I only have cable TV from Comcast. The service has been so lousy and is so ridiculously expensive, there's no way I want to have them for an internet provider, let alone for home phone service. Seriously, I want home phone service where I have a dial tone even if the power is out, which is something Comcast can't provide. What has me currently totally frosted is that my cable bill just went up from $105.15 to $111.11 and for what? Nothing has changed! I don't even have any premium channels. I pay extra for the HD package and a DVR so I can record shows in HD. I can't believe they think $105.15 isn't enough for doing nothing -- I've been hooked up for years and they don't do anything except provide a cable connection.
My favorite thing is that Comcast apparently gives all their customer service job applicants an EEG when they apply and that way they can screen out all the applicants who still have brain waves. When I'm watching cable and a channel goes black for several minutes and I look at a bunch of adjacent channels and find that three of them are "down" and the rest are fine, I call in and invariably I get some dipstick who tries to make an appointment for one of their people to come out to my apartment. "Excuse me," I say, but only three channels are down so that's something on your end, because all the rest of the channels are still working." Then they ask which channels are down and I ask, "Do you want the broadcast channel numbers of the numbers on the cable box." "I want the broadcast channel numbers," they say, so I proceed to tell them channels 2.1, 5.1 and 11.1 are down" and the idjit responds, "Sir, TV channels don't have decimal points in them." Oh my God. "Yes, they do," I explain, because the entire country went to digital TV, and now broadcast channels are no longer integers, not since analog broadcasting stopped. "Depending on the make and model of your TV," I explain, "channel numbers either have dots or hyphens in them." Finally, the idjit checks and says, "We have no reports of outages in your area." "Yes," I said. "This just happened, so you don't have a report on your computerized system yet." I now know not to call in when channels go black and I leave the experience to other people.
Then there's this service mark called "Xfinity" that Comcast is using to try to hide the fact that it's still Comcast you're dealing with. Calling their services "Xfinity" is definitely putting lipstick on a pig.
My AT&T DSL may be slower than Comcast's internet service, but in over 10 years, it's gone out on my maybe five times and four of those times it was back up and running within 30 minutes. Further, the only time I couldn't get a dial tone on my home phone was in 1989 in the hours following the 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake, because too many phones were bounced off the hook in the quake and too many people were trying to make phone calls. (I didn't have a cell phone then.) It has been reassuring, when the power has gone out, to be able to pick up the phone and make a phone call. Since Comcast's home phone service depends on a special telephone modem hooked up to the cable, and that modem needs power from an AC outlet, the phones fail (1) if the power goes off or the modem gets accidentally unplugged, or (2) if the modem dies.
So why don't I switch to AT&T U-Verse? Because it's not available at my address. AT&T told me yesterday it would be available by the end of the year and, believe me, I'm switching as soon as it becomes available. Then, instead of paying $111.11, I'll be entitled to a "bundle" from AT&T since I already have home phone and internet service, and my cable TV will cost an extra $57 a month -- and the DVR will record 4 shows at once instead of 2.
