The city of Savannah, Georgia is at the mercy of Comcast Cable, and city officials and local residents are fed up with high bills, the “don’t care” attitude from customer service, and cable and broadband that fails repeatedly, sometimes extending for weeks.

The fervor came to a head in December when city council had accumulated more than 150 complaints from local residents, deciding public hearings were warranted to deal with the city’s dominant cable company, Comcast.

“Comcast Destroyed My House”

Diana Thibodoux called Comcast to deal with a cable issue in her Ardsley Park home and never expected the service call would turn into an expensive nightmare.

Thibodoux says the Comcast technician who showed up decided on his own to rewire the house for cable and began drilling through brick and expensive plaster, stringing easily visible black coaxial cable along outside walls, inside baseboards and up over doors, all in plain sight.

“My house looks like a frat house,” Thibodoux complained to Comcast officials who were on hand to listen to customer complaints at the first of four public “town hall” meetings.

“I’ve never dealt with a company so incompetent,” another local resident said.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WTOC Savannah Ive never dealt with a company so incompetent 2-6-12.mp4[/flv]

WTOC in Savannah shares the horror story of Diana Thibodoux, who says Comcast destroyed her house thanks to an overzealous, incompetent repairman.  (3 minutes)

Residents used the public sessions to vent about long hold times which can extend to as much as two hours, poor quality service, and what city officials call the predictable outcome of a company that has “a stranglehold” over Savannah’s cable TV market.

“Comcast has treated Savannah like a third world country for years, delivering the best service to the wealthiest neighborhoods while leaving cable lines dangling on the ground in the areas they don’t care about,” said Stop the Cap! reader Jenny Child, who has kept a folder of papers documenting more than a dozen service calls regarding poor Internet service at her small business.

“If it rains in Savannah, and it does so a lot, our Internet goes out,” Child complains. “We have called and called but the technician shows up when it is bright and sunny and shrugs his shoulders and says there is no problem.”

Child and her two employees now handle their online business activities based on local weather forecasts.

“If the man says we’re getting rain today, we handle our Internet things real quick, because as sure as I’ll be in church on Sunday, we won’t have service after the first drops fall from the sky,” she says.

Child keeps calling Comcast when her Internet service drops out, but long hold times to reach the company’s outsourced-to-India customer service department have cut into her business.

“I can’t be sitting here on hold with Comcast for 45 minutes waiting for some representative’s nails to dry so she can pick up the phone and deal with customers,” Child complains. “It’s the biggest cable company ever, and don’t they own NBC? How many people do they have working there that they can’t answer the phone. Maybe everyone else is calling to complain too.”

Comcast’s Business Broadband Blockade Prompts Whining When Potential Competition Shows Up

While fielding complaints from more than 50 local residents at a second meeting held to address complaints, Comcast executives questioned whether the city of Savannah was giving favorable treatment to Hargray, a new entrant pushing to bring 21st century broadband into the city of Savannah for businesses Comcast has refused to serve for years.

Comcast complained they didn’t mind competition, but wanted “a level playing field,” a statement that prompted an immediate and angry response from some members of the city council, who blasted the cable company for its attitude.

Aldermen Tony Thomas, John Hall, and Tom Bordeaux all noted Comcast has steadfastly refused to wire many downtown business buildings for cable broadband service, despite years of requests.  Comcast claimed the relatively low number of customers did not justify the cost to expand the service.

All three could not understand why Comcast had a sudden urgency to complain about unfair treatment when a competitor sought to provide the service they never did.

“If [Comcast] did not want to offer that service previously and someone else is coming in to provide the service, where is the sticking point?” Thomas said.

Bordeaux was more blunt in his remarks intended for Comcast.

“Tell them to sue us,” he said.

In contrast to service from AT&T and Comcast, which often markets 3-6Mbps broadband in Savannah, Hargray’s fiber broadband project will deliver speeds up to 1Gbps, first to business customers. But the company promises it is considering selling to residential customers as well.

Great Deals, But Only for “Selected Neighborhoods”

As Comcast’s bad press has become fodder for the nightly newscasts on several of the city’s television outlets, Comcast literally took to the streets to try and mitigate their public relations nightmare. In the process, they created a new one.

