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.