Category: Rant

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

XMRadio pricing

Having been a customer of XMRadio since about 2000, I have liked the service, however their customer service hasn’t been the greatest. 2+ years ago when I bought a new car, I transferred my XMRadio subscription from the previous car to the new one. They were upset that the dealership didn’t take care of it, but ended up doing it. Well that subscription was set to expire in 2009. I renewed it in February of 2009 because they had a deal, whereas if you renewed it then, you also got the online service for free for the duration of that renewal. (They were going to start charging for the online stuff the month after I renewed it.) I decided that I would do the 2 year option as I knew I would have the car for at least 2 more years (since I had had it for less than a year).

Well I got my renewal notice in the mail a couple of weeks ago, saying it was going to automatically renew in February of 2011. I didn’t pay close attention to it, till a couple of nights later when I was going through the bills. This is when I got pissed. See when I renewed the service in 2009 for 2 years, it was around $251. Well this renewal noticed said that a 2 year subscription was going to be over $313. Yup $62 more than 2 years ago. Now I bitch about Comcast raising their prices but this was ludicrous. I only listen to it for about 30+ minutes on my drive home every night as I usually listen to Lex and Terry on WCLG on the morning drive to work. This seemed like an excessive amount of money to pay for a service that I usually listen to about 5 songs a day on. So I started contemplating just dropping the service and using the iPod or CD’s instead.

After a while I started looking around and found some sites on the Interweb that said, that Sirrius/XM is so desperate to keep subscribers that if you “threaten” to leave, then they will give you a special deal to keep you as a listener. Well considering that I was considering on leaving them, I decided to see what they would do. So I called them up, and said that I didn’t understand why my bill had gone up so much. Well, part of it is the Online fee, and then there is this little XM Music Royalty Fee. Basically because you get to listen to music with out commercials, you have to pay EXTRA for it? Well this fee on my 2 year bill was over $40. So I told the person on the phone, unless they have a cheaper package, I will have to cancel as this is just getting ridiculous. After a little talking back and forth, she offered up a $77 a year package, which after taxes and this “music royalty fee” would be $79. I told her that was a much better price and that I would take it. She told me that I wouldn’t get the online stuff unless I paid like $20 for it. I told her I didn’t want it as, I did not really have access to use it where I would want to use it.

Then came the funniest part, she asked if she could charge it to the credit card that was on file. I told her “No, I want an invoice in the mail, as you (xm) always try to charge an expired credit card and then proceed to harass me for weeks about not being able to bill me, even after I had paid the bill.” She then replied, “Well we have to charge you $2.00 for sending you a invoice.” WTF is that about? Why should you charge some one $2 to send them a bill? I told her that was fine, as I would rather pay the $2 now then be harassed for days. Then as she is clicking a way on the computer, she said “Oh your radio says you get the internet stuff for free..” I was like “ok, if I don’t have to pay for it.” So I have yet to try to see if I can get the online listening stuff yet. But they did kill my old online account right after I got off the phone with her.

So if you havn’t renewed your Sirius/XM since before June of 2009, be on the look out for the BIG change in pricing.