Comcast

I've made mention in the past about the troubles that I had with Time Warner cable and Roadrunner internet services. Well, we no longer have either in St. Louis Park. Instead we have only one option--Comcast. They bought out Time Warner/Roadrunner for the community. Along with the buyout comes terrible service (of both the customer and internet/cable type) and a lack of any alternatives.

We have continued to have troubles with our cable card not working and our internet just losing signal, at which point we have to reset our router for service to pick back up. On top of the continued troubles, our promo package that we had with Time Warner has run out so now Comcast wants to charge us nearly $100 a month for service.

I called them to see what's up and after about a half hour of arguing over how ridiculous it is that I should be paying so much for service that blows harder than Katrina did, the woman I talked to agreed to have an upper level technician come look at our setup since we've had 6 previous visit from technicians that didn't know jack and didn't fix a damn thing. She said she would call that evening with a time that the tech could come visit.

I didn't get a call that night or the next morning so called Comcast again. I got a different person since the woman I talked to was out that day. He said he would get something scheduled and call me back. There was no call that night... or all of Friday... or all of the weekend... or on Monday... so I called them again.

I got another new person because the other two were unavailable. It escalated to a senior service person, finally, and we went through everything AGAIN. By this time I'd wasted a couple of hours on the phone between all of the different calls. We finally got a tech scheduled to come look at our place.

So, Thursday night will be the big night as I informed Comcast that if they don't resolve all of my problems that I was going to cancel my cable and go with satellite. Time Warner never fixed anything and I highly doubt that Comcast will get anything done either so I'm prepping myself for the switchover to DirecTV. Dealing with Comcast's "Comcastic" service is driving me bonkers.

This is why cities should not allow cable companies to have a monopoly over an area. The same thing happened to me in Rochester where Charter was the only option in town and they seriously sucked hard. When there's no competition, what's the point in even trying to help out your customers? They're stuck with you regardless of how crappy you are. And that is terrible.

If a candidate on today's ballot had a strong stance on taking down shitty cable companies, I would vote for him or her in a second. Who cares what their stances on Iraq or social security or immigration or any of that other crap is? I want them to kick Comcast in the taint and give me some better options. Crack down on the monopolies!