Mediacom’s Last Chance

Our local cable and Internet provider sent a repair guy over yesterday (for the third time this week) to fix the Internet line coming into the house. For the last TWO YEARS every month or two we would lose the signal, sometimes for as many as five days while we waited for them to send someone out to fix it. I called their wonderful India based tech support branch eight days ago complaining about service being down. Three days later they sent someone out who “adjusted the levels.” I complained that that was what they always did (three times in the last six months at least). Sure enough, the guy’s adjustment worked fine, until five hours after he left when suddenly it stopped working again.

Considering that we had recently got rid of our cable TV plan I would normally have expected a conspiracy had it not been for the fact that this had been such a chronic problem over the years.

I called again, got routed to India again, and was told that this time it would be FIVE DAYS MORE before they would get out to me. No amount of arguing would change things. So five days later here comes a different guy and I go out to meet him at the box and tell him of my troubles. He checked it, said the levels were indeed off again but that there must be something wrong with the cable or a piece of hardware somewhere if I was continually having these problems. He said he was going to put in a work order to have some other techie subgroup come out and do a more thorough inspection of the equipment at the box but also proceeded to adjust the levels again and got me up and running.

Mediacom, you should really thank that guy because until I talked to him I was minutes away from calling up Qwest and ordering DSL even though I knew it would have crappy bandwidth compared to the 12 Mbps that Mediacom can provide. Qwest is still an option though. The next time our line goes dead I’m done with them, and their annoying overseas tech support people. Just once I would love to call in and get someone local!

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