Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The Comcast Troubles. The zombie that never dies...


Not sure if you have been following my ongoing love affair with Comcast, but it appears to want to graduate to a zombie state. The troubles just never seem to go away!!!

Don't know how the giant is hiring customer support people, or who is training them (and no I am NOT talking about outsourced tech support - I am talking about the real original (?) American brew thick accented proud gentry).

15 days after the move, everything seemed to look OK. No connectivity drops, perfect. Right?

Then all of a sudden, the Comcast DNS servers barf.

There is internet connectivity. But none of the www URLs are reachable. All servers, when pinged, respond from the same I.P. address.

You know the routine: power the devices down in a sequence. Wait for 30 minutes. Power them, back up in the reverse order. Sound familiar? I did that 4 times within a 2 hour period.

Finally, not by choice, I decide to call the dreaded 1-800-266-2278 number. A virtual lady greets me. After fiddling with the automated options for ~5 minutes, she (it?) initiates a remote reset of my cable modem. GAAH! I already did that 4 time. Get me a human to talk to!!!

Finally, after waiting in the queue for 12 minutes, I get connected to a human voice (Mathew?) at 9:13PM PST or so. Here is how it went:

Comcast. This is Mathew. How can I help you?
Hi... so I am having trouble...
(almost instantly..)  Comcast. This is Mathew. How can I help you?
Hi... this is .....   

(almost instantly once again..)  I cannot hear you. I will now disconnect this call. Call us again when you need us.

???
He hung up in 7 seconds?
I am pretty sure the phone line was working (that is how the 'virtual' agent was able to hear me..

Great strategy though. When there is an outage, the smart pants support people know how to get away with something like this. Who is to prove them wrong?

Time to move on to AT&T DSL ... thank GOD for other choices:-)

2 comments:

  1. I gave up on Comcast's DNS years ago, it was always flakey. Try out either OpenDNS or the Google DNS offerings. They're faster, and (in the case of OpenDNS) more featureful.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I apologize for the poor experience. I want to make sure this is addressed. I also w ant to help in making sure that the service problem you are experiencing is corrected.

    Will you please contact me and provide the phone number associated with your account as well as the link to this page?

    Thanks you in advance,

    Mark Casem
    Comcast Corp.
    National Customer Operations
    We_can_help@cable.comcast.com


    ReplyDelete

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