I have been a Comcast customer for a number of years. Until recently, Comcast was the only provider of broadband Internet connection in the Gaithersburg area where I live. From December of last year I have been experiencing intermittent connection drops with my service. With each failure I become more frustrated. I remember one such instance where I was trying to book an online flight using my credit card and the connection fail during the critical submission of my credit card details. I was left wondering if my card had been charged $800 or not. I then had to call the airline and spend 2 hours tracking down my partial payment.
Last April I started to see more Internet connection failures, only this time they were longer than the average 5 minute outages I had experienced before. My connection would go out for the entire day. At one point I was without reliable service for 2 weeks. The connection would go up and down so frequently that I couldn't use my connection without fear of loosing work.
I know far too much about Comcast's customer service department than I would like to. To date, I have called more than 20 service representatives, and a quarter of the calls made were to supervisors. I currently have 12 reference numbers assigned to my account. Typically, if I call the 1-800-COMCAST number I am forwarded to a customer service department in Ontario, Canada. I managed to find the local number for the Rockville office - the same office that sends me the bill each month, and when I call them I have a 50/50 chance of getting through to them or being passed onto the service center. The service center can do "nothing" to help me with my complaint, except to schedule an engineer, or to leave messages with the local office. Even the supervisors in Canada are powerless to ease my complaint.
I have had 7 engineers out to my property to survey my equipment and lines. Of those 7,5 have been out to my residence in the months of April and May. Each engineer performs the same duties -: he or she will check the line for the signal level, which is always with in range, then he or she will replace all my splitters in the house (of which I now only have one - Internet and TV), and then I'll be informed that the service is running fine. Within a few hours of the engineers leaving I will loose connection again. I had to stop one engineer replacing all the cable in my house because the prior engineer had done the same job 2 days earlier.
I ran a network polling service on my home computer in May to monitor how often the Internet connection failed during the day, and left it running for over a week. The connection would fail for hours at a time between 6am and 8pm, but would then miraculously stay up all night. I informed both the service department and each engineer that came to the house, and yet they still would not accept that it was something to do with their service.
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