On January 1 2008, The cable company that serviced the area that I live changed from Insight Communications to comcast. This change was due to comcast not wanting to sit on the side any longer. Through acquisitions comcast had become a silent 50% in many parts of the mid west. Both companies split up the area they partnered in. I knew this was coming only because it had been briefly mentioned in the paper in March 2007. There was zero communications from either company about the changes until the end of December I tried in December to find out what changes would be made. Neither Comcast not Insight could tell me anything. they kept passing the buck to the other.

While the change happened on Jan 1 the January Bill was issued by insight. comcast still into February claimed on its website to not be able to provide me service. They still are unable to give me a channel listing for my area. Comcast also Just sent out notices that it is raising the rates for its services.

With Insight i had a sticky IP, while it was mostly static they reserved the right to change the IP if they needed to. thought i was to be given two weeks written notice of change. Comcast silently dropped this service. Instead telling me when I called to verify that I had the same services after they finally switched us from the insight network to the comcast Network on Feb 20th that I needed to have a business internet account to get a static IP. After many calls and being completely frustrated i finally got bounced around to the correct department to switch to a business class plan. For this i had to sign an order form and fax/email it in. I dont have a scanner or a fax machine so it took me a few days to be able to get it in. A week later I called to find out the status to be told your sales person is on holiday in Spain and nothing has been done with your order. After getting them another signed copy emailed in, I called again a week later to be told its still being processed and we dont know when we will make the change. Mind you each time I called I was bounced around at least half a dozen people spent lots of time on hold and constantly got people who really have no clue about anything other than a tiny piece of their portion of things. The phone system would put you through to residential people when you follow the prompts for commercial service.

I finally got switched over on Friday to their business plan. I had chosen the option for enhanced service which is 16Mbits/3Mbits and a /29. the installers order had only a single IP. turned out that the modem was provisioned correctly but the order was wrong. and i had my /29. when doing my nightly rawhide sync i noticed Cacti was saying that i was only getting 6Mbit down alot less than the 16Mbit/s i was supposed to able to get. A quick call to support verified that my accound was on the standard plan not the enhanced one. which in my area is supposed to be 10/1.5 as thats what Insight offered but I got 6/1.5, now i have to call accounts on monday because tech support cant correct the issue without changes to my account.

All in all I have so far found comcast to be completely incompetent. Most of the people i have encountered are completely unwilling to try and help you. They are a bumbling mess. Unfortunately I have little in the way of choices. I can get naked DSL from Verizon for $30 a month but only at 3Mbit/768Kbit speed. I can get a slightly faster DSL option from a local telco but due to the FCC also being braindead I have to get a landline from verizon since MTCO being a CLEC cant offer naked DSL. Note to FCC, enforcing that ILEC must offer naked DSL, but not making sure there is competition by ensuring the CLEC’s can offer the same is really dumb. Way to promote monopolies