mistake" corrected, (you guessed it) you have to schedule ANOTHER service appointment to have them come out (within their infamous "window" time frame). Heck, you don't have to believe me, just check it out at courant.com and then search for the Ct. Watchdog (consumer advocate) column or weblog. Oh Comcast, how I DON'T miss you!

"Inexhaustable" is not a word.
You guys get paid for this, right?

This motivated me to check out my cable bill with Time Warner Cable, so I did. I checked it out online just now and noticed a charge of $2.99 for a "Change Of Service Fee." I called customer service to find out what this was and they informed me that I called a couple of weeks back to add on the HD tier to my account, providing me with a few extra HD channels for an extra $5 a month. They charged me a fee to upgrade my service and pay them more money per month.

On top of that, the representative said that there's "always a fee" for that, which there was not. I have upgraded and changed services in the past and have never been charged a penalty for this before. Totally unacceptable.

There is a very simple way to deal with most of these issues. DUMP CABLE/DISH and pay only for internet. Unless you're running a business out of your home or 20 PCs, basic-level DSL is all the bandwidth that a home computer user needs. I pay $45/month for internet, phone, and cable (which I don't have) and I have never had an issue. Take back your time and money and kick them permanently to the curb. Read a book, wash the car, grow a vegetable garden, visit a friend in person, plan a dinner party, take a class, go on vacation, become a mentor to an at risk kid, go for a walk, work out, get projects done around the house, or anything else besides watching TV. If you have to, watch your TV on Hulu, etc. I haven't heard the magic phone prompt voice in over 2 years because I haven't had to deal with these idiots since I first set up my DSL. And when I go to the Dr. and my blood pressure is consistently 120/75 I thank my lucky stars that I don't have cable or a dish.

Four hour window? My cable company gave me an eight hour window, got me to wait even later, then 13 hours later finally cancelled the appointment. I wouldn't have found out they cancelled if I hadn't called them every half-hour in the evening. Strangely, after I lost my temper (to put it mildly) they showed up within ten minutes. I wrote the whole story up.

Normally, I like being an "insider" when it comes to the cable company, however this time, I'm sure I'm going to get some backlash for this.
There's a few things that I'm going to have to contradict. Not because I want to, but because they need some explanation from the inside.

I've been a tech support rep for a few different ISPs for a few years now. I've got a pretty good understanding of how the services actually work from the inside. Also, I've been a customer, so I know what one should expect from their provider, and what one actually gets.

I'm going to respond to each item with the least bias I can possibly do.



1. Auto-Attendant Horror

Yes, they suck. It's one thing when it doesn't give you accurate-enough options to choose from, and it's a completely different level of Hell when it attempts to troubleshoot your problems for you. The success ratio for troubleshooting problems through the automated system is laughable. I agree that they need to get rid of them, but from a business perspective, it's a godsend. One computer can handle as many calls as an entire call center without crashing. That's less employees to pay and less resources in use.

However, also from a business perspective, the providers need to learn when to let the bot give up. From my experience, the bot goes too far (I had one try to walk me through resetting my winsock - something many human reps would never even think of). The bot should only walk you through the very first step, which is to turn the modem/cable box/whatever off and on. Should that fail, it should connect to a human rep from that point.

And yes, the rep will probably ask you to repeat steps that the bot had you do. It sucks, but the rep doesn't know if you actually did it or not. This is because we dont' get anything out of the bot before your call comes to us, and many people are liars and say that they've done everything in the world but have actually just mashed the zero key on their phone nonstop for ten minutes without even touching their computer. We can't take anybody's word but our own, so yes, you'll have to repeat stuff occasionally.



2. Give Me the Best Deal, Too

Most service providers do, in fact, charge you more than what's reasonable. While maintaining their infrastructure does cost money, and paying the employees who do said maintanence do require paychecks, there's still a lot of money that simply goes right into the pockets of the fatcats. No getting around that. You'll never pay a reasonable amount for services. Ever. Period. And no amount of class-action lawsuits will change this.

