Comcast’s error correctly noting the return of a customer’s cable modem has cost a Washington, D.C. man his credit rating and $26,000 in additional mortgage fees. Now the man is suing Comcast to get his credit restored and his money back.

In June 2010, Marc Himmelstein bid Comcast adieu. The cable giant informed Himmelstein he was due a refund of $123.19 after the company’s equipment was removed from his home. But the company’s cable modem was left behind by mistake, costing Himmelstein $220 in unreturned equipment charges.

Himmelstein claims nobody from Comcast notified him about the missing modem, nor did he receive a bill for the difference between the equipment fee and his credit balance. He learned about his debt to Comcast when he called the company in August wondering where his refund was.

Once he discovered Comcast’s problem, Himmelstein says he returned the modem. Comcast promised to remove the unreturned equipment charge and assured him the matter was now resolved.

But Himmelstein ultimately never received his $123.19 refund. Instead, Comcast transferred his “past due” account to Credit Protection Association, which reported Himmelstein delinquent to the country’s three largest credit-reporting agencies.

That was bad timing. Himmelstein discovered Comcast’s hit on his credit in the spring of 2011, just as he was refinancing his mortgage. The mortgage lender insisted he pay an additional point in interest — $26,000 — because of the delinquent item.

Boasberg

Himmelstein filed a breach of contract claim and negligence against Comcast in D.C. federal court. Also named is Credit Protection Association, charged with negligence and violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Himmelstein wants both companies to cover the $26,000 paid to the mortgage company, all attorney fees, and the $123.19 remaining credit balance Comcast still has not refunded.

In October, Comcast moved to dismiss all charges, and District Judge James Boasberg last week agreed to throw out claims of constructive fraud and “bad faith” breach of contract, but left the central claim of negligence stand. The case will either now proceed in court or Comcast and the collection agency will offer to settle.

Consumers canceling service should always insist on a printed receipt whenever company equipment in returned, and that receipt should be kept safe for at least six months in case of discrepancies. If an expected refund does not materialize or if a dispute arises, always write down the name of the representative spoken to on the phone or in person. Most cable companies do not refer past due accounts for outside collection activity until they are 90-120 days past due. If a collection company contacts you, demand written verification of the debt, which will force them to produce proof of the amount owed.

Lingering billing disputes should be referred to executive level customer service. Most cable operators have these specialized customer service representatives available to address red tape and special circumstances. Calling the company’s corporate office and asking to speak to the CEO will almost always get transferred to executive level customer service. Filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau will also be answered by an executive level representative. In the case of Comcast, e-mailing [email protected] may also prove worthwhile.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has called Verizon’s notification that phone service in lower Manhattan will not be back to normal until late next spring “unacceptable.”

Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge ruined at least 95 percent of Verizon Communications’ landline network in the lower half of Manhattan leaving numerous businesses without phone service with little hope service will be restored this year.

“Their schedule right now says that lower Manhattan is not going to be back up until May,” Bloomberg said in a recent speech.

The mayor is upset with Verizon’s timetable because a number of major buildings in the area cannot be reoccupied by business tenants until telephone service is restored, and Verizon is facing questions about why it will take a half-year to get phone service back up and running to everyone that wants it.

When local cable news channel NY1 asked Verizon how many customers were still without service, a spokesman told the reporter it did not know, adding some customers have priorities more pressing than phone service.

Verizon has chosen not to replace much of the damaged copper infrastructure and plans to invest in more reliable fiber optics in its ongoing effort to meet its FiOS rollout obligations in New York City, but that does not satisfy many business owners who cannot process credit card transactions or, in some cases, run their businesses as long as phone lines remain out of service.

This week a coalition of interest groups petitioned New York’s Public Service Commission asking them to impose new requirements on the state’s utility companies to develop comprehensive emergency response plans that acknowledge climate change and the extreme weather events that accompany it.

The petition was filed by the Columbia Law School Center for Climate Change Law, Natural Resources Defense Council, New York League of Conservation Voters, Pace Energy and Climate Law Center of Pace Law School, Municipal Art Society of New York, Earthjustice, Environmental Advocates of New York, and Riverkeeper.

The petition notes in the past two years alone, New York City has been hit by two of the largest hurricanes in history (Irene and Sandy).

The group’s observations are shared by some of the state’s highest elected officials.

