Category: Comcast

Posted on

oh comcast, why you do the things you do?

It has been a little over a month (almost 2) since I last had a fit about comcast. Well new month, new bill, new bitch. I had previously gotten rid of the Comcast HD/DVR box as it well plain sucked and I was paying for something that did not work, and didn’t do any thing that they advertise on any of their commercials or web pages. So I replaced it with a TiVo, which caused my monthly bill to drop significantly. Well on the last bill I received, they attached 4 pages of price increases.  So what all did they change ?

Cable cards are 210% of the cost they are now, new cost is $6.30 a month, where they were $3 a month.

Digital Standard Def Cable Boxes are now 132% of the cost they are now. New cost is $9.25 a month, where they were $6.99 a month. What is weird is they are now the same price as an HD converter box.

Digital Starter package, only rose in price by $0.42… Not “too” bad.

Total Premium (rest of the digital channels and all premiums, [HBO/Showtime/Cinemax/Starz]) rose by $2. Not to bad either.

Internet (just the basic one) rose by $3.

 

What is getting me though is the hardware cost. I have had 2 standard def Cable boxes for over 10 years. They still function exactly the same as the day I got them, in fact the remotes still say “Adelphia” on them. You can’t tell me that it costs more to maintain a piece of equipment that I have had in my possession for 10+ years. If I calculate the price at current rates, 10 years at $6.99 a month for 12 months equates to $1,677.60 I have paid for 2 standard def boxes.. Surely those have more than paid for themselves in the 10 years I have had them. So why should I have to keep paying for a box that is “effectively end of life?”

What really pissed me off is the raise in the cable card rate.. The ONLY thing they do is an authorization piece, why are they now twice as expensive as they were before? They can’t do anything new?

 

So end the end, all the money I saved by getting rid of their box, is now being paid back again because the total of the price increase equals what I was saving.

 

Here is a hint comcast. Make the equipment free, or put all the channels back in ClearQAM. Nothing like a bait and switch with your “world of more” campaign.

Posted on

Yet another comcast visit

Well hopefully this will be the last post for a while about the problems with comcast… (Will see after next week when they post my new bill)… As I mentioned last time, getting a cable card installed seems to require an act of god when it involves comcast. The new contractor came out 2 saturday’s ago with a 3 more cable cards. (side bar/ I don’t know what it is about cable people, by why the hell do they always smell like they smoked a carton of cigs before coming in to the house? I have used an entire can of febreze in my living room after this tech and the two previous ones left.)

Anyways back to the story, the tech showed up, and and proceeded to put the cable card in the TiVO. It starts to do the firmware upgrade like the ones the other guys brought.. After it was done, he talked to the Comcast phone guy and then we found out that once again this card “was not in the system.” Is comcast / tri-wire’s inventory system so f&()’d up that they are not doing proper inventory of their equipment, but yet they can charge me out the ass for it?

So we pulled that card out and went through the others he had. The next one the phone guy said “should work”. Well put it in and then let it update the firmware. The guy on the other side pushed the right signals and my second TiVO is finally activated. So the tech got up and left, (and I had to completely soak the couch with febreze as it smelled so bad).

So now what can I bitch about with Comcast? The fact that they have had the ESPN’s screwed up for weeks now. The audio is so out of sync that you can’t watch anything that has close ups of people talking.

