GatewayRedbirds.com

I thought when I lived in the St Louis area that Mediacom was the absolute worst company I'd ever dealt with repeatedly. Our internet and TV went out way too often.

Then I moved to Chicago, and I was wrong. Comcast is an abomination. Our internet drops, fails, slows to a crawl, or dies on a daily - DAILY - basis. I asked the woman whom I was 'working with' - read: Yelling at - just how many records of phone calls to their service I'd had to make in the last year. She said she couldn't tell me, but gave her same spiel.

I'm not even on the account - it's my upstairs neighbors; their router, their service. I pay em a bit every month to pretty much monopolize their bandwidth, so I can't complain too much. But, it's me that makes the phone calls since the girls don't know things like "My Tracert continues to drop 33% of its packets to your level3.net gateway, can you explain why you have never dealt with this issue?"

Insert a curse word every third word of this post to get an idea of how upset I am at this terrible, terrible company.

You understand that the more you yell at them the less they are going to help you.

I am a super saiyan 3 at talking/explaining/moaning/griping to tech support people. The only time I was rude to the lady today was when she tried for the third time to tell me to try resetting my router. The trick is to get to the guys (and some gals!) who actually have some experience with networks, who don't make me plug away at the mundane crap that I obviously tried before calling.

I haven't been as lucky with comcast, but in my time with Mediacom, we had a couple hundred bucks worth of credit to our account through my hours lost on their support lines.

We rarely have any trouble or outages with our Comcast services out here. And we get TV, phone and internet.

Ah Mac, you're really starting to earn your Chicago stripes now. Comcast is an outrage perpetrated on humanity and dealing with them is a Chicago right of passage. One of my favorite anecdotes about Comcast involves a buddy of mine who moved out of an apartment, canceled his cable, but continued to be billed. This has happened to me as well but what I think takes this story to the next level is that my buddy had a long bus ride back from the suburbs after work and every day he'd just sit on the bus, whip out the cellphone, and call Comcast customer "service" and berate them for their continuing failure to correct the problem. People on the bus would openly applaud some of the more inspired jabs because everyone who lives here will at some point experience a personal war against that company.

Do these companies ever make changes in response to customer complaints? I wouldn't even bother complaining to them about the third level router dropping packets because I assume that there isn't the slightest chance that they're going to fix it for me.

Well, I'm trying to get the girls to cancel it and go to ATnT. It's weird how hard it is to get credits with them, though; I've threatened to cancel the service a bunch of times, to little progress. Mediacom would jump out of their shoes to throw a week credit in. Which is strange, since Mediacom was about the only choice we had in Belleville, and Comcast has solid competition out here.

Too bad my dishnetwork's internet is so absurdly high, or I'd just spring for that. 200 install and 80 a month for a decent speed? Gross!

I guess I shouldn't complain about RCN here in Chicago.

Is this some infrastructure thing? I have Comcast in Indianapolis, and I've had one major issue that they seemed to have resolved last month.

And check this [expletive] out:

Mac, I live in Belleville and don't know of anyone that uses that company. Hey, it's Mediacom t-shirt girl.