Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Comcast Is...
...losing my loyalty. Our cable has been going in and out since last Friday. Comcast says there is a service issue and that cable would be restored by morning. Morning came but cable service didn't. The first rule of public relations is to do what you say you are going to do. Comcast is failing Rule One.
The challenge that a broadband-telephone-TV-service supplier has is uptime. Uptime of 99 percent is not good enough during a year. It needs to be closer to something like 99.9999 percent. Why? People depend on the service in the same way they depend on electric power (which went out at our house yesterday in the middle of a heat wave). I have to live with the electric utility. There is no other service available. I don't have to live with Comcast. There are alternatives. This means that Comcast cannot afford to have long-term outages and maintain public confidence in it as a service provider. It is a difficult position for a cable company to be in, but that is the marketplace. Press releases and soothing words don't substitute for service.
If you have noticed that my web page, online-pr.com, has not been updated since last week, the reason is Comcast. I'll call Comcast again this morning, but Verizon's FIOS service is looking better all the time.
The challenge that a broadband-telephone-TV-service supplier has is uptime. Uptime of 99 percent is not good enough during a year. It needs to be closer to something like 99.9999 percent. Why? People depend on the service in the same way they depend on electric power (which went out at our house yesterday in the middle of a heat wave). I have to live with the electric utility. There is no other service available. I don't have to live with Comcast. There are alternatives. This means that Comcast cannot afford to have long-term outages and maintain public confidence in it as a service provider. It is a difficult position for a cable company to be in, but that is the marketplace. Press releases and soothing words don't substitute for service.
If you have noticed that my web page, online-pr.com, has not been updated since last week, the reason is Comcast. I'll call Comcast again this morning, but Verizon's FIOS service is looking better all the time.
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