Reader Rex knows that it’s likely squirrels chewed into his cable because it’s happened before, but Comcast doesn’t seem to care. They’d rather keep sending technicians to swap out his modem. Over. And Over. And Over. Rex writes:

I’ve told them either they are throttling the bandwidth for my neighborhood or it’s a problem on the pole going to my house. They had found a problem there previously; apparently it looked like squirrels chewed through the box and severed components. Squirrels are apparently bad-asses when it comes to taking down infrastructures.

We suppose Comcast could have kept Rex as a customer if they’d bothered to just take a look at his potential squirrel damage. Comcast even promised that they would. They didn’t. Now Rex has Speakeasy. Sadly, when we told him that they’d just been purchased by Best Buy he said a word that nice ladies don’t type on the internet.

Rex writes:

I had problems with Comcast High Speed internet over the period of years using their service. It was the only option for me at the time to use them to get broadband internet in my neighborhood because DSL wasn’t available. Over the course of many years using their services, I would get a series of outages. It took them MONTHS to solve this problem until finally it was resolved.

Fast forward to December of last year and the outage issues started all over again. Usually it would be a modem or connection issue (you would see lights blinking on the modem that shouldn’t be), but that wasn’t the case. The modem was connected and I was just getting a shoddy throughput for my bandwidth. Whether it was low speeds or no response from websites at all, it wasn’t working properly. I should also add I bought into Comcast’s 8mb down/768k up package, so I thought peak hours wouldn’t be an issue.

Over the course of the last three months, I have been on the phones and had people from Comcast at the house 3-4 times at least. Every time is the same problem. When it was on the phones it was “We can contact your modem fine and everything looks good here.” If it looked good on my end I wouldn’t have called you for the 5th time. And the same with technicians at the house (whom by the way, they outsource now) “Everything looks good, I don’t see a problem with the lines, or the modem. Let me switch out your modem anyway though.”

I’ve told them either they are throttling the bandwidth for my neighborhood or it’s a problem on the pole going to my house. They had found a problem there previously; apparently it looked like squirrels chewed through the box and severed components. Squirrels are apparently bad-asses when it comes to taking down infrastructures. At any rate, I told the technicians it’s either one way or the other. Not once have I seen them even investigate the telephone pole to check the box or line. The last technician at the house said “I’ll have my manager look into this.” They went so far as to tell me that their manager would come look at the pole. And we never heard a follow-up.

Finally I gave up on them and bought Speakeasy DSL’s plan for 6mb down and 768k up at more than I originally paid for Comcast. Is it a loss? I really don’t think so when I constantly had people either on the phone or in my face scratching their heads because the problem wasn’t escalated. They lost an internet customer. At least with Speakeasy, I’ve heard their support has won awards and if I run into another problem they might know what to do.

We often hear this sort of thing from Comcast subscribers, unless you have a simple problem…you’re out of luck. A problem that involves wildlife? Forget about it.—MEGHANN MARCO

(Photo: are you my rik?)

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