We’ve made it a sort of hobby to post our Comcast experiences here at CG, more often than not because they’ve been terribletastic and we needed to be angry publicly for our own satisfaction. This time however it’s quite a different case so read on if you’d like to hear that rarest of tales: a tale of good customer service.
Last night I was doing some heavy downloading and uploading (as one does) and after about midnight the whole thing cut out completely. I tried the usual remedies and eventually went to bed thinking they were finally onto me, and what would I do with the hard drives, and what if they found that, and would they check behind the bookcase? Fortunately when I got up this morning, the modem’s little lights were twinkling with activity, though when I got online it was dog slow. My upstream was constantly interrupted and never more than 25KB/s.
Curses! They were on to me after all, I thought, but when I fired up a bandwidth test it shot straight past a meg a second. I called Comcast, and after a short time when 1-800-COMCAST was down, I got in, hit about 50 digits, and ended up talking with a nice lady in customer service. She threw a bunch of packets my way, noted a lot of outrageous ping times and packet loss (she seemed to know what she was doing, I didn’t have to break through to the next tier), and chatted about how she was on her way to Vegas tomorrow.
I mentioned that I paid extra for the extra bandwidth and thought I might have been throttled, but she said that wasn’t the case and without further ado gave me a credit on my account. And not just a little credit! My internet bill is ~$45. She reduced it to $25 for the next three months, then $35 for the three after that, with no change in service.
What the hell?! At the moment I’m still stuck with a weak upstream until they fix whatever ghost in the system is slowing me down, but at least I know I’m not paying extra for it. Thanks to the girl I talked to, have a good time in Vegas, and thanks for reminding me that sometimes even Comcast can take care of its customers.