Posted on

Comcast TV Funhouse

Since we last met, here is what is happening in the world of Comcast…

  1. They have started the compression of HD channels even more.. Now instead of having 2 HD’s per 6MHz, they are bunching 4 HD’s in the same 6MHz. Which makes watching anything with fast motion on it look horrible.
  2. The problem with the cable card flashing, has appeared to be fixed. Funny that the Corporate Escalation people don’t know it is fixed yet, or maybe the magic gremlin just hopped in the TiVo and did it.
  3. I decided to get rid of the Comcast SA 8300 HD/DVR box. The reason behind this one is that about 3 weeks or so ago, Comcast decided to move all of the HD channels from the 700’s to the 800’s (to be “grouped together better”, yeah what ever.) Well when this happened, my TiVo and ReplayTV DVR’s auto updated the scheduled recordings with the new channels numbers. However the crappy SA8300 box didn’t. So to my surprise when I got home and found it hadn’t recorded anything in a week or so I was pissed. See when you pay over $2600 a year to COMCAST for a service you should expect it to work as they say it should. So I decided to quit paying them the $15.95 a month for the DVR service and just switch to the TiVo. Well today was the day for the tech to come out and do the box/cable card swap. As usual Comcast has the wrong address on my account so the tech called me because they wanted to come early, well they were 3 miles away from my house on the other side of town. So after we got that straighten out they showed up. It was a contractor and a new employee he was training.

    So in goes the first cable card, and it comes up needing a firmware upgrade. So we let it go, it kept flashing saying it was going to take an hour, but ended up only taking about 20 minutes. After the update, he called the Comcast number, where we hear that the card that we just spent 20+ minutes updating, is “not in their inventory” and therefore can’t be used. F’ing great. So luckly they had brought 3 cards with them. That is where the luck ended, as the other 2 cards “were not in inventory” either. So basically some one dropped the ball at the warehouse and was watching tv when they should have been doing work. So they left saying that they were going to try to find some more cable cards so they could come back.

  4. After they left, I bitched and it got escalated to Corporate again. Well the tech called back around 4 and said that since I called corporate that there was nothing he could do. I told him it wasn’t his fault that some one else screwed up, and I can’t tell if his phone died, or he just hung up.. Anyways, Comcast Corporate called me about an hour after that and wanted to talk. So I talked to her and they said they were going to try to get some one out on Tuesday. I told them that I had already scheduled it for Saturday as I wasn’t going to waste my time again and take off work to sit around while they play “lets try this one”.
  5. So as it sits now my adventure with TiVo has in total been 6 techs since June, and 9 cable cards… Out of the 9 cable cards, only 2 of them have ever worked.
  6. Hopefully after all of this is done, I will save over $200 a year on my Comcast bill. Or I may save more if I just drop them and go with Dish network.
Posted on

Comcast appointment #whoknows

I had another Comcast tech appointment today. See last weekend TiVo called me to work on the problem with the Comcast Cable card and the “flashing” that was occurring on about 25 channels. I talked with them for a while and then they conferenced in Comcast Phone support. The first thing out of Comcast’s “mouth” was “We need to have a tech come out and look at the lines in your house”. I was pissed, I spent the weekend before that with one of their tech’s who basically did absolutely nothing besides changes the ends in the house and replace the cable card. Neither of which fixed the “flashing” problems. So the phone guy, said he couldn’t do anything until a tech came out and did a in detail inspection of the lines. Haha what a freaking joke. So I had them schedule the appointment for 10AM today, preparing to waste the whole day on waiting for them to show up.

Like normal, 10AM came and past, around 11:15AM I get a call from a Comcast 866 number. It was one of their people calling to say that they ran out of cable cards in the area, and the warehouse was closed, and if I wanted it replaced I would have to schedule it during the week when the warehouse was open. I told them that I couldn’t and replacing it wasn’t going to fix the problem. I then explained what was going on and that the only real reason the tech was supposed to come out was to meter the equipment. She then said “Well the tech is running behind and won’t be there till after 12PM, is some one going to be there then?” I said I would and she hung up.

About 12:30 or so the Comcast guy showed up. Basically said “I know there is a problem with the cable card’s and I can’t fix it.” We then talked for a while about what the problem was and he said that there has been people calling in reporting it, but not one really took it seriously until Milan Puskar called in. It seems he had 15 TiVo’s at his place and ALL of them were doing the exact same thing as everyone else who had been calling in. That is when they finally started looking in to it. Go figure it takes a millionaire to get Comcast off of their ass to start looking in to the problem. The tech said that it is happening all over Morgantown and Fairmont from what he can tell, and every one is having the problems on the same channels.

