Comcast Remains America's Most-Hated Company, Survey Finds (dslreports.com) 111
What may come as no surprise to cable TV or internet subscribers, Comcast remains among the least-liked companies in American history, according to a new survey from 24/7 Wall Street. From DSL Reports: [The survey] combines data from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, JD Power and Associates and a Zogby Analytics poll, and lists Comcast as the "most hated company in America." Comcast had made some small strides in the ACSI rankings last year, but even with minor improvements still consistently battles Charter for last place in most customer satisfaction and service studies. "The company')s internet services received the fourth worst score out of some 350 companies. In J.D. Power's rating of major wireline services, only Time Warner Cable -- recently subsumed by Charter -- received a worse score in overall satisfaction," notes the report, which adds that Comcast received the worst scores in consumer costs, billing, and reliability. "In 24/7 Wall St.'s annual customer satisfaction poll conducted in partnership with Zogby, nearly 55% of of respondents reported a negative experience with the company, the second worst of any corporation." Comcast finds itself ahead of numerous banks and airlines, but it isn't alone in the rankings among telecom providers. Dish Network is ranked eighth, the report noting that 47% of those polled reported a negative service experience with the company. Also on the list at tenth is Sprint, which had the worst customer service rating out of the more than 100 companies included in the survey. "More than half of Sprint customers polled reported a negative customer service experience with the company," the study found.
Re:Comcast customer here (Score:4, Funny)
Fortunately for health insurance providers, if you're dead, you can't be surveyed.
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Re:IP6 (Score:1)
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to route across devices that had no IP addresses, with devices on each side with IP addresses able to see each other.
That's switching then, not routing. Please turn in your Associate's degree.
Re:Switching vs routing (Score:1)
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It sounds like the survey asked if you had a bad customer service experience in the last year. I have. The year started out good enough - they told me my service was being upgraded to 75Mbs without any cost to me; they'd upgrade my modem (I was renting from them), and wouldn't have to do anything else, all I had to do was log in and request the service, so I did. They said I'd get a ship notification for the new modem within 7 (or 10, I forget) business days.
A month later I checked the status and they sa
Re: Comcast customer here (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Comcast customer here (Score:1)
Owning your own router and cable modem (Score:1)
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A router shouldn't be going bad after 2 years. I had a WRT54G for over 10 years until last year when I replaced it with a new model with all the new wireless protocols. My DirecTV DVR kept bitching about speed for on demand. It made a big difference in throughput and I probably should have replaced it years ago but I have a hard time throwing out something that works.
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Re: Comcast customer here (Score:4, Informative)
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totally depends, the office near my house is a couple of laid back bumpkins that can help you with anything, the one near my work makes the call centers look like saints
those are the most ignorant of their function, hateful "humans" I have ever had to deal with
Cable and connector. (Score:1)
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No, he's thinking of RG11 [solidsignal.com]. You're thinking that you know better, but you do not.
RG11 would be a bitch to use for inside wiring, and probably unnecessary, but if he wants to put in the work it's not for us to say.
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For what it's worth I've have pretty good experience with their phone support. Actually the only problem I've had with them with support is that during chat with an agent, I was considering one of their offers but hadn't accepted it (she was totally unable to provide a channel listing) but she took the signup far enough through the process that I had some hardware delivered to my house the next day. So I had to drive to the store but they took it back no problem.
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If they consistently get an awful rating, then imagine how many people they have to regularly piss off, especially if a lot of their customers don't really have much of a problem with them.
Personally, I think that people just tend to hate their own cable provider, and it's been a long time coming. Quality has been declining and prices have been increasing for a while but people feel like they don't have any options, so they take it out on whoever their provider happens to be. I'm one of the cord cutters,
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I think that people just tend to hate their own cable provider, and it's been a long time coming. Quality has been declining and prices have been increasing for a while...
Here's a novel idea: walk away from that junk and forget about it forever. Get 30 hours per week of your life back.
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If you're confused about that then just keep watching TV.