But when it comes to paying more than somebody else with the same services, it's really goofy the way the providers charge their customers. The way the internal pricing schemes generally work is that they have a slew of different pricing packages, tiers, levels, campaigns, whatever you want to call them. They do vary slightly by where you live, but only by a few cents or so (this is generally just because of city ordinances and stuff).

Now, the reason you may be paying double what your neighbor is paying is because of the totally f-ed up pricing packages the provider has set up. The neighbor may have established service during a special campaign period and got a special pricing deal, they may be on a "new customer" pricing (see: promotional), or dammit maybe they're just on a different pricing tier for no reason other than the fact that nobody changed it.

There's really no logical explanation for this. The way I see it, everybody should pay a single rate for their services, period. I can understand discounts for bundling services, but to have entirely different sets of pricing packages that do NOT automatically update for the entire customerbase is simply a horrible way to steal money from the customers.

It sucks, but the only way that'll ever change is if the provider decides to charge everybody the same amount equally, which is much higher than most are already paying.

They own you, and will continue to own you.



3. How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?

Do not get mad at the phone reps for this. Please. We have nothing to do with this. The system is designed to make canceling service a huge pain in the ass. We have no control over this. We hear it every day, we know it sucks, we know you're pissed, we know, we know, we know.

The "network" of phone reps is set up by the corporate guys to to a few things:

# Make it take a long time to actually cancel your service
# Mislead you - each department has their own copies of company policy, which are all slightly different. This way you hear one thing from one rep but get told another from another rep, and they hope you only remember the one that sounded better and overlook the charges they sneak in there
# Piss you off
Yes, that's right. They WANT to piss you off. It's a psychological thing. When you're angry, it's harder to remember small details like "early termination fee". It also ensures that you don't get transferred to the right department. When you're not thinking clearly, the rep will offer to transfer you to who they think is the right department (again, don't blame us, we didn't design the system this way), and you're speaking to somebody who will try to give you a better deal instead of getting rid of it.
It sucks. It's horrible. It shouldn't be legal. Again, nothing the little guy can do.



4. Lost Love and Telemarketing

Yes, it's true. They'll say in your face "We won't sell your information", but the fine print states slightly otherwise. While they're not selling your information for a profit, they're just giving it away for free to their partners.

And don't think that signing up for the Do Not Call Registry fixes this. The DNC only prevents people from "cold calling" you.

"Cold calling" is a misleading term. Most people think it means that they're calling you out of the blue. In reality, it only means that they call you when you've had no business with them. Most telemarketers you get calls from got your information from another service you signed up for. And in the Terms of Service of said service, in the very very fine print, it states that you agree that they will offer your information to their partners for "promotional reasons" or whatever.

It's BS, I know. But they'll bend you over with fine print every time.



5. All Talk and No Walk

Problems like this are generally because of internal information leaks. Some department manager may catch his superiors mention something in a meeting that's "in the works", and he'll pass this information on to the guys working the floor without mentioning the "in the works" part, so the floor reps tell the customers "Yes yes! We're building a machine that prints money and mails it directly to your house!"

Again, it's something that's usually not the rep's fault (unless he's just being a dick).



6. Draconian Pricing Schemes

Yes.



7. Through the (Appointment) Window

This is one that I used to deal with a lot. And it's really a pain to explain without sounding rude.

This will vary slightly from provider to provider, but it's almost all universal.

The provider has a team of field technicians who go out to the customers' homes and fix (or attempt to fix) their problems (or take a nap in the living room). The way they operate is that at the beginning of the day, they're given a list of appointments.

Now, because unseen problems may occur, there's absolutely no way to specify an exact timeframe for a repair. It can't humanly be done. Maybe a part may be broken. Maybe a line needs to be spliced. Maybe the customer was the one who screwed everything up by plugging their toaster into their TV. Who knows.
This is why you're offered some sort of time window for the appointment. It's usually going to be very wide. 3-6 hours is NOT uncommon.

