These days you can see plenty of commercials for Comcast, in particular for their “new” xfinity offering.  And AT&T is offering their U-Verse package in some cities here …

I’ve been a DISH Network customer for nearly 10 years, but over the past few months, I tried both Comcast and AT&T.  Because of that, I’ve had a number of friends who are currently subscribed to one of these services ask me

But my experience with Comcast was miles away from the advertising.

Back in early April, a Comcast sales person came to my door offering me a “win-back deal” on their service — cable, internet and phone — no contract, guaranteed pricing for a year.

I’ve been a DISHNetwork subscriber for nearly 10 years, and  in general am happy with their service.  But, the savings over what I was currently paying to DISH, and AT&T (for landline and DSL), coupled with the assurances of the salesperson that Comcast was re-vamping their entire business and wanted the chance to show customers that they had changed, lured me  in.  After all, it couldn’t be that bad, right?

Wrong!

I understood that it would take a week or two to get service installed, so it was expected that an installation appointment would be a week and a half later.

So, the day of installation comes, and my wife is home during the installation. I come home from work, excited to see how the new service is.

For starters, the cable box was connected directly to my TV, instead of through my Onkyo home theater receiver (HTR). No biggie … I didn’t really expect that they would connect to that — I could do that myself. Next, I start to check out the HD channels. Quite a bit of pixelation in channels. Thinking it might be solved through some upscaling through my HTR, I decide to hook it up.

It was a little trickier because the tech had hooked up via component cables instead of HDMI (I’d had DISH DVR VIP722 connected to my HTR this way), but I got it worked out. Yet, I still didn’t have Dolby Digital 5.1 surround, even on channels that normally were broadcasting it. This led me to search around a little, and I thought maybe connected via HDMI would yield better results in the audio and video.

Problem: No HDMI out on the cable box.

I decided to contact Comcast, which led them to tell me that the boxes that had been hooked up were regular digital boxes, not HD. (Further investigation discovered that these boxes were also 5 years old.)

I was pretty ticked — especially considering that this was their “win back offer”.

“Ok”, I said, “when can someone bring out the right boxes?”

“Apr 23rd.”

April 23rd was two weeks away. “April 23rd? No, I want this corrected within the next 24-47 hours.”

The tech gave me a number to call the next morning to try to get an earlier date. Calling the next morning did no good … that was “the earliest date available”, but I had the option of going to a service center in another town to exchange the boxes — although “there was no guarantee they had such boxes available.”

Unbelievable!  After the call, I thought about this more … why was I being expected to correct their mistake?  This was exactly a reason why I left cable, and laughed at people who shared similar stories of poor customer service from cable but still stuck with them.

I quickly researched AT&T, and less that 48 hours after I had cable TV, phone and internet installed … I had ordered AT&T U-verse — to be installed a day BEFORE Comcast said they could come out to do a simply exchange of cable boxes and correct their mistake.

I’ll describe the AT&T installation and service in a later entry, but after AT&T finished the installation, I called Comcast to cancel my service.  THEN, the rep asked if they were able to get someone out sooner, would I reconsider cancelling?  I said, you could have corrected your mistake two weeks ago.  I order AT&T U-verse less than 2 days after your installer was here, and I’ve got AT&T service now.

Comcast said they could have someone out the next day(!) to pickup the equipment.   So, they must have plenty of employees available to get out to get equipment when they lose a customer … but no one available to keep a customer.  Amazing!

My experience with Comcast was absolutely horrible.  Their customer service was some of the worst I’ve ever encountered.  Many of my friends and family have had poor customer service experiences with Comcast (or other cable providers) as well, yet most of them put up with it.

It’ll definitely be longer than 15+ years before I even think of trying cable again.

(Check back … part 2 will be coming around soon)