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I personally have, and still find a way to watch what I want to watch, but plenty of other people don't know how.
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Or, just maybe:
Comcast Remains America's Most-Hated Company, Survey Finds
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What flavor of U-verse are you getting? AT&T sells a bunch of different things and still calls it U-verse.
In town here they sell the ADSL2+ flavor.
The 6Mbps dsl connection we had before hadn't given us any issue unless the junction boxes were underwater in which case the phone was out too.
When we switched over to uverse they put us on the 12Mbps rate that took several service calls and switching us to another copper pair to get working stable a few months ago it was bumped up to 14Mbps and it went to cr
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Alright we're talking about the ADSL2+ flavor then it's the crappiest thing they still call u-verse.
The upload speed maxes out at 1Mbps but the other flavours have 1.5Mbps it's the same price either way tho.
When they were initially advertising it they were calling it a fiber optic connection (which is BS) most areas aren't getting that flavor but they were advertising it like it was.
I suppose that's good for them here since the city sells FTTH they can just lie to people and say hey we have FTTH too and sel
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Not really any benefit switching at that distance + wire length I figure you can only get up to 6 Mbps max on ADSL or ADSL2+ since att doesn't sell any plans between 6 and 12.
Something important to note while att's dsl uses the standard dsl protocols the uverse flavor of dsl uses a proprietary version of the standard so you can't use 3rd party modems.
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I can stick up for AT&T also. I had slow but reliable 6mbps DSL for years,went to Comcast for 4 years and hated every minute of it. Now I'm back on AT&T Fiber 1Gbps, didn't have to pay to rent their modem and they charge $70 flat for the service -no extra fees are taxes.
If i did go with their TV package, the first four set top boxes are free. If I went to Comcast, they would have charged $50 for the extra five TVs, cable modem rental, and another $30 in taxes, non government fees, an HD technology f
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My experience with Comcast vs AT&T is day and night. AT&T took over the cable system and @Home in my area and it became unusable because of AT&T's screwups. They throttled the aggregate upstream bandwidth of all of the customers on a node to 128Kbps. That's like myself and all of my neighbor's traffic combined being limited to 128Kbps upstream bandwidth. Their support would ask me to reboot my computer even though a simple traceroute or ping showed exactly where the problem was, and it was on th
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A lot of people have very good reasons to hate AT&T what's yours?
I personally am annoyed by being asked to sign in to look around the store.
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Mostly their billing practices. They kept signing me up for services i didnt ask for & charging me for services i wasnt getting.
For awhile there it was a new thing every month. First some fancy voicemail package for the land line i didnt have, then a 2nd land line i didnt have, then they charged me for a modem upgrade i didnt want, twice, then they signed me up for their DVR whatever service. Every time you turn around theyve found some way to double your bill, and it takes hours and hours to get them t
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I had @Home cable modem service and it was taken over by AT&T. This was around 1999 and AT&T in their infinite wisdom decided that 1Mbps upstream bandwidth was too much, so instead of programming the modems to throttle lower they decided to do it at the head-end where they throttled the aggregate bandwidth of all of the subscribers on a node down to 128Kbps. This meant that ALL upstream traffic from all customers on the node combined was limited to 128Kbps. At the best of times I only saw 40% packet
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No one has to go to CNN for news, a lot of people are stuck with Comcast for decent broadband.
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Comcast customer also here (Score:1)
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The thing is everyone bases things on their own anecdotal experience. I hate Comcast (and AT&T) with a passion based on very bad customer experiences.
I'm sure some people manage to have Comcast as their ISP/cable provider and the service works well and they don't think it's that expensive because they can afford it easily enough anyway.
When I was a Comcast customer I had outages all the time both with the cable TV and internet service. Their customer service/repair were always a hassle to deal with.
