I don’t know what’s going on, but Comcast has served me very well this year. In prior years I haven’t had much positive to say. Maybe it was the possibly intoxicated installer who had to be escorted out by the Verizon installer, or his replacement who drilled a hole through our dresser, or the three visits to get the TiVo Series3 operational, channel lineup issues, unusable broadband, etc. But this year, Comcast has really been on top of their game (service and support) and they deserve some public lovin’.
When I joined Sling in February, I figured I’d want a little more bandwidth to stream up to 3 Slingboxes simultaneously. So I reluctantly gave up my Verizon DSL (capped at 384Kbps up in my apartment building) and moved on over to Comcast which offered 768Kbps. The process of adding broadband was very smooth and the service has been very good – fast and reliable.
Sometime in the spring I decided I didn’t need all these extra digital channels, but I did want to keep ESPN, Discovery, etc in HD on my S3. I called Comcast and they were able to cut the digital tier (~$15/mo) but retain the HD channels… for free. Nice! Also nice: In my region Comcast doesn’t charge for CableCARD rentals.
I gave Comcast a call this morning asking if they had any deals on the movie channels. Unfortunately they didn’t have any promotions running and it looked like the cable television portion of my bill would nearly double. However, the phone agent was very patient and went through a variety of TV packages and deals on my broadband until we found something agreeable. He asked if my CableCARDs were in a TV or a TiVo (!) and then put me on hold while he called in the changes. HBO HD and Showtime HD magically appeared (on both tuners). Then he wished me a good day, good week, and good weekend.
Maybe this competition thing (satellite, FiOS) is finally paying off for us consumers.