Councilman Tony Thomas is happy Comcast is approaching upset customers and offering them substantial discounts on their cable bill.  But he’s not happy Comcast is only extending those deals to certain customers, not all.

Thomas wants the deals offered to everyone, something that he says is not happening today.

Andy Macke, Comcast’s Vice President of Communications counters, “All they have to do is call 1-800-COMCAST and they will hear the same deals that the same people are getting from those reps going from door to door.”

“Comcast’s attitude in Savannah is see no evil, hear no evil,” says Jeff White, a Comcast customer who has watched the scuffle. “They don’t even admit there is a problem until it runs on the evening news and city council waves 150 complaints they are getting at the camera — the ones Comcast ignored.”

Macke himself told WJCL-TV, which has covered the dispute with Comcast repeatedly, he was “unaware of the extent of the concerns that our Savannah customers had with us.”

Despite promises to make things right, Alderman Thomas says many complaints are still unresolved.

“We were told that all of those folks had been contacted and that their problems were being worked on. I have since found a few of these people [who] have had no contact whatsoever with Comcast,” Thomas told the TV station.

“Under no circumstances should City Council let the situation with Comcast get pushed under the rug,” one person wrote in the Vox Populi column in the Savannah Morning News. “We the people need help!”

No Help On the Way

Unfortunately for that reader, and other Savannah residents, an attempt by Savannah city officials to attract competing cable service has met with no success and no interest.  Cable operators almost never compete head to head, each respecting the service areas of fellow providers.  Hargray’s interest in Savannah is primarily serving business customers, and the option for municipal service may not be possible much longer if a bill supported by Comcast, SB 313, ever becomes law.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Comcast in Savannah 2-8-12.flv[/flv]

A compilation of news reports from WJCL, WSAV, and WTOC exploring Comcast’s performance problems in the city of Savannah, Georgia.  (15 minutes)

While simultaneously complaining about the spiraling costs of sports programming such as MSG Networks, the nation’s two largest cable operators are planning to cut checks worth $80 million to help bail the NY Mets baseball team out of some of its long term debt.

The New York Times reports both Comcast and Time Warner Cable are preparing to funnel funds into the team through regional sports network SNY.

Time Warner Cable and Comcast are nearing a plan to finance SNY’s purchase of four shares in the Mets, worth $80 million, said one person e with knowledge of the plan who was not authorized to speak publicly.

[…] That means they will have much-needed cash to pay off their substantial debts. But it would be a slightly quirky way of doing it. The deal would mean 16 percent of the Mets would be owned by SNY. The Mets’ parent company, Sterling Equities, owns 70 percent of the network.

[…] Lee Berke, the president of a media consulting company, said that Time Warner Cable and Comcast “don’t want to see the team stumble as it has been, because it directly impacts what they’re putting on TV. This is shaping up as a multiyear downswing for the Mets, and this is a way to keep them above water.”

[…] As for Time Warner Cable and Comcast, it was not immediately clear why they would not invest directly in the Mets. But the two companies clearly want to put money into Wilpon’s financially beleaguered hands (the club has lost some $120 million in the last two years), even if it has to be routed through SNY, to ensure that the team meets its $200 million goal.

[…] Together, Time Warner Cable and Comcast own about 30 percent of SNY. The network started carrying Mets games in 2006.

That investment comes at the same time cable operators are increasingly vocal about sports programming costs.

“ESPN, through … sheer muscle, has been able to say to us, ‘You will carry this service on the lowest level subscription you offer, and you will make all of them pay for it,’” Matt Polka, CEO of the American Cable Association, a trade group told Newsweek. “My next-door neighbor is 74, a widow. She says to me, ‘Why do I have to get all that sports programming?’ She has no idea that in the course of a year, for just ESPN and ESPN2, she is sending a check to Disney for about $70. She would be apoplectic if she knew … Ultimately, there’s going to be a revolt over the cost. Or policymakers will get involved, because the costs of these things are so out of line with cost of living that someone’s going to put up a stop sign.”

Cable analysts continue to be astonished by an inflation rate in sports programming rates that rivals health care costs.

