My pet peeve: The Internet spawns an era of flagrant customer disservice

Part 2: Try getting rid of it, and facing the consequences

Last time, I brought readers along for my funhouse-ride with two of the nation’s largest and greediest Internet service providers, Spectrum and Comcast. Because both of them had started out as cable-television providers, they learned early how to confuse, mislead, and torment customers about the quality, cost, and dependability of their disservice. Back then, the municipalities which granted them exclusive franchises had at least once promised to ride herd on them … until they stopped doing that, and left consumers with no choice and virtually no protection.

Long ago, when I lived in Alexandria, Virginia, I had cable TV service from the only firm allowed to offer it in the city, on an experimental basis: a now-largely forgotten company called Jones Intercable. They actually had a local office, and actually tried diligently to resolve any service issues—or face penalties from the city council. That was in the mid-1990s. Service was okay, if not perfect, and affordable. You could opt to buy your cable box rather than rent it—a rare practice no longer allowed. But that al ended when Comcast, then scrambling to build its nationwide empire, bought it out by 1999—and the concerted push began to raise fees, eliminate local offices, and force consumers to accept behavior I can only characterize as oafish and greedy.

Around the same time, Time-Warner came into existence and began competing, first in major metropolitan areas and then in smaller markets, like North Carolina, by offering cable TV services at modest monthly prices and eventually emerging as a national rival to Comcast. Feeling threatened, perhaps, or sensing an opportunity to squelch its major competition, Comcast eventually tried to acquire it—but that huge deal fell apart, finally. Charter Communications, a smaller national upstart, stepped in sometime later to close the deal, buying out Time-Warner and other firms and marketing them all under a new name: Spectrum.

Neither of these would-be behemoths was yet more than mildly interested in providing home Internet service, which most people still obtained through their landline telephones, anyway: the old dial-up service, essentially free, whose main disadvantage was that it tied up your landline telephone indefinitely, forcing heavier users like me to invest in a dedicated second line in their home offices.

By the time the new communications giants saw the light and began marketing themselves as providers of home Internet service, both to their existing cable-TV customers and those tired of dial-up service, they had outgrown their limited dreams and entered a new mind-set: promise the world they are getting what they need, but simultaneously make it almost impossible for anyone to guess how much it will cost, how to install and monitor equipment and service, and how to get out of it if you are not satisfied.

The contracts are a masterpiece of misleading fine print, and even the customer service mis-representatives could never figure them out—or explain them clearly. The key was to obfuscate and make it sound better than it was—but give nothing in writing—and once you were hooked, all hope would disappear.

* * * * * * *

Being something of a cheapskate, I have long preferred antenna-driven TV—willing to accept spotty free service when possible instead of overpriced cable service of doubtful quality, whose sole purpose seems to be browbeating subscribers into buying expensive subscriptions to dubious “premium” channels and renting on-demand movies for almost as much as the then-price of a theater visit. It’s all a nasty little game of high-pressure tactics and substandard results.

My almost-free world came crashing down around my ears when Congress decided to phase out analog TV and force us all to go digital—and the much-ballyhooed analog-to-digital converter boxes we all got for “free” to keep using older television sets gradually lost their appeal. I ended up trying Direct TV and then Dish Network and their satellite receiver dishes—which were okay and reasonably priced.

But when I moved out of Alexandria into suburban Fairfax County in 2012, I had almost no choice—I lived in a veritable “desert” for over-the-air signals from all those channels I had once been able to view with a regular antenna, and had to bite the bullet. (Even cell phone service from large carriers was distressingly spotty—in the reasonably upscale neighborhood I moved into, residents were routinely forced to sit outside to talk on their Verizon cell phones … I had no problem with my Sprint-powered phone but my wife’s Consumer Cellular phone regularly gave her fits.)

Because I needed home Internet service for my freelance editing job, I held my nose and decided to give Verizon a try, since I already had a home telephone line through their new “wireless” (optical strand) service. I detested Verizon, but it was the only option. But as with their other offerings, the “introductory” prices disappeared almost overnight—often with no explanation, and absolutely no justification for their inevitable annual rate increases—and I soon grew weary of them, eventually switching to Cox Internet, which installed my first Panoramic whole-house modem. I stayed with Cox until we left Virginia in 2021—even though their customer service reps were almost impossible to deal with, even worse than Verizon. Where do they get these people?

That brings me to Comcast, my current provider in Florida. I had been told by residents of my condo complex that in addition to providing bulk TV cable service (included in my quarterly HOA fee), Comcast was supposed to provide a reduced bulk rate for Internet service and a landline telephone. I brought this up with the smooth-talking customer service representative who handled establishing my new account—all carried out by telephone from North Carolina—but because I needed high-speed Internet service for my job, I did not want to risk taking only regular-speed service. And he could find no allowance for a landline at reduced cost.

