You Heard It Here

Our local cable TV/Internet provider changed hands at the start of the year, from Insight to Comcast. All was fine in the beginning. Now it seems I’m having weekly issues.

A service tech has been out twice to fix problems which kept me from having Internet. Things worked OK for a short period after each visit, but two weeks ago I lost Internet again. I called Comcast and begged for a tech to come that afternoon. No luck. It was either the next morning or days later. I informed the phone tech I wasn’t going to be home the next morning so she said someone would call the next day to discuss the ongoing issues. Well guess what? A tech showed up the next morning anyway (leaving a “sorry we missed you” tag on the door).

And, of course, the phone call to discuss my ongoing problems never came. However, thanks to a little investigative work I deduced I was still having weak signal issues. I pulled a splitter from the whole setup, which gave me Internet again — but cut off television to one of my TVs.

So last week my service went out again. I thought it was another weak signal problem but this time it was much simpler: termination of service due to non-payment. Hmm… the bank shows the payments have been made, so what gives? Turns out that during the transition from Insight to Comcast a payment vanished. It went to the same address, but what they did with it — “they” being Insight-turned-Comcast — is a mystery.

I convinced the Comcast billing rep to turn us back on, but she played dumb about the missing payment. I suggested that since Insight is now Comcast, there had to be someone who could track down the missing money. “No, we’re not Insight,” she told me. “No, you are Insight,” I replied. ”You’re simply under new ownership with a new name. And since you’re the company that bought Insight, their money is now your money.”

No dice. However, she did give me the phone number for an Insight/Comcast office she thought could help. Nifty! Too bad it was a Comcast business customers support line. Too bad, also, the guy on the other end was stumped.

So now where are we? In Comcast no-man’s land, that’s where. I’ve ordered my own booster to help our weak signal problem, but I’m guessing by the time it arrives we’ll have been cut off for non-payment again.

UPDATE: Within an hour of this post going live I was notified of two comments awaiting moderation — both from Comcast reps saying they were sorry to hear of my troubles, and both encouraging me to contact them for help. That’s nice. (At least someone’s reading my blog.)

UPDATE #2: A local Comcast rep called Monday, but I wasn’t home. I called her Tuesday, emailed her a PDF of my bank statement showing we paid all our bills. She said she’d be fixing the problem so it looks like the Comcast billing issue is resolved. Since I’ve already ordered my own signal booster, I’m hoping to fix the weak signal issue on my own.