About a year ago, after years of poor quality service and hours upon hours of time on the phone with thickly accented “tech support” people named Jack and Fred – the household left Verizon’s DSL and phone service in hopes that my previous enjoyable experience with COX (in my nine months living in VA my COX internet went out once – for an hour – I was very impressed) cable out of Virginia would be as seamless with telecommunications giant Comcast.

I was so excited the day they arrived to hook us up, but it wasn’t long before I was on the phone with Comcast local help line wondering what was going on. The phone and the internet simultaneously didn’t work, but the TV was unaffected. They seemed stumped each time I called and the only solution seemed to be unhooking the cable from the back of the modem and then hooking it back up – a temporary solution that sometimes only lasted 5 minutes. This was a really frustrating fix as the computers are upstairs and the modem downstairs.

After a while it seemed like there was a pattern to when the connection would terminate and we started keeping a log of when it happened each day. Almost every day we lost the connection at 10:00 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and around 8:00 p.m. (sometimes right at 10:30 p.m. too). This was good I thought, if they know that these outages are happening at regular they may be to come up with a solution.

As a result I called Comcast frequently to see if they could determine what the problem was – one of these phone calls went like this:

“Can’t you see that our connection keeps cutting off there in your office?” I asked the Comcast representative.

“For all I know, your disconnecting it yourself everyday.” she replied

She honestly thinks that I’m so bored with my life that I want to call Comcast every day? Seriously

So Comcast technicians would come to the house, there have been several and each of them were certain they knew what the problem was and that the solution they would prescribe would fix it. The latest visit from their tech people gave us a new fancy modem… but it too is not fixing the problem.

At this point you should be reminded that I really will do just about anything to avoid going back to Verizon, their customer service that bad that I’m willing to have spent the last year with the bad service at Comcast, mostly because at least the Comcast people would listen to me on the phone and not speak in (in broken english) from a script that didn’t usually have anything to do with my issue. My roommate is a consultant and needs the phone and the internet to work when he’s here at home – never mind that it really began to affect my game play on World of Warcraft.

Well, I’d finally had it and we’re having RCN come on Wednesday to install their service with TiVo (which is the best, if you have never really experienced a genuine TiVo you’re missing out – it’s far superior to the every day DVR) Premiere service. I’m also getting Showtime and HBO (so I can watch Dexter and Game of Thrones when they are on instead of waiting for iTunes).  I’m hopeful that the experience with RCN will be better than it’s been with Comcast, I’m hoping RCN is as good to me as COX was… if not, I may have to go back to Verizon.

Well, I’d better post this and go there’s no telling how long my connection will last…