All Consumerist reader Dan wants is to get Internet access to the house he just purchased. Shouldn’t be a big deal since Comcast says the building was previously wired for its service. Problem is, the cable running to his house no longer connects with his house, but instead now snakes off across his yard — on top of the ground — to a neighbor; and Comcast wants Dan to pay up just to come out and fix the mess.

See, the cable in Dan’s town doesn’t run on utility poles, but underground. There’s a piece of conduit on the outside of his house where the cable comes up from underground and is supposed to enter the building.

But as you can see from the above photo, at some point someone pulled the cable out of that conduit and attached the orange cable that runs across his side yard and onto a neighbor’s property. Thus, the cable that should be feeding the Internet to his home is instead providing access to someone else.

Dan says the connectors and the grade of cable used appear to be professional, though he can’t say for sure whether or not this botch-job was done by a Comcast installer who inexplicably thought it was okay to not bury the orange cable, but leave it sitting in the grass.

“I do not want to touch the cable going into the neighbor’s yard because it looks shady,” writes Dan. “I have no idea if Comcast did it or someone else did.”

The big pain in the rear is that Comcast won’t come out and fix the problem without charging Dan.

Before discovering there was an issue, Dan says he contacted Comcast to see if he’d need to get service installed. The person he spoke to confirmed that this house previously had service so Dan should be able to do the free self-install kit for new Internet customers. That certainly sounds better than the $40-60 he’d need to pay for installation.

But when he told them about the mysterious orange cable, he was suddenly told that he would have to pay the installation fee, even though his house already had — before someone swiped the service — a Comcast connection.

“I have never heard of Comcast charging to fix outside cabling issues,” says Dan. “It’s like the electric company charging you to fix a downed electrical line.”

He says he mentioned the problem on Twitter, which resulted in a call from the Comcast executive customer service, but even that went nowhere.

“The person told me there was nothing they could do since I do not have a physical cable going inside my house,” he tells Consumerist. “They needed to send someone out to set it up and that was a charge on my part.”

He says he had planned on just sucking up the charge, but feels like this is not how Comcast should treat customers, let alone someone who is new to their service.

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