“Every time [there is] a huge increase we can’t believe it, and then there’s another huge increase,” says Laura Martin, an analyst with investment bank Needham & Co. “The rapidly rising cost of sports, especially the new NFL contracts, increases the likelihood that sports will be forced by the government to be on a different tier within three years, by our estimates.”

Cable industry investment in sporting teams is now becoming a familiar headline.  In early January, the Los Angeles Times reported Time Warner Cable was considering buying the Los Angeles Dodgers at a price that could exceed $2 billion.  It would compliment two new regional sports cable channels Time Warner plans to launch in southern California featuring the Los Angeles Lakers.

Verizon FiOS’ “digital phone” product is a far cry from Verizon’s traditional landline service.  Some central New York customers now getting hooked up to the fiber-to-the-home service report they are frustrated because they have to dial an area code for every phone call, even those to friends and neighbors right next door.

Verizon told WSYR-TV that unlike traditional landline service based in your neighborhood, Verizon FiOS phone service is, in fact, a nationwide Voice Over IP (VOIP) service, and uses servers across the country to process phone calls.  Although many traditional VOIP services have since learned ways around the area code limitation, Verizon has not made a similar effort to allow customers to pre-designate an area code.  That would permit Verizon’s servers to assume any seven digit number dialed was within a particular area code and complete the call accordingly.

Instead, Verizon advises customers to learn how to use the included “speed dial” feature to make dialing more convenient.

Verizon’s competitors, including companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable are quick to point out seven digit dialing is available from them, except where multiple overlaid area codes in the same geographic area exist.  So far, parts of western and central New York have endured area code splits, but for now each service area maintains just a single area code.

[flv width=”400″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WSYR Syracuse Dialing area code for Verizon FiOS 1-25-12.mp4[/flv]

WSYR in Syracuse answers viewers’ suggested stories.  Today, it’s about why Verizon FiOS customers are forced to dial 10 numbers for every phone call.  (1 minute)

 

A group whose national umbrella organization has close connections to the nation’s largest phone companies estimates 5.3% of residents in the state of Tennessee now have access to world-class fiber broadband at speeds up to 1Gbps, but no thanks to AT&T or Comcast.

As part of updated broadband availability estimates, the group noted that only a fraction of the state gets access to the community-0wned Chattanooga-based utility that provides fiber to the home service, EPB.

Key findings from this update include:

• 95.2% of Tennessee households have access to fixed broadband service of at least 768 Kbps downstream and 200 Kbps upstream (excluding mobile and satellite services).
• 93% of Tennessee households have access to fixed broadband service of at least 3 Mbps downstream and 768 Kbps upstream (excluding mobile and satellite services).
• 4.8% of Tennessee households remain unserved by any fixed broadband provider, representing approximately 120,000 unserved households that do not have access to a fixed wireless or wired broadband service offering (excluding mobile and satellite services).
• Across rural areas of Tennessee, the percentage of unserved households by any fixed broadband service is 8.4%, representing approximately 110,000 unserved rural Tennessee households.
• 5.3% of Tennessee households now have access to broadband service of at least 1 Gbps, marking the first time in Tennessee.

Most households receiving the slowest speeds get them from phone-company marketed DSL service and some fixed wireless ISPs operating in the state.

In Chattanooga, consumers have a choice between AT&T U-verse in selected neighborhoods, Comcast Cable, or EPB Fiber.  Recently, Christopher Mitchell at Community Broadband Networks alerted us that The Chattanoogan newspaper shared the difference between Comcast and EPB customer service:

You’ve got to be kidding me, Comcast! Several days ago our On Demand stopped working with a message to contact customer service and report that error seven occurred.

My husband called and after being given the self-help/troubleshoot option over the phone selected and requested a signal to be re-sent to the box. The box had already been unplugged, the appropriate amount of time waited, and the box plugged back in. No luck. The box was sent the refresh signal…it didn’t work; surprise.

So, he called back and spoke with someone who wanted to re-send the signal again and if that didn’t work then a technician would be needed.

[…]

I called Comcast this morning to schedule the technician to be told that it was going to cost me $30 for them to come out regardless of the problem. Let’s see, Comcast’s DVR box that they own and I rent shot trouble and I have to pay them another $30; I asked at least twice – “if Comcast’s equipment is the problem, I still have to pay $30?” “Yes, mam”.

