Archive: Opinions

There was a great story in the news a couple of days ago about a columnist who called Suzanne Roberts in behalf of a Philadelphia couple who were trying to get hooked up to Comcast.  The couple had moved to Philadelphia and had missed 13 days of work waiting for 14 installation appointments that Comcast never showed up for.  Instead of calling Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, she decided to call his mother to tell on him.  And that got results.

She actually only got to talk to the mother's assistant, but that got her a call back from Ralph Roberts' personal assistant.  Ralph Roberts is Suzanne's husband and the founder of Comcast.  Three hours after that call the couple got their cable hook-up.  They had been waiting since December 23rd.  To add insult to injury, however, a technician groused to the couple that their hookup meant canceling somebody else's.

Boo hoo.  Maybe Comcast should hire a few more installers and not guilt their customers for trying to get some basic level of service.  Like any service at all.

For anyone who has been following the Net Neutrality story, you know Comcast isn't one of the good guys.  Net Neutrality is good for all of us, and no Net Neutrality is good for the big ISPs like Verizon (the evil villain of net Neutrality) and Comcast that want to throttle content providers (Web sites), making them slower unless they pay a toll.  Comcast is also infamous for its horrendous customer service, with story after story about customers who spent three days trying to cancel their service and representatives refusing to do so, or not getting repairs or installation, or whatever.

Here in Tompkins County this matters because Comcast wants to buy Time Warner Cable.  And while TWC also doesn't rate high in customer service surveys, it is way better than Comcast in most ways imaginable.  It's the devil we know, and it's better than the devil that wants to know us.

I don't want to have to call a CEO's mother to tell on him just to get a service I am paying for.

I once asked my Dad why he didn't have Comcast cable Internet because it would be much faster and reliable than the DSL service he had.  His reply was, 'Because I don't want to give the b******s any more money than they're getting for TV!.  At the time I thought he was biting off his nose to spite his face, but now I understand.

So if Net Neutrality is too remote-seeming an issue for you, or even the speed throttling for ransom that we'd be subjected to, think about trying to get your cable modem hooked up, waiting two months and then finding a columnist who would call the CEO's mother to tell her how lousy her son's company is.  And then being dissed by a technician when he finally does show up.  For me that's a good enough reason to oppose the sale.

Time Warner Cable is looking pretty good right now.

v11i7