Comcast changed the name of this customer to “Super Bitch Bauer” in their billing records after she complained about poor service.

Getting a firm deal from Comcast on a promotion or retention package has become increasingly difficult as the company points to terms and conditions in its contract that allow it to adjust pricing of equipment, service fees and surcharges at will.

One Broadband Reports reader signed up for a Comcast Double Play promotion that appeared to be a great deal until it turned into a major headache.

What Comcast promised:

• 105Mbps Extreme Internet plus Preferred 220 digital-channel TV package with free HBO price-locked for 24 months – $99.99
• First cable box free for 24 months
• HD X1 DVR Box – $7.99/mo for 24 months
• HD Service Fee – Free for 24 months
• Starz – $1/mo for 24 months
• Showtime – $1/mo for 24 months

The total price-locked contract price: $109.98/mo plus estimated taxes of $7.50 per month + free installation

After accepting Comcast’s offer, “Ngiovas” received an email confirmation that was radically different from what was originally offered. Instead of 105Mbps broadband, Comcast now offered 50Mbps, the first cable box was free for only one year, the X1 DVR deal was also only good for a year, the HD service fee was free for only six months, and a $60 installation fee now applied.

When Ngiovas complained about the discrepancy, Comcast explained their systems would not allow discounted fee promotions for longer than 12 months and the customer could call back and have a deal extended for an extra year. The installation fee was waived and the Internet speed was supposed to be corrected to reflect 105Mbps. Only it turned out it wasn’t.

A follow-up phone call with a “Customer Loyalty” agent revealed Comcast’s promotions are considerably less generous than one might think.

Comcast only commits to price-locking its service package — the $99.95 broadband and television bundle. Everything else is open to price changes at the whim of the cable company. The discounts and fees can and will change over the next two years and customers have no recourse to cancel their contract, unless they are willing to pay an early termination fee.

Getting Comcast to deliver what it originally promised required hand to hand negotiating combat.

The 105Mbps Extreme bundle was priced $20 higher than Ngiovas was originally quoted and the representative insisted there was no way to get the Extreme package for $99.95. When Ngiovas told the representative about Comcast’s “zero dollar” no-cost Extreme upgrade, the representative paused and then admitted yes, the free upgrade was suddenly available. But Ngiovas would have to switch to a different package that would be “price adjusted” to match the original offer, and the customer would also have to commit to stay with that package for a full two years.

No matter what Ngiovas argued, the commitment to provide 24 months of equipment discounts was not going to happen. The HD discount would end after six months, resulting in an additional $10 a month later this year. The DVR discount also ends after one year.

Because Comcast’s prices for Internet-only service is so high, the out-the-door price to add television service amounted to just $27 a month more, which makes Ngiovas’ $109 DirecTV service a poor deal.

Other Comcast customers who have been down this road predict Ngiovas is being set up for a Comcast billing nightmare.

“Hold on for the ride and check all your bills with a fine tooth comb,” offered one. Another suggested that Comcast sales representatives occasionally sell promotional packages they are not authorized to offer and Comcast’s order verification system catches and rescinds or modifies the offer.

“I would be wary and look at other options in case retentions can’t make the deal happen,” offered another.

Comcast’s own customer service forum is filled with thousands of complaints about billing errors and bait and switch promotions, including one customer promised a $10/mo Internet speed upgrade that ended up costing more than $60.

ESPN today filed a lawsuit against Verizon Communications, claiming FiOS TV’s new slimmed-down television packages violate ESPN’s contract provisions that forbid placing the network in an optional add-on “sports tier.”

Verizon’s new packages represent its efforts to control the cost of cable television. Custom TV offers a base package of networks for $55 with optional add-on channel bouquets covering genres like sports, lifestyle and family programming.

ESPN’s lawsuit, filed in New York Supreme Court, claims Verizon has no right to offer its networks as part of a theme-based package of optional channels.

A Verizon spokesperson shot back, “It looks like they are suing consumers to force them into a one-size-fits-all bundle.”

“Consumers have spoken loud and clear that they want choice, and the industry should be focused on giving consumers what they want,” Verizon said in a statement. ” We are well within our rights under our agreements to offer our customers these choices.”

A week after its deal with Comcast collapsed, Time Warner Cable may be in the buying mood.

The Wall Street Journal reports the cable giant approached privately held Cox Communications about a deal. Cox told them they weren’t interested.

You negotiated for a better rate from Time Warner Cable and thought you were all set for another year or two, only to discover the promotion ended early or never got applied at all.

You are not alone.

We did some negotiating of our own back in February and thought we managed an agreement to cut our bill from $175 to $112 — a savings of $63 a month. Instead, the first bill under the new rate was $150.

“You’d be surprised how many people never bother to pursue reneged on promotions like this,” said Sam Tremblay, a telecommunications bill analyst for a major regional supermarket chain.