Now, most providers will try to have the tech give you some sort of heads-up with a more accurate window. Maybe something unexpected happened and they had to run fifty miles back to the depot in rush hour traffic to pick up a part which set them back a few hours. Yeah, that sucks for you, Mr Next In Line, but there's nothing you can do.

Now I've dealt with a lot of people who've argued back and forth that we (the provider) have some sort of backup crew who are on-call. This isn't true. Every single field tech that the provider employs is out on the field at any given time (when they're on the clock, of course). There is no backup, on-call group. Nor are we (the provider) going to cancel somebody else to service you. When it comes to late arrivals or wide time windows, that's as fair as the provider can humanly be to you. Really, it is.

They're not the local plumber who has thirty or forty appointments a day and employs three or four plumbers. They're Comcast or Time Warner or Cox, who has three or four thousand appointments a day, and only employs three or four hundred field technicians.

This type of complaint is usually the result of the customers' unreasonably high expectations. It sucks that you had to miss work. Not the provider's fault, not the provider's problem. I hate to say this, but you're nobody special, regarldless of how much money you give them every month. You're Joe Blow. Nobody gets special treatment.



8. Stop Patting Yourself on the Back (and Get Real)

The surveys are ridiculous. I agree. However, they're generally not handled by the actual service provider. They're usually handled by research companies like Nielson who do statistics and stuff with pretty graphs.

Do yourself a favor and not take the survey. Occasionally the phone rep might actually get graded in response to your survey answers, but if you decline to take it, no harm no foul.

Yeah, it might be like adding insult to injury, but somebody has to know how the provider is doing. Nobody (you) has to care, though.



9. I Don't Want My Sí TV

This is something I dealt with a lot, as well. Sure, it only seems reasonable that you should be able to pick and choose what channels you want, and only pay for those. However, the technology for doing this simply does not exist yet.

Here's a laymans rundown of how cable works:

The provider has a handful of channels on their basic lineup. They push ALL these channels down the pipe and to your home. The same broadcast - including all the channels - goes to your entire neighborhood. One main broadcast for everybody.

Now, with digital cable (and satellite might work this way as well, but I am not positive), it's a little different.

The digital signals are also sent down the same pipe. However, each node (which is the equipment that handles the service for your neighborhood) can slightly influence what signals are being sent to the homes. There's a fairly new tech called "Switched Digital Video", or SDV. What SDV does is pretty smart. It conserves bandwidth going down the pipe by turning off channels that nobody in the neighborhood is watching. For instance, say that in your neighborhood, nobody is watching the FOX Reality Channel. Since nobody is watching it, there's no sense in wasting the bandwidth by pushing the broadcast down the pipe. So the node turns it off.

Now, as soon as somebody tunes their cable box to that channel, the signal gets turned back on, and is sent to the whole neighborhood once again.

Only certain channels operate on SDV. It's not possible, at this time, to put every single channel on SDV. The technology isn't there.

Once this tech DOES become available, though, it WILL be possible to pick and choose channels, because the provider will actually have the technogical ability to filter 100% of their broadcasting. Whether or not the provider will actually allow you to do this, though, is another story, but it WILL be possible at some point. Just not right now.

Now, when I say the technology isn't there, that's kind of a lie. It's there, but it's not financially reasonable to do just yet. The cable providers would suffer a huge loss if they implimented this right now (not that you care, of course), and that would directly affect you.

What'cha gonna do.



10. 'Our Time Is More Valuable Than Yours'

Yeah, this is screwed up and there is absolutely no reasonable explanation for this other than greed. So yeah, this is one of those instances where you have every right to complain.







I hope this sheds a little light on things. I know it sucks, but that's the way it is. But use this to educate yourself so that you can poise your complaints better. You might just get some better results now that you know how it works on the inside.

