Comcast and me

What you wrote was eerily familiar. I went through much the same song and dance with Comcast myself in San Francisco.

Their HD feed was regularly terrible with frequent video freezes, pixelation and loss of audio. Assurances that they would make this right came frequently and earnestly. And they tried--sort of. They came out and re-wired my house. It didn't help. They changed out the converter box. That didn't help either. They re-wired the feed to the vault on the street. No luck. And yes, on occasion, they would credit small portions of my bill. To be fair, once they even comped me an entire month of service.

However, they continued to blame me and say that this was my problem--even though I reported, as did others in the Bay Area, that the issue was system-wide and likely originating at their Sutro Tower head end. We were all experiencing the same issue, but apparently no one told the head end technicians or the service guys that. Eventually, after three years of being the victim, I canceled my service. I then went out and bought a Samsung HD tuner and a Terk HD antenna from Best Buy.

True, I lost ESPN, Discovery a few channels of minor interest, but, boy did I save.The total equipment cost was about $300. Installation was essentially free since I did the installation myself using time that I would normally have spent listening to Comcast's beautiful music on hold. Comcast was charging me nearly $100 a month for their lowest tier HD (no HBO, no Showtime, no Cinemax, etc.) So for a one time cost of $300, I saved almost $1,200 a year in recurring costs. How's that for ROI?

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