Tremblay analyzes his employer’s telephone, broadband, and wireless bills that total close to $100,000 a month. He says he saved his employer over $50,000 in 2014 finding billing errors and getting companies to deliver on the rate promises made by salespeople.

“What a salesperson or customer service representative promises and what is actually compatible with their billing system are often two different things,” Tremblay tells us. “You are most at risk of billing errors when making changes to your account, especially if those changes involve a billing credit or special discount.”

Did you get what you were promised? (Image: Bruce Kushnick)

He explains that many billing systems are not tied directly to call center employees offering promotions or, in our case, customer retention offers. If an employee attempts to apply a promotion the customer was not entitled to receive, or one that had expired by the time it was processed by the billing system, it is typically rejected.

The latter is what happened to us, despite initially seeing the promotion applied.

Time Warner Cable often generates a temporary “virtual” mid-cycle bill available for review online when significant changes are made to your account. We were able to see the promotion correctly applied to this temporary “bill” but it was gone by the time the official bill was mailed. By the time we noticed it, a second inaccurate bill was ready to be processed.

Other customers have found their promotions canceled or unfulfilled, especially when the offer involved a high value gift card, tablet, or other electronics. As we reported earlier, fighting for a rebate card or tablet is often a waste of time. It is typically better to request a bill credit equal to the value of the gift card or promotional item because Time Warner relies on a third-party to fulfill those offers and getting an exception made to a rebate/offer rejection is extremely time-consuming and often fruitless. Use the savings from a substantial bill credit to buy your own tablet.

“A lot of customers just don’t bother to pursue things like this, believing they were bait and switched by customer service, have no recourse, and chalk it up as another reason to hate the cable company,” said Tremblay.

Not us. We pursued the mysterious disappearing promotion with Time Warner’s social media team who forwarded the complaint to the nearest regional office and we received a call early this morning with an apology.

It turned out Tremblay had figured out the problem before Time Warner Cable.

The retention promotion we were offered on Feb. 27 expired Feb. 28 — a Saturday. By the time the account changes were processed by Time Warner’s billing system the following Monday, the promised promotion could no longer be applied, hence a $150 bill instead of $112.

To resurrect the promised promotion, the Time Warner representative placed us on the next best valid promotion — $130 a month, and before we could complain about the $18 difference, also offered a $275 credit making up for overpayments already made and ensuring the two offers are financially equal.

Tremblay said such errors are usually unintentional, especially when there is lag time between the first customer contact and the date a company’s systems are updated with the changes.

“If a company’s call center or customer-facing system is not directly tied with the billing system, it is easy to apply a credit or promotion the customer isn’t entitled to receive based on the rules programmed into the billing system,” Tremblay said. “Once the change is received by the billing system, it rejects it.”

He added the mistake Time Warner Cable made was not following up after the promotion was rejected, correcting it before an unexpected higher bill was generated.

“A customer should not have to call a second time to get a provider to live up to its original commitment, but it happens all the time,”  he said. “In my experience, 80% of billing errors are in their favor, 20% in ours.”

Phillip “Victory is Ours” Dampier

It has been 14 months since we heard for the first time Comcast was planning to acquire Time Warner Cable. It was the night of February 12, 2014. I still remember where I was the moment I first learned the news.

Stop the Cap! has maintained a civil relationship with Time Warner Cable for the most part over our seven-year struggle fighting usage caps, lousy broadband, and high prices. We fought one major battle with the company in April of 2009, when Time Warner executives planned a compulsory usage cap experiment on customers in Rochester, N.Y., Austin and San Antonio, Tex., and Greensboro, N.C.

Just as we had done with Frontier Communications a year earlier, we successfully beat down their efforts to impose usage allowances on customers already paying a significant chunk of money for broadband Internet access. After that battle ended, Time Warner Cable changed their position on usage caps and stated emphatically that customers should always have the option of unmetered/unlimited access. They have kept their word. In fact, their optional usage cap experiments have been a spectacular flop, attracting less than 1% of their customer base and delivering the message we’ve tried to get across the industry for years: customer hate usage caps, usage-based billing, and speed throttles.

Comcast is a company that long ago stopped listening to their customers. It applied an arbitrary usage cap on all their customers in retaliation for a FCC decision that disallowed them from running hidden speed throttles on peer-to-peer Internet traffic. Comcast lied about throttling traffic, paid homeless people to stack a hearing on the issue to keep company critics out of the room, and slapped the caps on in the fall of 2008 with the flimsy excuse it represented “fairness” to customers. Only later, we would learn usage caps were never about “fairness” or good traffic management. It’s just a way to deter customers from spending too much time on the Internet, especially if that time is spent watching online videos. Too much time spent watching Netflix might convince you your cable TV package isn’t necessary any longer.

