Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Ahh-choo, there goes the cable . . .

The cable tech came and told us (big surprise) that our tiling and signal loss was the fault of the cold weather which our outside equipment was not capable of withstanding. He had attended a Comcast training session which involved placing the equipment in the vicinity of dry ice to demonstrate the effects. It caused the signal to rise which resulted in tiling and intermittent sound. Finally the signal was lost all together.

Exactly so. We have been experiencing the same effects. Comcast is not going to install cold resistant equipment for the relatively few days a year that our temperature falls below the threshold the current equipment can withstand. In street terms: suck it up, sucka.

I did discover that I should call and report tiling every time it happens. I also will record the effects on the DVR, which I did this time. Why? Because Comcast will give back pro-rated credit for the viewing time lost, beginning with the date of the call and ending with the visit of the (helpless) technician.

The cold weather signal loss is not covered by Comcast's customer satisfaction guarantee. That guarantee is for new customers who have trouble within 30 days of installation or for when a service technician is late for his service call. That's it. Those are the only instances when customers must be satisfied.

Oh, the credit we received? Nine bucks. Not to be sneezed at but we will probably sneeze anyway because our sub-tropical weather
. . . isn't.

3 comments:

Zeta said...

You need Uverse as soon as possible. I'll contact a tech who has connections and see what he can do. I doubt he can do anything; however, this would also be a nice commercial comparison. Food for thought.

Big Ed said...

I hate it when you are just out of range. You would think they would fix that.

ol Doc said...

We use DTV and the only tiling we see happens during rain storms. Cold doesn't seem to bother the dish. We were kind of bothered by the Customer No Service when we lost signal at the bedroom receiver. We called and went thru the menu to establish we had a problem not fixable without a service call so they kindly scheduled one for two days later. Between 8AM and Noon. Oddly enough, the computer called us back within 20 minutes to ask if we wanted to keep the appointment. We said Keep It.

Two days later T. waited at home. No one came. When I got home that evening I called Cust Svc. They said their computerized scheduler had called the day before and since there was no answer at the phone number THE COMPUTER CANCELLED THE SERVICE CALL.

Top that!