The Comcast Experience

June 17, 2016

I’m going to use this post to chronicle my experience of transferring Comcast’s Xfinity TV and internet service over to a new (to me) house. Let’s face it, they’ve pumped a ton of ad dollars into campaigns stating they’ll be the one friend who will be there to help you while others bail on you during your move. Well, they already bailed once on me. Here we go.

Prior to house offer

We finally found a house that checked most of our boxes. I’m a web developer that, ironically, has moved into two prior houses that never had Comcast hooked up so I knew I should do my due diligence and confirm the new house could get service. Comcast confirmed it could receive service, we made our offer and got the house. Sweet. This is going to be rad. I can code from a nice huge deck on a corner lot overlooking the neighborhood. Commence life.

June 7, 2016

The above date may be off by a day or two because I wasn’t planning on documenting this whole thing, but moving forward I want to be as accurate as possible so I can be fair and represent the facts as they are.

At this point we were still in our apartment. I logged into our account via their website and jumped around to a section allowing me to schedule a move. They asked for my new address and congratulated me by saying they could perform the transfer of service.

This was fantastic because the previous owners of the house had lived there for 30 years. In that time Comcast service had never been installed. Make that three houses in a row that have never had Comcast service installed prior to moving in.

The first available appointment was June 16. We got our keys on the 10th and could have used service earlier, but we could deal.

June 16, 2016

It’s the day before a tech is supposed to come out and initiate service at our new house, so I call to confirm the appointment for 1:00pm on the 17th.

“Sorry sir, you don’t have an appointment scheduled.”

What?! I’ve already waited longer than I wanted to kick this thing off and now there’s no record of an appointment. It gets better. They could see where I had made the appointment in their records, but the appointment was never scheduled? So, chalk up one big fail for their website scheduling process. It failed.

I tend to lean towards chats and websites for doing this type of thing because I can document things easier. Chat transcripts can be saved and websites can be screenshotted (probably not a word). However, I think phone calls will be necessary moving forward to triple-confirm things.

Anywhoo, they reschedule the appointment for next Wednesday. So, I’m without an internet connection for nearly another week and having to push client work. I’ll probably need to contact them again in the next couple days to talk to them about being charged for all this time I’m not able to use their service.

What really sucks, and this isn’t entirely their fault, but I know a tech is going to come out and say,

“This house has never had service.”

“Nope, we talked about that with your reps on the phone”, I’ll reply.

“Okay, well we’re going to have to get someone out here to figure out where to run the connection to your house.”

At that point, it’ll probably be another week or so to have some specialized techs come out to evaluate the situation. Considering my past experiences with this, I’ll be surprised if I have service by the end of July.

June 22, 2016

Kevin saves the day! For now…

We had a two hour window from 12-2pm. Kevin came at around 1:00pm. No problems there. He’d looked ahead of time and was aware this was going to be a new hookup. We canvased up and down the street a bit and found the box that serviced ours and our neighbor’s home.

At that point he was able to run a temporary coax line down the property line and around to the back of the house where we connected it to an existing entry into the home. He did a nice job of securing the line to the siding and making it look as nice as cable can.

He then went up into the attic and replaced the older splitters so that we had good signal strength to all the rooms. Long story short… I’m updating this post via my own wireless network. I’m also enjoying some High West whiskey to celebrate. Having an internet connection is kind of a big deal to a web dev and should be acknowledged with booze.

A crew will have to come out in the coming weeks to burry the line. We’re on a hill with a lot of mature landscaping so that could be a little bonkers, but we’ll deal with it as it comes. All in all, today’s Comcast experience was great. I expected a fiasco, but it went about as smooth as it could have gone.

Credit where credit is due.

July 28, 2016

After running our connection off a temporary line, a crew came out and buried some conduit and ran a new coax line to the back of our property. They had to go under and around existing plants and I would say then did about as good of a job as you could given the circumstances. I didn’t come out to any plants that were destroyed and they placed everything else where it belonged.

I believe the only thing that remains is to have one final tech come out and switch over to the permanent line. I’m crossing my fingers that this is an easy switch and this ends up being a relatively painless install.