So I ended up signing up for high-speed service and an add-on telephone line—roughly $100 a month, or twice as much as the bulk rate. After the first year, of course, all bets were off. By 2023, I dropped the landline and was soon paying more than that for Internet service alone—when you stop “bundling,” turns out they stop discounting your modem rental fee. Fine print …

Only recently, when the condo association board forced Comcast to revisit the issue—or risk not getting that new five-year contract they so badly wanted—did they agree to cut the old $55-a-month fee down to $20 a month ($30 for high-speed). With that, I now realized Comcast had been lying to me from the start … I should have been charged only $65 a month for high-speed Internet, as a bulk customer, but they had added on another $40-plus a month by baldly ignoring their own rules. Because they could get away with it …

I mentioned last time that my wife’s laptop steadfastly refused to connect to the new Internet modem when we finally moved in, after completing renovations. It was a puzzle to which I had no answer. The manufacturer’s rep walked me through every step, patiently. It took days to figure out. Then came the awful truth: Sir, the problem seems to be her operating system (Windows 7—bought nine years earlier when it was state-of-the-art)—which is not capable of extending a “handshake” to your brand-new modem…

My choices were few. Comcast would not give me an outdated modem. Either she could work at her part-time job only at her cousin’s condo, whose older modem did shake her laptop’s hand … “commuting” to work, in effect … or I could bite the bullet and spend about $1,000 to buy a new laptop (from the same firm as her old one, but with a Windows 10 operating system—another long story on its own). We were pinching pennies after a very expensive move. I pondered my fate … hell in a very small condo (with apologies to Bernard Fall, and his wonderful journalistic study of the siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1954) or cleaning out my fast-dwindling savings account.

I think you know what I had to do. Getting her new laptop delivered and up and running wasn’t exactly a piece of cake, but it finally met its new home and made peace with our Comcast modem. I ended up taking her old laptop to Dunn, where it connected perfectly with my older Spectrum modem there for the next three years …

* * * * * * *

But back to Spectrum. Even though I only occasionally visited my North Carolina residence, every three months for a couple of weeks, I needed full-time regular service to facilitate the security service Beth and I had subscribed to after our Mother passed in 2019, in order to protect a house left vacant for extended periods. Earlier this year, we decided to begin the long-delayed process of selling our beloved, 70-year-old childhood home, which needed extensive repairs and updating, significant expenses we simply did not feel we could justify.

The 2,000-mile round-trip from my home in Florida to Dunn was also becoming less and less appealing—literally taking days to recover from—although I still enjoyed visiting my grandchildren in nearby Wilmington, as my main “carrot” for the trip. Benji has been on every one of those six car trips. I call him my 12,000-mile poodle …

In April, I drove up for what may be my last Dunn visit, to begin clearing out 70 years of accumulated furniture, clothing, books, and sundry possessions—little of which either Beth or I wanted or needed—and preparing the house for sale. My dog Benji and I stayed for two months this time, and he watched me tearfully dispose of hundreds—thousands?—of books, the hardest thing any booklover ever has to do. Most went to the Wake County library system in Raleigh, the only regional system which still takes large donations—where I pray they found a good home.

In late May, with almost all of my work done, as I prepared for my departure in early June, I gave my security service notice to discontinue the subscription after five years—and with that, prepared to cut my separate ties with Spectrum, which I would no longer need, either for work or for security. That was when I encountered the closest thing to a brick wall in my arduous 2-month clean-up. First, I told Spectrum to discontinue the house telephone, which had always been a vanity thing, anyway—hardly ever used, but preserving my parents’ home telephone number since the 1950s—and spent a half-hour on the phone explaining why I did NOT need a new mobile telephone with that number instead.

But I finally prevailed, or so I thought, convincing them to discontinue the number at the end of the current billing cycle—for their bookkeeping convenience, not mine—and going forward, to begin billing me only for Internet service, which I planned to terminate right before I left.

Big mistake, as it turned out. I should have set a termination date for both simultaneously. By the time I arrived back in Florida, and called back a second time to see what was taking so long, the disconnect notice had all but disappeared from their system—it hasn’t been acted on yet, sir, and it will take 48 hours after that to be sure. So two days later, I called back a third time, and another half-hour conversation ensued. Are you certain you don’t want a mobile phone with that number, sir? We are running a special … free service for a year …

No, now I want to terminate the whole thing. I’m sorry, sir, we can’t terminate your home Internet service until AFTER the phone service has been officially removed from it. You just can’t have two orders being processed at the same time. Unless you want to rescind the phone disconnect order, and then replace it with a total disconnect order …

Where was I, in some kind of special Internet version of customer service hell? That made no sense to me, but I accepted my fate. Turns out all I succeeded in doing was negating the original order, according to the subsequent e-mail I got—meaning all was back to “normal,” full service—what they had wanted all along, I guess—so I contacted the customer service representative a fourth time. Same pleasant voice I had talked with a week earlier, still in another Florida county …

She did not recognize me, or acknowledge our previous conversation—so I innocently played along, and just explained that I needed to disconnect everything—that my previous attempt had somehow backfired—and no, I did NOT need a second mobile telephone with that old homeline number. Sorry sir, we do have to ask.

But as she reminded me, I would need to make certain that the modem and antenna that Spectrum had “loaned” to me for five years would be returned to the “nearest Spectrum store,” within two weeks after disconnection, or perhaps I would like prepaid boxes sent to me to take to the UPS store nearest my home? NO, my sister will take them to the Spectrum store near her home in Raleigh. I dutifully copied down the 16-digit confirmation number of the disconnect-order and Beth took that, with the equipment, to the Spectrum store the next week. She got a receipt from them acknowledging we had turned in their property—the modem, at least—they refused to accept the separate desk antenna, claiming it was not theirs—even though it was clearly marked with the Spectrum ID.

All was well, I thought ...

Until last week, when I started receiving marketing calls from Spectrum in Raleigh, begging me to consider a mobile phone from them—this time, at reduced rates, not free, because I was no longer a customer, I guess. They have called three times so far … sooner or later they are going to come after me for that valuable desk antenna we tried to turn in, I know. Beth still has it, waiting …

I may be finished with them, but they aren’t quite finished with me … I can just feel it in my bones …

Next time: My moratorium on the news, and commentators in general