“In just 14 months, two hurricanes have forced [New York City] to evacuate neighborhoods — something our city government had never done before,” New York City Mayor Bloomberg wrote in an editorial for Bloomberg View. “If this is a trend, it is simply not sustainable.”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo echoed Bloomberg’s concerns:

Extreme weather is a reality. It is a reality that we are vulnerable. And if we’re going to do our job as elected officials, we’re going to need to think about how to redesign, or as we go forward, make the modifications necessary so we don’t incur this type of damage…. For us to sit here today and say this is a once-in-a-generation and it’s not going to happen again, I think would be short-sighted…. I think we need to anticipate more of these extreme weather type situations in the future and we have to take that into consideration in reforming, modifying, our infrastructure.

The coalition claims current utility policies are designed for short-term disaster response procedures, which they call inadequate.

Most utility companies develop plans based on historic weather patterns the environmental groups argue cannot take into account the more extreme weather patterns afflicting the state. The PSC can mandate utilities do more.

New York’s utility infrastructure is also deemed outdated, with much of it exposed above-ground, vulnerable to storm damage. The state also lacks more advanced technology including smart electricity grids, telecommunications fiber rings that can reroute around cable cuts, and reinforcement of vulnerably placed generator plants, telephone switches, and utility substations.

Despite the criticism, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam remained upbeat about Verizon’s performance, particularly noting strong growth in wireless.

In the third quarter when Sandy struck, Verizon picked up 1.54 million more contract customers, exceeding the 901,000 estimate predicted by analysts polled by Bloomberg News. The wireless profit margin at Verizon also reached a new milestone – 50 percent, up from 49 percent in the second quarter.

[flv width=”534″ height=”320″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/NY1 Bloomberg Criticizes Verizon For Slow Recovery Of Service 12-6-12.mp4[/flv]

NY1 reports business customers in lower Manhattan are not too pleased waiting for Verizon to repair their landlines.  (2 minutes)

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Verizon Restoration of Verizon’s Lower Manhattan Cable Vault 11-12.flv[/flv]

Verizon produced this video showing off its own restoration efforts in a downtown Manhattan cable vault.  (3 minutes)

Eight channels are missing from Raleigh-area televisions.

Time Warner Cable dropped eight analog channels from its lineup in Raleigh recently, advising customers they will need either a digital transport adapter (DTA) or standard set top box to get those channels back.

But one Raleigh customer tells Stop the Cap! those DTA boxes are hard to come by at the moment, forcing some to get costly set top boxes instead.

“We have been told three times by Time Warner Cable there is a multi-week wait for the free boxes, but we can get all the set top boxes we want today, for more than $6 a month each,” complains Rachel, who has three TV’s that need a box solution. “You think they would have waited for enough equipment before they took the channels away.”

Now missing from the analog lineup: C-SPAN, CMT, Oprah Winfrey Network, VH-1 Classics, Discovery Fitness & Health, Lifetime Movie Network, TruTV and the Golf Channel.

Jim DuBreck thought he had nothing to worry about when Time Warner sent him a postcard alerting him those eight channels were only going to be available in digital starting this month. He told ABC11 he already has a digital TV. Time Warner did not tell him that was not enough to keep watching.

DuBreck later learned the cable company not only converted the channels to digital, it also encrypted them. His digital TV would still need either a set top box or DTA. Only he is still waiting for the five DTA boxes for his own televisions.

Time Warner told the station they have seen a much higher demand than anticipated for the adapters. So, there may be some temporary delays before receiving one. DTA boxes are free for two years, set top boxes are not.

Customers better get used to it. Time Warner is gradually converting their systems to digital lineups, so as time goes by, more analog channels will disappear.

Time Warner Cable explained why:

“Moving analog channels to digital frees up capacity in our network to bring customers faster internet like we just did last week when we boosted the speeds of our standard internet service by 50 percent. Providing channels digitally also allows us to offer customers more because it’s dramatically more efficient: We can deliver up to four HD channels, or as many as 12 standard-definition digital channels, using the same capacity as it takes to carry one analog channel.”

[flv width=”600″ height=”358″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WTVD Raleigh Cable customer upset over Time Warner changes 12-14-12.flv[/flv]

WTVD in Raleigh helps Time Warner Cable customers understand where some of their analog channels are going.  (3 minutes)

Cox injected this pop up message when customers launched their web browsers over the weekend, notifying them about the e-mail outage. (Courtesy: Broadband Reports forum reader ‘bb44’)

Our friends at Broadband Reports have been tracking Cox’s near-nationwide e-mail outage that left millions of customers without access to their company-supplied accounts over the weekend.

Customers in Rhode Island, Nebraska, Virginia, Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, and beyond began noticing the problem on Friday. Only Cox’s customers in the western and mountain states seemed unaffected.