I hate to shamelessly plug myself, but I happen to frequently blog about some of the things I deal with in technical support with the cable industry. If you want to read through some of my posts, you may also find some information that may educate you a bit.

gilrob said:

Strange...I don't get charged anything extra by Comcast for Video On Demand....unless I order an On Demand program that costs money. On Demand is included as part of my cable TV package...and has been the WHOLE time I have had it.

JRod37 said:

Not necessarily. If you download a large amount of data (say you buy movies online to download to your computer...or want to download the roughly 4 GB ISO file to install Windows 7 RC or some other such large program installer), then a faster connection can mean a WORLD of difference. Just because you might not do such stuff, does not mean that others do not as well.

@smax013: Ok, for downloading movies, there's this wonderful thing called Red Box. I know it means you have to get off your @$s and move something more than your mouse, but I'll take $1/day movies from Red Box over the alternative. And as far as the ISO files: I have downloaded and installed Windows 7 RC1 and just about every popular distro of Linux (GNU and KDE) over the past 2 months. I start the download when I leave for work, and voila! it's there when I get home. That 2.4 GB W7RC1 downloaded in about 4 hours - while I was at work and thus not having any impact on my computer play time. So if you want to talk to me about being techy and doing tech stuff, bring it on. I'll sacrifice $500-1,000/year in internet costs to have to dance around a slower-than-ideal connection.

JRod37 said:

And that is all great that it works for you...but the point is that not every one is you. What works for you, might not work for me or someone else. I am glad you enjoy your setup, but it just is not want I want or need. And I suspect that there are many others out there that would feel the same. Like or not, the world is not a "one solution fits all" world.

D14BL0 -- Your comment to my story is just AWESOME. It's really a reasonable look at the other side of my story; I really appreciate you taking the time to write it. --Mark

I hope this story causes a lot of people to take a closer look at thier bill. That little fee you found is infuriating. They charged you to sell you a new service. Unreal. -Mark

This may not be the cable/satellite TV company's direct fault but the problem is related as part of the big picture: The exorbitant amount of time ads are eating up time.

Has anyone noticed that commercial breaks have been increasing in length, some routinely 4-5 minutes long, and there's several of these marathons each hour, while the actual program time has been shrinking? It's nuts. I mean, you practically forget what show you're watching. Why are we as cable subscribers, in addition to the monthly subscription fee, forced to endure these large blocks of commercials for cripes sakes? In a round about way, this is double-charging. I feel the least cable companies could do is consider this problem and figure it into the monthly price in the form of a price reduction. (Yeah right--when pigs fly) Of course, the root of this problem lies with the networks.

Anyway, I got so fed up with this I canceled my cable TV service about a year ago but kept the Internet access. Between all the web video content available now and the free over-the-air digital channels I get on my HDTV, I've been happy as a clam, and saving a ton of money.

glassmaster said:

It is probably related to the fact that Network TV (i.e. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox) are losing more and more customers to other options (cable networks, online viewing, downloading - whether legal or not, etc). Thus, they cannot get the same per minute rates for ads as they used to since ratings are overall lower, so they run longer ads. And by and large, your cable bill is completely unrelated to Network TV...very little, if anything, of that cable bill goes to the Network TV stations (some likely goes indirectly as cable companies have to pay local stations for their feeds and those local stations likely have to pay the Network).

You're correct, the networks are ultimately to blame. I actually wrote a complaint email to TNT (one of the worst of the offenders) but of course, heard nothing back. I just look at the whole enchilada-- ads are burning up program time, and the subscriber is in effect paying to watch ads. There's something wrong with this picture (pun intended.)

glassmaster said:

And likely their USER filter handled your message...think of a SPAM like filter that just dumps complaints from users! ;)

Networks (whether cable or National) don't tend to give a crap about their "users" issues...unless a WHOLE lot of them complain.

I sent a complaint once to NBC about their Olympic coverage (basically told them that I was able to watch more coverage of US Swimming in "real time" during the day on CBC (that Canadian Broadcasting Corp, in case you did not know...which I get here since we are so close to Windsor, ON) than I could on NBC. No response. I also sent an email message to CBC complimenting them...and got a response.