With all due respect, your customer service policy should be based on doing the right thing regardless of the forum, as opposed to simply responding to those who have an audience.
The data caps you've recently put into place in my market are going to effectively double my account price per month. I look forward to the day that I have other choices.
No one is blaming individual employees. Quite the opposite, in fact—they're blaming the organization for failing to address issues unless the right individual is reached.
That's been my experience, as well. In two instances (one business class, one residential), I had issues getting their construction department to actually do the work they promised until I was able to get through to the escalation department—once via Twitter, once (IIRC) on dslreports.com back when the Comcast direct forum was monitored. Once the escalation department was engaged, things moved very quickly, with them calling me almost daily with status updates.
There are clearly individuals at Comcast who care about customer service. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be the ones in charge of organizational policies and processes.
Agreed. I recently decided to give Comcast another go because my current provider has some horribly bad upstream speeds, but even with brand new service, I seem to be having issues where my connection drops 4-5 times a day. It is not too big a deal when you're trying to work from home, but it can be a massive pain in the neck when you're trying to play anything online. I've been trying to resolve this issue with their customer support but I've gotten nowhere so far and feel like I'll probably just go ahead and cancel out of the contract before my first month is up.
They do advertise that they spend millions of dollars on improving their customer support, but I've yet to see anything happen on their end. Amusingly, our Comcast business contract at work has at least a couple of issues every week, too. We only don't notice them if they are to happen over the weekend, but when CRON jobs that require internet connection haven't run over the weekend, it's easy to figure out who needs blamed.
I agree with you. I'm troubled though by this new era of customer service where the focus is on having a team of people who monitor social media for the loudest complaints and devote resources to solving those out of fear of bad PR.
I do my best (customer support is not my day job) - if you are having issues I'd encourage you to try out the tool I helped build here: https://speedexperience.xfinity.com/
Some listing of what the actual issue is would be kinda useful, even if you shove it in a collapsible div to hide it away.
I (and most people) are more likely to rage-quit and go do something else than try to navigate three layers of outsourced customer service that is designed and optimized to deflect people, waste their time, and only if they are sufficiently insistent, and border-line belligerent, maybe give them an answer more involved than "unplug your modem and plug it back in"
At least one employee would be to blame, right? Comcast's network hasn't become sentient, and isn't actively rebelling against human businesses by shutting down random ports. At some point, someone either made an explicit decision to do this, or decided to skimp on training.
It could also be an endemic culture problem, where lots of people skimp on lots of tiny things to the point that the final performance goes down the drain. No one to blame, but everyone to blame.
> I look forward to the day that I have other choices.
Same here. They are very aware that we have no other choices. They will continue provide the least amount of service for the greatest cost until this changes.
The week after google fiber arrived in my neighborhood, my cable provider "spontaneously" decided to double my connection speed for the same price, "because we care about our customers and want them to have the best experience possible."
I had Comcast when I lived in Chicago. They basically run that city. You can't get any decent internet anywhere else. All the other providers for some reason in the city, didn't cover any neighborhood I was in.
The biggest thing I liked, moving back to Iowa was decent internet provider.
>For a CMTS port to enter the Near Congestion State, traffic flowing to or from that CMTS port must exceed a specified level (the "Port Utilization Threshold") for a specific period of time (the "Port Utilization Duration").
>Given our experience as described above, we determined that a starting point for the upstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 70 percent and the downstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 80 percent. For the Port Utilization Duration, we determined that the starting point should be approximately 15 minutes
>Thus, over any 15-minute period, if an average of more than 70 percent of a port's upstream bandwidth capacity or more than 80 percent of a port's downstream bandwidth capacity is utilized, that port is determined to be in a Near Congestion State.
>For a user to enter an Extended High Consumption State, he or she must consume greater than a certain percentage of his or her provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth(the "User Consumption Threshold") for a specific length of time (the "User Consumption Duration").
>we have determined that the appropriate starting point for the User Consumption Threshold is 70 percent of a subscriber's provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth, and that the appropriate starting point for the User Consumption Duration is 15 minutes
> A user's traffic is released from a BE state when the user's bandwidth consumption drops below 50 percent of his or her provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth for a period of approximately 15 minutes.
hmm, actually i don't think i caught how much your speeds are actually reduced.
Its throttled until you've used less than 50% of what you pay for for at least 15 minutes.
That threshold is so low specifically so that a line doesn't end up cycling between throttled and not every interval if its 79% once then 81% the next, etc.
It seems obvious to me that Comcast et al are vastly overselling beyond their capacity.
They then market these strategies as methods to ensure quality to their customers, when their customers bought a service that was misadvertised as having enough capacity for them in the first place.
Just like airlines - they sell more tickets than they have seats, because they figure they can squeeze more profit out of the people who paid for a ticket but didnt show up, then when everyone shows up, someone has to get bumped.
I believe it is that if you use more than 80% and someone else is using 60%, IF throttling occurs on the network, the person using 60% will have priority over you.
Question #1: Is the CMTS Upstream Port Utilization at an average
of OVER 70% for OVER 15 minutes?
Result #1: CMTS marked in a Near Congestion State, indicating
congestion *may* occur soon.
Action #1: Search most recent analysis timeframe (approx. 15 mins.)
of IPDR usage data.
Question #2: Are any users consuming an average of OVER 70% of
provisioned upstream bandwidth for OVER 15 minutes?
Result #2: No action taken.
Result #3: Change user's upstream traffic from Priority Best Effort
(PBE) to Best Effort (BE).
Question #3: Is the user in Best Effort (BE) consuming an average
of LESS THAN 50% of provisioned upstream bandwidth
over a period of 15 minutes?
Result #4: Change user's upstream traffic back to Priority Best
Effort (PBE) from Best Effort (BE).
The data caps you've recently put into place in my market are going to effectively double my account price per month. I look forward to the day that I have other choices.