Cox blamed the problem on a “failing server.” In an effort to reduce calls from complaining customers, Cox used a browser injection notification message alerting subscribers whenever they opened their web browsers. Sending e-mail to all affected subscribers was obviously not an option.

Cox customers, including many small businesses that still rely on their Cox-supplied e-mail addresses were very unhappy about the length of the outage.

By Sunday afternoon customers like Bill Roland of Ocala, Fla. were fed up.

“Heads should roll over this one and we should all get a credit on our bills,” Roland wrote on Broadband Reports’ Cox Forum. “I don’t really care when it’s out for 15 minutes in the middle of the night due to a maintenance window, but going on 48 hours with no end is sight is not acceptable.”

Roland would have to wait until early Monday morning for the queued mail held since the outage to begin slowly arriving in his mailbox.

Cox shared this statement about the outage:

As of 6:30 am ET, access to Cox email has been restored to all customers previously affected by the email outage. All customers should now be able to send and receive email messages.

If you lost access to your email during this outage, we have queued your emails received since Friday. You may continue to receive these queued emails over the course of the next several days. These will arrive gradually and may not be delivered in chronological order.

Now that service is restored we are moving forward with replacing email storage platform equipment and implementing measures to prevent a reoccurrence of these issues. We will remain intensely focused on this effort until all queued email messages are successfully delivered. Technical teams continue to be on high alert and monitoring systems closely.

We deeply regret the impact this outage has had on our customers and truly appreciate their patience as all Cox resources continue to be focused on this restoration effort.

Cox customers can call the company and request a courtesy credit for the outage, which the company is providing to those particularly upset by the e-mail loss.

Among those hardest hit: small businesses like those in Providence, RI which are particularly dependent on answering e-mail from customers during the holiday season. Several made their apologies to customers on their websites.

The best solution to this dilemma is to avoid using ISP-supplied e-mail accounts. Cox customers using Gmail or other web-based e-mail providers never realized there was an outage.

“The best reason not to use your ISP e-mail account is that it ties you down with your broadband provider,” writes Cox customers and Stop the Cap! reader Sam Hernandez. “I bought my own domain name for around $7 and I use Gmail to handle everything and have been able to switch providers or move to another city and never have to change my e-mail address. Gmail has proved to be very reliable as well.”

[flv width=”640″ height=”363″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WJAR Providence Cox reports email outages now fixed 12-16-12.flv[/flv]

WJAR in Providence reports Cox’s near-nationwide weekend e-mail outage caused problems for area small businesses during the critically-important holiday season.  (1 minute)

Enjoy arrest and deportation.

If Time Warner Cable was hoping to attract new customers, allowing employees to arrange for their arrest and deportation is probably not the best way to accomplish that.

But that is precisely what happened to a Burlington, N.C., mom who tried to order cable service for her daughter with a fake Social Security number. An off-duty local police officer working part time as a security guard in the cable office overheard the conversation and arranged for the woman’s arrest.

Now 27-year old Lorena Yanez-Mata faces deportation to Mexico because she is in the United States illegally.

Yanez-Mata tried to use her individual taxpayer identification number to order cable service. The cable company rejected that, insisting on a Social Security number. So she arrived at the cable store with a counterfeit card with a random nine digit number.

When the security officer overheard the conversation, Time Warner Cable says he acted on his own initiative to contact local police, who arrested Yanez-Mata as soon as she left.

Yanez-Mata was charged with obtaining property by false pretense because of the phony Social Security number. But her prospects are likely to be more serious when she arrives in a Charlotte immigration court for possible deportation.

Time Warner Cable tried to distance itself from the debacle, claiming it is against their policy to share personal information with law enforcement and the security officer was not following any company procedure or direction. The cable company has no interest in bringing charges against the woman.

The company did not explain what would happen to the security officer who apparently disregarded the cable company’s policies when he choose to share potentially confidential, personal information with authorities. Nor did the company say whether it planned to issue new directives to avoid similar situations in the future.

Although Triad area residents and the local media used the incident to debate the issue of illegal immigration, another question remains: should an off-duty police officer working as a security guard act on private information he overhears and initiate a police investigation contrary to the interests of his employer?

[flv width=”604″ height=”424″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WFMY Greensboro Burlington Mom Faces Deportation After Trying To Get Time Warner Cable 12-12-12.flv[/flv]

WFMY-TV in Greensboro used the story of the Burlington mom to address the larger issue of why people illegally immigrate to the United States. We are wondering how Time Warner plans to handle employees sharing customer information with the authorities. (2 minutes)