They should bring out a replacement DVR for me, adjust my account for the days we’ve been without the On Demand plus an amount plus or minus $30 for the time we’ve had to take to mess around with this; not counting the time that will have to be arranged to be taken to have their technician come out.

Since I’m going to have to arrange to take more time, maybe we’ll just have someone else come out and put in something other than Comcast and they can have their broken DVR and all their other stupid little additional cable boxes returned to them.

Melanie Henderson
Hixson

The community-owned broadband alternative, EPB Fiber

We experienced the same “customer service” issues with Comcast. We finally cancelled our service when the tornado came through our neighborhood and we were forced to move for six months. When we finally moved back home we became EPB customers.

We have had one instance where we needed to contact customer service, and the problem was fixed quickly and easily by the most polite customer service rep I’ve ever dealt with.

Comcast came by recently to offer us a “substantial savings” if we’d make the switch back to them. My question was, why now? I was a customer for years and treated poorly as rates increased exponentially. Now the offer the discount? No thanks.

For the $5 extra per month that we pay for EPB, we receive better features, prompt and polite customer service, and an all around trouble free experience. Thanks EPB!

Leah Crisp
Harrison

In an eyebrow-raising exchange between the Heartland Institute’s Bruce Edward Walker and Dr. Joseph P. Fuhr, Jr., who produced a dollar-a-holler “research report” on behalf of corporate-backed astroturf group the Coalition for the New Economy (which lists the Heartland Institute’s Florida chapter as a member), the two dismiss Chattanooga’s award-winning EPB Fiber Network as providing lesser service than private competitors AT&T (also a member of the Coalition) and Comcast, in part because EPB “only sells customers a gig.”

An exchange between Heartland Institute’s Bruce Edward Walker and Dr. Joseph P. Fuhr, Jr. fundamentally misrepresents Chattanooga’s EPB Fiber network. At no point does Walker disclose Heartland Institute’s chapter in Florida is a member of the group that sponsored the production of Fuhr’s report. (1 minute)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

Walker: The government broadband services are always one step behind private industry and I’m thinking in Chattanooga, the law [sic] that they have the fastest download speeds of all government broadband in the United States, but they only offer 1Gbps service.

Fuhr: Well, one of the issues there is, well, the supply is there but they kind of have the feeling that if you build it, they will come.  Well, they haven’t come.  I mean they are charging $350 a month for that service and very few people are willing to subscribe.  People are, for the most part, happy with slower speeds.  Who really needs a gigabyte (sic) and the market shows that people don’t really need that.

Dr. Fuhr apparently does not know the difference between a “gigabyte” and a “gigabit,” so I am not sure how seriously we are supposed to take this “broadband expert.”  He also does nothing to challenge Walker’s wholly-inaccurate declaration that EPB only sells customers $350 1Gbps broadband.

In fact, most of Heartland Institute’s views about EPB broadband are a big bucket of wrong:

1. EPB Fiber offers the fastest fiber broadband in the United States.  It is “private industry” providers Comcast and AT&T who are more than one step behind, and they refuse to sell faster service and upgrade their networks to the speeds seen in Asia and Europe that Chattanooga’s EPB customers can have today.
2. There is no “law” involved in the delivery of broadband by EPB.  In fact, EPB fought off attempts by incumbent operators to sue the municipally-owned provider out of the broadband business, and some of those same companies are backing the “Coalition for the New Economy” in their efforts to curtail community broadband with new laws that would make networks like EPB next to impossible to provide.
3. EPB does not only offer 1Gbps service.  Consumers and businesses are free to choose between several different speed tiers.  As any commercial entity will tell, you 1Gbps at just $350 a month is a steal compared to the prices AT&T and Comcast would charge.
4. When EPB built their fiber network, private businesses did come.  In addition to media reports documenting expansion in Chattanooga from one Knoxville business, Amazon.com has announced hundreds of millions of dollars in new investments building and expanding distribution centers in and around Chattanooga, in part because EPB Fiber was available for their use.
5. People are not happy with the slow speeds some providers force them to accept.  It is no surprise, however, that industry-funded astroturf groups would repeat the usual provider line that people “don’t need” fast broadband that they have no plans to deliver anyway.