Now all of you realize by now that I am a pretty big geek. And I can’t disappoint the other geeks that may be reading this blog by not posting anything geeky on it. So I’ve decided to start off with a short summary of my dealings with the Comcast Cable Company. However, if you are the kind of person that puts black tape over the blinking 12:00 because it’s easier than setting the time on your VCR… Then you will probably not care to understand most of what I’m talking about here. Feel free to ignore this post and check out our recent pictures of the pretty animals at the zoo.
I started out by calling and politely asking about what services they offer, and any promotions that they had going on. I originally intended to get the smallest, and most basic analog cable package that they offered and setup my Mac Mini to work as a home media center; following in the footsteps of my good friend Jon Wise (more info here). After speaking with the first representative for a few minutes, I have learned that Comcast charges $51 a month for standard, analog, basic cable. But for $2.95 more, you can have digital cable, and get a discount on it for the first 6 months. When asked why, my representative informed me that in an effort to comply with the new regulations being set forth by the FCC that require all cable to be digital by 2009, Comcast has elected to “discourage new customers from getting basic cable”. Yes that is a direct quote.
After a few minutes of contemplation, I decided that paying a little more for digital cable was worth it for us at this point and time. (Not to mention all the problems that Comcast has been causing by blocking BitTorrent streams. And I needed something simple enough for Virginia to use while I am gone.) But what could I do to minimize the cost of it? Well, one of the ways that cable companies suck dollars from your pocket is they have all these little service fees that they charge to lease equipment to you. $3 for this, $6.50 for that, you can get this fancy box for just another $4.45 a month… And before you know it you are putting your customer service rep and his kids through college it seems. The most logical choice seems to be to own your own equipment, and then have the cable company provision it for you in their system so that you can use it. I figured, “They do this all the time with cable modems. Why would it be any different with set top boxes?” I started to ask a couple of questions about whether or not this was possible, and was referred to the cable tv tech support department. A few minutes of cheap hold music later and I was speaking with another representative in that department. I explained my situation and my intentions, and was told that there should be no problem! A short while later I had setup my appointment for an installer to visit the very next day! This is quite rare, but they had another appointment in the same apartment complex and since all he was supposed to do was verify that my equipment was a legitimate cable box, they squeezed me in. She told me that it would be $19.00 for the service call to hook up my cable and 19.99 for an internet self-install kit. I asked why I needed either in the first place, the last tenants cable was still hooked up, so I had a live signal to the house, and all the self-install kit for the internet includes is a few cables and a diagram to hook everything up. I told her I didn’t need it, so why would I pay for it? She agreed and prorated me the install kit, but said that the service call was still needed to verify my TV worked and answer any other questions I had. I decided to consider this a small victory and conceded.
A few hours of digging through boxes later, I had found my cable modem and set top box. The cable modem was used on Comcast back when I was stationed in South Caroline. Time Warner had said that it wouldn’t work with their system, but a sympathetic rep had decided to set the lease charge to $0 on my account to rent one, and that seemed pretty fair to me. The set top box was part of a project that I messed around with a while ago that involved a few DirectTV receivers, some cable boxes, and various card authentication systems that they use. I won’t go into much more detail than that, other than I decided that it was more trouble than it would be worth. I put most of the equipment back on eBay where I had bought it, and broke even after selling all but the best cable receiver. It was a DVR, and had external firewire and SATA, so I decided to keep it. A short inspection revealed that it was still new enough to work, and is only one feature behind the boxes that Comcast is offering to lease me.
When the installer showed up, he claimed to have no idea what I was talking about when I said that I was using my own equipment. He called the main office and told them what I had, and said that my cable modem was too old to be used with their system, and that they did not allow customers to use their own set top boxes. (If you intend on trying this yourself, be ready to hear this claim a lot. It is a generic first response answer that all their employees are trained to say. The FCC actually helped consumers by regulating that a cable company can not prevent a customer from using their own equipment, as long as the equipment is technologically compatible with the cable system. Proof here in the FCC Cable Act of 1994. Simply read this to anyone who challenges that you can’t use your own equipment and you’ll surely be passed up to a supervisor.) I already did not have much faith in this guy, so I politely accepted his word for it, and let him leave me with one of their modems and a cheap Motorola DCT700 cable converter. The picture quality of the DCT700 was worse than just plugging the cable directly into my TV and letting it tune the channels. And the worst part of it was that after setting up the converter, he sat on the couch and watched TV for almost half an hour! I’m so glad that I’m paying him to sit on my couch and watch my TV.
As soon as he left, I called Comcast. I politely asked to be reconnected with the agent who had set up my installation. The rep said that they couldn’t do this, but after being politely forceful, they shuffled me around through a few people and I ended up talking back with the person I wanted to. (Sidenote: If you ever get someone from Comcast on the phone that seems to be genuinely concerned with your satisfaction, you need to get three things from them. Their name, their department, and their extension. The Comcast phone system will not let reps transfer directly to an extension that is not in their own department. So when you call back, you will need to ask for someone in that department first, and then ask to be transferred to that extension. If they claim that the rep you want is on the phone with another customer, ask them to IM the rep your information and ask for a call back. It has worked for me twice so far.) I explained the deplorable service that the installer had provided me with and that neither my modem nor my converter had been setup for me. She apologized, refunded me the installation fee, explained my case to a supervisor who offered me free HBO for a year, and got someone in the internet department to provision my cable modem for me. Evidently it wasn’t too old after all. So far things were going well. All I wanted now was for my PVR to work.
And that is where I still am. I went to the local office to return the cable modem the installer left, and got one of their Motorola PVR’s to use in the meantime until I get mine working. I carefully compared their box to mine, and the only difference is that theirs has a network jack on the back of it. Though tempting, I’ve decided not to mess with it at all. Things are going too well so far, and I need to continue to be a good, polite customer if I’m going to get what I want. They setup a service call from a field technician who was impressed with my setup, but also claimed that he didn’t have the ability to setup my box. He did fix a couple errors on my account which had caused HBO to not work after I got the PVR, and took the DCT700 with him. He also gave me a direct number to call the local support call center. This was a big help because my past account with Comcast in South Carolina has their national call routing system sending any calls from my cell phone to 1-800-COMCAST to the call center in South Carolina or Jacksonville, FL. I then have to wait for 8 to 10 minutes for a rep who can transfer me back to Seattle, to wait another 4 to 5 minutes for a representative.
I called and tried again to be transferred back to the representative I have been working with, and was told that most of the lines in their call center were down at the moment, as well as several computer terminals. I explained my situation to the rep, and she again claimed that I could not use my own set top box. I again quoted the FCC’s ruling and was passed up to a new level of support. I spoke to a “Supervisor Support Agent” who asked me for some technical information about my box, as well as it’s mac address and agreed to call me back within the hour. She said that she needed to do some research to find out who would have the authority to provision the device for me. After obtaining her name and extension (which she was very reluctant to give) I thanked her for her time and effort and agreed to wait for her to call me back.