He basically said there was nothing he could do except for pass it up to the supervisor for handling.

Here is a video I made of what it is doing. It is called “Flashing” by some of the Comcast phone people. I call it “Cable not working”. The funny thing when the tech left, was he said he hated working on cable cards because they don’t work. I was like hmm then make the channels unencrypted and you wouldn’t have this problem.

Since Comcast has not publicly admitted to what the problem is any place that I can find, here is something that I got from some one at comcast:

Only encrypted programs would be affected.  More specifically, only programs associated with segments that are part of more than twelve packages would be affected.  This is because the ECMs required to carry the entitlement IDs for up to twelve packages will fit into a single MPEG packet.  If more than twelve entitlement IDs are required, however, two MPEG packets are needed to fully encapsulate the ECMs. Not all two-packet ECM programs are affected by this problem.

The customer impact is further narrowed by the fact that only devices that specifically check the payload flag of the adaptation_control for ECM packets will be affected.  At present, and based on customer reports, this seems to be only TiVo devices.

Basically, there is an issue with decryption.  This will cause tiling, missing channels and not authorized errors.

Posted on

Comcast, TiVO and Frontier Communications

I have been a Comcast customer for a while now, and have not really had problems with their service until recently. It has all started with the switch to the “full digital” cable system. I had problems with their dta’s (here and here). Now I am having problems with their Billing department and cable card “services”.  Back in June I decided to get a TiVO to be an “hd tuner” for the bedroom HDTV. This is when the fiasco with their cable card started. I was told by Comcast reps online that the Cable Card was free, since it would be the first one on the account. This was awesome, till I got the bill and found out they were charging me for it. I talked to them again, and they removed the charge.

Well in November when I got the 2 dta’s, something happened and they started charging me $6.99 a month for the cable card, that was supposed to be free. So I contacted Comcast, and they said “sorry” and took the charge off. Well December rolled around and the charge was back. Since then I have been having a fight with Comcast over false advertising and the failure to properly document their prices in public view. It has gone back and forth about 11 times. Just recently they sent me the Morgantown Price sheet, which is not available any where online that I could find, so here it is Rate Card Morgantown. What they fail to tell you is that if you have ANY of their cable boxes (hd, sd, hd/dvr) you can NOT get a cable card for free, contrary to what I was told in June which lead to the decision to buy the TiVO. So now I am stuck paying $3.00 a month for a cable card. Which means my cable bill is now even more expensive than it was before. I am going to file an FCC complaint over all of this as well, to say that the order of “devices” dictates the price of the service is pure bull shit.

Then while I am bitching to them about the prices, it appears that either something changed on the TiVO side or the Comcast side and I started having problems with about 24 digital channels. When I would tune to say  BBC America, it would be normal for a couple of seconds and then freeze for a couple seconds, then be normal, ad nauseam. So I spent a couple of hours on a friday night clicking through all 250+ channels that I get. Out of them I found out which ones had the problems. I then went and mapped every channel to the QAM / RF channel it was allotted. And guess what they were all around the same general area. What is weird, was BBC America was one that I was having problems with, then all of the sudden they turned off The Weather Channel on the analog side, BBC America started working and The Weather Channel started having problems. For those interested, here is the list that I and some other people are having problems with:

I ended up calling Comcast to come out and replace the cable card, because I thought that was the problem. Well the guy showed up, and was not exactly the friendliest person I have met from Comcast. He seemed like it was a “stupid call”. So he started looking around and I showed him what was happening with the TiVO. He then said he would be back. When he came back in the house, he had some new cable and some tools. He proceeded to cut every end off of every cable in my bedroom and pull out all the cable and replace it with his “new” cable. Well that did not work. So he asked where the cable came in to the house. I took him to where every cable home run’s back to. He got so confused that I had to explain what was going on. It then seemed like he was pissed for some reason. Once again pulled out the snips and cut every end off of every cable and the put new ones on. Still didn’t fix the problem. So I asked if he had brought a cable card to replace the one in the TiVO. He hadn’t brought one. He left and went back to the local office and picked up a card and came out and replaced it. Well the channels are still messed up. So he said it had to be  the TiVO’s problem because the Comcast boxes “were working fine” and took off.

