Here’s an odd situation: Reader Stephen says that Comcast (his old cable company) disconnected his new Verizon cable. He’s not sure what exactly he should do about it and would like your advice.
August 8th. 3pm. My Verizon cable service is disconnected. Both set top boxes are non-responsive, but my internet service is booming along. I reboot the Verizon equipment a few times over the next 3 hours, but it never comes back on. I call Verizon’s “Fibre Solutions Center” and deal with some rather incompetent customer service. They blame me for rewiring my apartment. They say that they don’t see any issues. They deactivate and reactive my cable boxes. They tell me there is no problem. They tell me that the cable boxes are broken. None of what they do works. Every call is ended with the representative telling me that my service “will be back within the hour”. It never is. They send me 2 new cable boxes. They don’t work. I called ever day from Friday to Monday. They refused to send out a technician because they didn’t see the issue on their end. Finally after going up the chain I am told they can have someone out by Wednesday evening. This was not really that acceptable considering all of the Olympics I missed, but if they were sending someone out I should be happy.
In speaking with comcast today I am told that I shouldn’t have received a bill for the month of September since my Comcast service was physically disconnected the evening of Aug 8. The rep gives me a little background and says that until they physically sever the connection, my service with Comcast continues. At that point I was no longer receiving Comcast signals over my coax. I was 100% Verizon.
On Wednesday, August 13th a Verizon technician arrives at my apartment. He is happy to say that he already found the problem. Someone with access to the LOCKED network closet disconnected me from the Verizon lines. That someone was not from Verizon I was told. That someone severed the lines without permission. Now I find out that that somone was a Comcast technician.
Where do I stand on this? What can I do? How do I get anything from Comcast on this? What should I do with Verizon. I am still going through executive customer service within both companies but I’m not sure what the exact implications of this happen to be.
We think you should call your local government and find out which department regulates cable in your area. File an official complaint against Comcast for disconnecting your cable and continuing to bill you after you had already switched to Verizon.
As far as getting compensation from your old cable company, we’re not sure that you’ll have much luck since you’ve severed your business relationship with Comcast. We’re sure they’d love for you to switch back, but we suspect that you’re not going to want to do that.
We’d concentrate on asking Verizon for a credit to compensate you for the service interruption rather than get into a bunch of “he said, she said” nonsense with the cable companies.
Has this happened to any of you? How did you handle it?
(Photo: Tyler Durden’s Imaginary Friend )
UPDATE: Comcast says they’re sending someone out to Stephen’s house to investigate.
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@dottat1: These shared/locked facilities are common in telecoms. Lots of phone substations will contain equipment from multiple LECs and LD providers. Many apartments were originally built assuming only one cable provider would be allowed in the complex, but when the FCC ruled that apartments could not limit access competing cable services they had to let multiple companies into the wiring cabinet/room.
This happened all the time when I worked at Charter (don’t work there anymore.) Someone would subscribe for just internet access and Charter’s “special” contractors would see the DirecTV/DN connection and cut it.
Those were ALWAYS Sup Callback calls, and I can’t say I blame them. I hear a lot of stories about Comcast, but can they REALLY be worse than Charter?
I think people saying this was done on purpose are overreacting.
I think Comcast isn’t taking this very seriously. Comcast is getting my vote in 2009. They are trying harder!
@2719: Even Comcast themselves can’t say for sure if it was done on purpose. I’m sure it isn’t a company directive, but an employee or contractor who thinks he’ll score brownie points by severing competitors lines is not out of the question. Nor is plain and simple incompetence or poor training. It really comes down to how clearly the wires were labeled or if the technician traced the wires prior to cutting and securing them.
“UPDATE: Comcast says they’re sending someone out to Stephen’s house to investigate.”
READ: Disconnect it again…
According to what you said, Comcast certainly made unauthorized access
to a locked cabinet in order to do the disconnection. This is
trespass; you ought to (a) file criminal charges against them for
that trespass; and (b) include the tresspass in a civil suit against
them.
A RICO lawsuit *would* be a little over the top, I think…
–
Carlie J. Coats, Jr.,Ph.D.
6502 Glen Forrest Dr. home: (919) 493-7695
Chapel Hill, NC 27517 carlie@jyarborough.com
Chief Systems Architect carlie.coats@baronams.com
Environmental Modeling Center carlie_coats@ncsu.edu
Baron Advanced Meteorological Systems, LLC.
920 Main Campus Drive, Suite 101
Raleigh, NC 27606 phone: (919)424-4444 / fax: (919)424-4401
http://www.baronams.com/staff/coats/index.html
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Sure the **** out of Comcast. Enough of their BS.
Since Verizon FiOS runs it’s signal over coax for the video service (See wikipedia FiOS article if you want proof) and you live in an MDU (Multi Dwelling Unit) Comcast may have the right to disconnect any feed coming into the lock box that is not part of their service. This depends on the contract with the MDU’s owner and who actually owns the cables in the building. Yes, in some situations cable companies may have ownership of the actual cable lines inside an MDU all the way to either an outlet or to a junction panel inside each unit. Thus legally preventing other services (Satellite, other cable co., fiber to premise) from using the cables. In these cases the “authorized cable company” is well within their rights to disconnect any feed trying to use the buildings internal distribution network since they own it.
I have ideas as to why contracts are setup like this but I’m not well versed in the legal side of it. From my experience it has always depended on the apartment complex, sometimes I’d be told to leave it, other times I’d be told to disconnect and removed the offending wire and write an unauthorized access report.
What you should really do, and all of us for that matter is ask the FCC why they said exclusive contracts for service inside MDU complexes would be considered illegal but never stated a date when this law was to be active by.
Yes, once upon a time I did work for Comcast.