I
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From my experience Comcast is infinitely better than AT&T. Originally I had @Home Internet service which was great. In the 1990s I was getting 10Mbps full duplex which was unheard of. Later they reduced it to 1Mbps up and 10Mbps down and I was still happy since the alternative was dial-up. Then AT&T took it over as ATTBI. AT&T in their infinite wisdom figured that 1Mbps upstream was too much so they cut the upstream speed to 128Kbps. To make matters worse, they didn't cut each customer's upstrea
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They just happen to be a company that many people interface with and they sell a service that is prone to problems.
- Shared bandwidth which requires intrusive monitoring and limiting in order to be fair for all their users
- Infrastructure that passes over/through several different domains both public and private
- It is an often misunderstood technology and is conflated with other problems. (person is having PC or Netflix or any technology trouble and the blame falls on the internet provider)
- It is seen as
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Residential Fiber (Score:3)
City has laid fiber out to the curb and has made it available to residents. I never watch broadcast TV (been 4 years now) so I only had Comcast for high speed; 110 download/26 upload as of the last Speedtest. Honestly though, I've almost never had a problem with Comcast with an outage happening very very seldom in Virginia and Colorado and I've been on Comcast since the mid 90's. The main reason I'm switching is the price for 1G/1G fiber to the house is $50 a month vs the $130 a month for Comcast 'Blast'.
[John]
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Longmont?
Comcast was easy enough when I called em to cancel. They started listing other offers but stopped when I asked if the could beat Gb for $50/mo.
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Yep. They're in the neighborhood today with a ditch digger to run it up to the house and then next week to run it to my internal server farm :) Once in and I know it's working, I'll package up the Comcast gear and bring it down to the offices to cancel service.
[John]
But if you live somewhere else (Score:2)
you don't have to deal with them
I have Charter as the cable/phone/ISP
My vote for most hated company goes to Microsoft
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I like my cable company's customer service great. The price is way too much though. Same with AT&T, I love the service but hate paying the bill.
Comcast customer here (Score:2)
I don't blame the employees. I do blame the company.
Total ripoff and consumer gouging.
Well they didn't ask me... (Score:2)
Everybody hates the cable company... Trust me.. It doesn't really matter who they are for the most part.
My favorite company I love to hate is Frontier who just purchased all the Verizon FIOS infrastructure and subscribers in my area (including me).
Verizon was bad, but these new folks take the cake. Frontier wasn't even able to muster enough folks to answer the phones and say they couldn't help you, much less actually know what they where talking about or get a service guy out to fix their recently acquir
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My guess is that Comcast isn't all that much worse than any of the other providers, they just have a larger install base and more subscribers which hate the cable company. That means that more folks hate them, but only because they have more customers to tick off.
Your guess, based on no experience with the company, is WRONG. They are simply the worst company I have ever had to deal with. No one in customer service has any intention to help you, only to get you off the phone. All problems require a "home visit," even if the problem is on their end. And that can't be scheduled for at least a week. Every five minutes on the phone you get another suggestion to upgrade to a more expensive service. We should be able to sue for PTSD just having to deal with them.
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I was forced into using Frontier for Internet for a few years. It wasn't the worst thing I have ever experienced.... here is my list of grievances:
- Their support was lame. They told me that configuring my "modem" in a bridging mode was impossible.... /rolleyes. I had to figure out their stupid Siemens modem interface, but did finally get it to work.
- They made me rent the modem... they said "you can use your own device if you want, but you will still have to pay the modem rental fee" seriously...
- They sla
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In 2014, Comcast was selected as worse than Monsanto!
The vast majority of the reasons why Monsanto are regarded as such a boogeyman are complete bullshit.
Monsanto's Toxic Monopolies (Score:2)
Anniston, AL and Sauget, IL, and some forty other past and current Superfund sites would like to have a word with you. Anniston in particular was knowingly polluted for decades:
Service (Score:1)
Reformed cord cutter (Score:1)
After 8 years of not having cable, I broke down and got comcast TV. I had used them for internet and after all the additional services (nextflix, hulu, online dish, etc...) it turned out to be cheaper to just get cable TV then all these services.