So now I was like hmm, this freaking sucks as I know the finger pointing game is going to start, but I got on TiVO’s chat and started talking to them. They had me reboot the TiVO a couple of times, but that did not fix any of the problems. He suggested that I call their phone support as they would have some better things to have me try. I did and they had me read off some signal levels and look at the “RS Uncorrected” and “RS Corrected” counters. He did not like the numbers on there and basicly said that it was a Comcast problem and the signal was dirty coming in to the house. But he also said he was going to go talk to some one else and call me back in an hour. An hour went by and he did call me back. This time he said he talked to some supervisors and they would like to replace my TiVO because they thought one of the tuners may be bad in it. He told me he would ship me a new TiVO since mine was only a few months old and that they would leave my current one active until I made the swap so that I could get all the shows off of my current one and on to the new one. I thought that is good, at least they aren’t like Comcast and just replace it and you lose everything.

Well today, I got stuck at home because of 3/4 inch of ice all of the driveway, and UPS showed up with the “new” TiVO. To my surprise it wasn’t new, it was a refurb. Not only that there were no cables in the box, so I could not power it on and the current one on at the same time to copy any thing over. This made me extremely pissed. Not only had they lied to me (the tech guy stressed more than once that he was going to make sure I got a new TiVO and not a refurb) but now I couldn’t even test it.

Well here is where the power of Social networking comes to help. One little bitch, and with in a couple of minutes some one from TiVO is asking for details. Then about 3 hours later, I got a call from the Executive relations people. He said he was sorry for the confusion and would be sending me a cable pack to get the current refurb one running. He also said that if the refurb that was sent did not work, he would send me a brand new one.

Fast forward about 40 minutes, and I was talking to Justin and found out that he is having problems on his TiVO with the exact same channels that I am. So now it is definitely a Comcast or TiVO problem and not a problem with my box, unless his which is a different model also developed the same problems at the same time.  Needless to say, I called the TiVo guy back and left a message that I think there is a bigger problem than just my box.

So you are probably thinking by now, if you have read this far, what the hell does this post have to do with Frontier Communications? Well not really anything, other than something weird happened last night and they are a “service provider” in the area, not that I am a client. I have not had a land line phone in the house since about October 2007 when I canceled the Verizon line in favor of using Packet 8 VOIP, which I have been using since June of 2004. Well I had left the phone in the kitchen hooked up to the old “Verizon” line even though it was dead. Don’t know why, just did. Well while I was putting memory in my laptop last night, the kitchen phone started ringing. It took me a minute to figure out what it was, because I hadn’t heard that phone ring in probably 4 years. I went in and picked it up and there was some one on the other side asking for some one who obviously doesn’t live here. After saying “sorry wrong number”, I hung up and then picked the phone up again. Freaking weird to hear a dial tone on it. So I called my self and my other phones rang. Now I had the phone number of this new “phantom” line. This was pretty weird. So I disconnected the phone from the line, as I didn’t want to hear it ring again if I had some one elses phone mapped to my house.

Once again a little Social networking and with in a few minutes I had a contact at Frontier Communications who was asking for information. I gave her the details and told her that the dial tone is a “weird” dial tone type. Needless to say I have not heard back from her yet, but last time I checked, the dial tone still exists, so I bet they are trying to figure out where the “wires” got crossed.  Some friends suggested I make some overseas calls, and some 900 number calls, or act like I am the people they are calling. But the weird part is the phone has not ringed at all today. So maybe they just assigned a phone to my house and the number is not assigned to any one and the other night was just a fluke?

All in all, I hope TiVO and Comcast get their system/signals worked out as it sucks to be paying such a high price for a service and not be able to use it completely.