(This is the second part of a continuing saga. Part one can be found here.)
As it turns out, I actually did get a call back from someone at Comcast today - a gentleman from the Houston office called, told me that the corporate offices had asked him to get in touch with me, and proceeded to do a fantastic job of demonstrating that it's possible to be courteous, polite, well-spoken, and totally and completely unhelpful. It seems that Comcast has firmly and irrevocably decided to put a two week moratorium into effect on new internet service in the Houston area so that they can switch former Time Warner accounts over to the new system.
That's right. Comcast has decided that they don't need new customers in the area for two weeks. Investors shouldn't worry too much, though, because the bottom line seems to be that they're the only game in town. DSL isn't available in the complex we're moving into, and there are no other high speed providers out there. Which, of course, is why they don't really need to factor in things like loosing customers when they decide to stop setting up new customers for two weeks. Isn't it fun to be a monopoly?
Of course, they're only a monopoly when it comes to broadband. Direct TV is available, is competitive in price, and will be getting my TV business as a result. I'll be signing up for their service just as soon as I call Comcast and modify the order that they're sitting on. Of course, that might be a couple of days. The customer service line's still busy all the time.
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Mike... it could be worse. You could have signed up for Time Warner and then immediately gone through the transition. We just went the opposite way in SoCal -- I was a Comcast customer and now have Time Warner. The joys of servers that don't work and e-mail that gets replicated and triplicated.
I wonder if they just trade customers back and forth, kind of like baseball cards?
I had a similar problem. When I moved, I switched over my comcast service. Unfortunately, the new service was about 50% more, and came with an abbreviated channel lineup. The real kicker is that I moved about 10 minutes away from where I previously lived, but because it's across a county line I get screwed.
The Time Warner - Comcast deal sounds suspiciously like the AT&T-Cingular. Two years ago, AT&T switched to Cingular ("Cingular is the new AT&T"), and now there are commercials promoting "AT&T is the new Cingular". WTF? Do they just rebrand themselves every six months?
It could be worse. You could have Cablevision, like mom and dad. They've screwed the pooch so far on cable, digital cable, internet AND have run the Rangers and Knicks into the ground.
As for Comcast, Ben had it in Jersey. I will say this: they might be a pain in the rear end, but in terms of programming, they're 5 steps ahead of Time Warner and like 10 miles ahead of Cablevision. They have a better grip on how to approach television programming, especially in terms of on-demand stuff (they've adopted a model kind of like iTunes).
Also, if I'm a TW customer switching over right now, I'm pretty stoked that Comcast is (hopefully) taking the time to do the right thing. It sucks for you, though.
You can sometimes get reasonable-speed internet over the cable tv net. Maybe there's a service provider in the area who can do that for you?
- JS
An apartment? You might see if someone around you has a wireless router that you can connect to. Get a cheap wireless card and see if you can get a signal. If it's encrypted, you could try to track down the owners to see if they'd let you piggyback until your cable is in. If it's not, then trying to contact the owners for permission would still be the right thing to do.
If you're up to hacking together a 'cantenna' you might even be able to connect to a public wireless network.
Hey, Mike, are you here in Houston? Give me a shout: bill.farrell@gmail.com
I'm a (former) TW Roadrunner customer and they have been very good in service. Can't complain.
Comcast, I don't know. They're stomping around like the 800-lb gorilla. All I know is that they killed my email domain, but I won't be getting a Comcast.com address, I assure you!
I don't know about the quality of cable TV in your area, but where I live, my Directv picture is lots better than my mother's cable picture, and that's not even counting the hd content.