Comcast: 10-1 BC (Before Comcast)

Since I seem to be stuck with Comcast for cable and internet I figured I might as well blog about the experience.

To give you some idea of where I'm coming from, when I moved into my apartment I had to get my cable service from OpTel and I had a choice of phone service from OpTel or Alltel. At the time I was working for a division of MCI so as a benefit I was receiving a monthly long distance credit but I had to have MCI as my long distance carrier to use it. Since OpTel insisted on being both local and long distance carrier if I used them I went with Alltel instead. When OpTel proved to be extremely bad at providing cable I dropped them in favor of DirecTV. (Amusing story, when I went into the apartment office to ask if we were allowed to have satellite the apartment manager told me, "No, but if we don't see the antenna we don't see the antenna if you know what I mean." I did and shortly thereafter I was a DirecTV customer.) To give you an idea of just how incompetent OpTel was, shortly after I cancelled my OpTel service I discovered that my television, through no action of my own, was suddenly receiving more premium movie channels from the OpTel cable coming out of the wall than I had ever gotten as a paid subscriber and continued to do so for about a year before they apparently figured out that instead of disconnecting me they had hooked me up with more channels and finally cut me off. It didn't really matter to me at that point since I'd been a DirecTV customer the entire time.

When Alltel offered DSL I signed up and when they sold their broadband service to Windstream I went along. After being an Alltel/Windstream customer for over 10 years with no real complaints about the quality of service I had received from them it was with a certain amount of sadness that I called them to cancel my account. Same goes for DirecTV. I was happy with their service but they just aren't practical at my parents' house unless we want to cut down a bunch of trees, which we don't.