I hadn't used them is years for TV and was surprised at how smoothly everything went to get it installed. They came within 2 days of me ordering it, the boxes and software are much better than they were 8 years ago and the customer service was good. I had called
I knew it, (Score:1)
Adobe Systems is not an American company !
If it is so bad, why keep using it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh right, free market capitalism and competition only applies when normal suckers like you and me try to start a business, not to oligopolies and cronies who seize public spectrum, restrict access to utility poles on public land, and pour hundreds of millions into lobbying and captured politicians to protect their monopoly. Because the first rule of success in a free market system is to make sure there is no free market.
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Oh right, free market capitalism and competition only applies when normal suckers like you and me try to start a business, not to oligopolies and cronies who seize public spectrum, restrict access to utility poles on public land, and pour hundreds of millions into lobbying and captured politicians to protect their monopoly. Because the first rule of success in a free market system is to make sure there is no free market.
Exactly, these poor large corporations are not permitted to operate in the free market. As Libertarians tell us, governments are the only source of barriers to entry. These poor telco's have been consistently hamstrung by evil regulation preventing them from swimming courageously and carefree in the great free market lake.
Clearly we need less regulation to ensure that they can operate however they like. I'm certain they'll never abuse their dominant position to prevent smaller players from entering the m
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Filthy yurpeens and their nanny state. Sure they may be happier, healthier, and their govt serves the citizens, but they ain't got our freedoms!
Sonic? (Score:2)
Does anyone here have any recent experience with Sonic? It used to get great reviews in Yelp. But recently there have been a lot of Yelp reviews by people who had a hard time getting the service set up. DSLReports [dslreports.com] has better reviews regarding getting the service set up.
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Sadly, no because the phone company infastructure into my place is crap and I can only get the lowest tier of DSL whether its from Sonic or AT&T. Back when I had them? Amazing. Top customer support, with very low wait times (I only had to call them a few times but every time had wait times of like 30 seconds. Every time I was surprised thinking "how unexpectedly reasonable!"), and a company that actually seems to care about your data privacy. My Dad uses them too and I remember about 10 years ago he was
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I have been a Sonic customer for years in Santa Clara, California. I dumped ISDN and went to their DSL service in late 90s. Been on Fusion since it was available in my neighborhood. There have been no systematic problems with their service or support.
I moved 18 months ago and getting service at the new address was difficult because of AT&T, which controls the local loop. AT&T never did the connection work even though they said they did and it took a month to finally get it working. About 6 months a
Re:Sonic? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, I like their foot-long chili cheese hot dog!
https://www.sonicdrivein.com/m... [sonicdrivein.com]
Trump Organization? (Score:3)
Agreed that Comcast is sleazy, but let's keep things in perspective here.
It's Comcastic! (Score:2)
Thanks,
We will being adding a new Most Hated Fee to bill.
Health insurance (Score:3)
I figured every spot would have been occupied by health insurance companies.
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Which Sovietistan was that? I'm pretty sure that you did not grow up in Sweden, where a doctor visit to my neighbourhood clinic costs me about US$15, and my wife's night in the hospital a few years ago ran us about US$75.
And in the US, you have (at least in theory) a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Which pretty much disqualifies inadequate/inaccessible/prohibitively expensive medical care, since those things are impossible to achieve without being in reasonably good health.
Nor does it
Comcast via Earthlink (Score:2)
I am, unfortunately, a Comcast customer. But my experience hasn't been so bad because I bought the service through Earthlink, about 10 years ago. Earthlink never jacked with my pricing, it stayed exactly the same for all of those 10 years, but the bandwidth kept going up during that time, to about 60 Mbps today.
Unfortunately, Earthlink finally got out of the business, and notified me that I was transferred to Comcast as of January 1. I wonder what methods Comcast will use to turn me sour like the rest of yo
WTF, there is an ISP out there worse than Telstra? (Score:2)
I find it hard to believe that any ISP out there could possibly be worse than Telstra...
How do they do it? (Score:2)
52 week high (Score:2)
Stock is near it's 52-week high [cmcsa.com].
Old lady with the hammer to strike again? (Score:2)