Comcast customer service horror stories reached a level unparalleled by other cable companies when a Comcast predator-installer was convicted of raping and strangling to death 23-year old Comcast customer Urszula Sakowska,  whose lifeless body was found in a bathtub inside her Chicago-area home back in 2006. But Triplett’s violent service calls didn’t stop there. He also faced charges in the death of 39-year old Janice Ordidge, a Comcast customer in Hyde Park. Those two Comcast customers lost their lives. In 2009, another Comcast installer set a Pennsylvania customer’s house on fire. Other installers stole jewelry right out of customers’ homes. Others have exposed themselves in front of female customers or fallen asleep on their couches.

Billing errors are the stuff of legend at Comcast. Offshore call centers with language barriers, inept customer service, and long, long, long lines at cable stores with windows only partially manned by agents sitting behind bullet-proof glass also helped cultivate a customer relationship that can best be described as “perp and victim.”

Comcast isn’t just a bad cable company, it’s a menace. We didn’t have to spend hours proving our case. Fortunately, Comcast’s appalling reputation preceded it. Outside of two executive suites in Philadelphia and New York, nobody was for supersizing Comcast. Just to make sure our regulators knew this, we traveled to Buffalo in June of last year to testify at a Public Service Commission hearing on the subject of the merger. We didn’t mince words.

Sure, there were non-profit groups like the Boys & Girls Club that absolutely sullied their reputation pushing for the merger (Comcast wrote large checks to the organization so you need not give the group a single penny of your money in the future). “Civil Rights” organizations like the Urban League, NAACP, and others that used to defend minority rights now concern themselves with defending the interests of giant cable companies, just as long as they get a nice check in the mail with Comcast’s name on it. Among the worst of all – Shakedown Al Sharpton who will either be your merger deal’s best friend or will go away and leave victims of racism in peace, if you cut his organization a big fat check. (Now that the merger has collapsed, perhaps Comcast-owned MSNBC will end the thinly veiled quid-pro-quo arrangement it has with the man that gives him an hour a night to perform a talent train wreck.)

My own state assemblyman, Joe Morelle, who served as New York’s interim assembly speaker for about five minutes literally plagiarized his letter in support of the Comcast merger (after cashing their check) almost word-for-word from Comcast press releases and congressional testimony. Say it ain’t so, Joe!

N.Y. State Assembly Leader Joe Morelle: “The combination of Comcast and Time Warner Cable will create a world-class communications, media and technology company to help meet the increasing consumer demand for advanced digital services on multiple devices in homes, workplaces and on-the-go.”

David Cohen, executive vice-president, Comcast: “The combination of Comcast and TWC will create a world-class communications, media, and technology company to help meet the insatiable consumer demand for advanced digital services on multiple devices in homes, workplaces, and on-the-go.”

There was not a doubt in my mind that replacing Time Warner Cable with Comcast would be a disaster for Time Warner Cable customers. Despite promises Comcast would upgrade Time Warner’s network, it would also upgrade customer bills, resorting in higher priced service, higher modem fees, and lousy customer service. Comcast vice president David Cohen also made it clear usage caps would be a part of our life within five years. No amount of protesting or rational argument would stop Comcast from being Comcast. Don’t like it? Just try to cancel.

Time Warner Cable can be bad but it is no Comcast.

Malone: Waiting in the wings?

Life will be just fine without Comcast, but danger lurks on the horizon. Still interested in the possibility of taking over Time Warner Cable is the smaller Charter Communications, now effectively controlled by cable magnate John Malone (he owns his own castles). Malone has a long history of enriching himself at the expense of customers with no other choices for cable/broadband service. He used to control Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), a cable company that literally threatened city officials who didn’t do what TCI wanted.

We remain unsure exactly what will happen next. Charter could bid aggressively to buy Time Warner Cable, Time Warner Cable could go it alone, or Time Warner Cable could start buying other cable companies (like Charter).

What we hope will happen is Time Warner Cable will refocus its energy on expanding its Maxx upgrade program as quickly as possible to reach all Time Warner Cable markets with faster broadband and a better cable TV experience. We also hope the company will stand by its word that compulsory usage caps are off the table.

I’d like to thank all of our readers who took the time to get involved in the fight and helped make a difference. Wall Street and Washington, as well as Comcast CEO Brian Roberts are all shocked the merger deal collapsed after a torrent of criticism from consumers. It also left state regulators cautious about how to proceed. New York’s Public Service Commission delayed making a decision eight times, recognizing the merger as a hot potato.

Our experience demonstrates that ordinary citizens can wield considerable power when unified and involved. We’ve proved that with multiple victories on the usage cap front as well as the AT&T/T-Mobile merger and Net Neutrality.

Let the fight for better broadband continue!