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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