Comcast Business Services
My consulting company just moved into a new office in Redwood City. One of the first tasks for such a move is to establish Internet connectivity; I’ve been reasonably happy with Comcast at home (the occasional glitch but nothing too serious) so I decided to sign up with them again for the office.
I started out in their online chat on Monday, trying to find out why the business plans are so much more expensive than the home plans. After talking to two people in chat and getting no useful answers other than “you have to call this number for businesses, we don’t even have access to the plans”, I called the business folks.
“Mark” from the business sales team was helpful enough although the prices weren’t great – a 22/5 connection is $100/month for a business compared to $53/month for consumer-grade 20/4. I was told that the only major difference between the two is the lack of filtering or bandwidth caps on the business account. The real kicker was the contract – you can get a 1-year contract if you pay a $200 installation fee, 2-year for $100 install, or a 3-year contract for $25 installation, all of which come with a penalty of 75% of the remaining contract fees if you cancel early. So, if you sign a 3-year contract and decide you have a better option in 12 months and want to cancel, it’ll cost you $1800 to get out of the contract. I decided to proceed anyway (on a 1-year contract), and after electronically signing the contract I was told to expect a call back with an installation time the same day.
Monday passed, Tuesday came and went, and eventually I got a call this morning (Wednesday) telling me to expect installation tomorrow. Here’s the thing – I’m planning to use VoIP for all our office calls (we use Asterisk a lot) and that means we need a reliable internet connection. If it takes Comcast 48 hours to get back to me when there’s a sales guy earning commission from the deal, how long is it going to take to get a repair when nobody is getting paid? For a business I can’t afford to take that risk (being without phones or internet for 2 days is a big deal), so I decided to cancel the order and go with another provider (astound.net in this case).
After explaining this to the person who called, I got a call back from Mark just a few minutes later (no surprise that happened quickly), who tried to tell me that he’d confirmed the installation time on Monday. He hadn’t – he’d told me to expect a call on Monday to schedule an installation on probably Wedesday. I’m not sure whether he wrote down incorrect notes or was simply trying to avoid losing his commission, but the end result was a bare-faced lie – I cancelled the order on the spot, whereupon Mark hung up on me.
I’ve had good experiences with Comcast residential services before, so I’m a little surprised that the business side is so different. Excessively high prices (and cancellation penalties that are verging on extortion), slow turnaround times, and outright lies from salesmen – Comcast won’t be getting my business service any time soon. I’ll update once astound.net have done my installation – a 10-minute phone call to their business folks got me an 18/2 connection for $80/month with $100 installation fee on a 12-month contract (they also offer month-to-month for $200 installation), and more importantly they scheduled the installation while I was on the phone. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the network is as good as their service – the engineer will be coming by on Tuesday.
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