Surprise, surprise: The triple-play deal that I cobbled together recently didn t turn out to be as good as I d been led to believe, nor was the transition to my new services as easy as I d hoped.
Long story short: I ended up with more upfront costs than I d planned for, the second-year rates on my services will be higher than I d been promised and my switchover took longer and cost more than I d expected. On the whole, I m happy with my new services, but I m not particularly happy about how I got here.
The biggest changes from what I described in my recent column had to do with Comcast s broadband service. When I wrote my column, I hadn t yet switched over to my new services. The prices I quoted came not from what I was actually paying, but what I had been promised in talking with customer service representatives or the regular rates I discovered online.
Unfortunately, I should have gotten Comcast s promises in writing, because when I subsequently called back to sign up for service, the company s representative refused to honor the rate the previous representative quoted me. What s more, the second representative informed me that I d soon be paying a higher price to rent a Comcast cable modem than the first representative had promised.
The first representative I spoke with quoted me a price of $39.99 for the first year of service, $59.99 for the second year of service and a regular price of $66.95 that would kick in starting with the third year. That representative also said I d be paying $8 a month to rent my cable modem and that I could cancel any time, because it was a month-to-month plan.
While the second representative reaffirmed the $39.99 first-year price, she declined to honor the $59.99 second-year price, claiming that Comcast never offers second-year discounting on such plans. Instead of paying $59.99 in the second year, I would pay the everyday price of $66.95.
What s more, the second representative informed me that my modem price would within a few months go from $8 a month to $10 a month.
As you can imagine, I was furious, in part because a similar thing happened the last time I signed up for Comcast s service. In that case also, when I called to sign up for service, the company failed to honor a price a representative had previously quoted me.
In that case, I was able to get a somewhat better deal — although not the one I was originally quoted — by insisting on talking with a supervisor. In this case, talking with a supervisor didn t help; the supervisor similarly failed to uphold the quoted terms. Instead, the only bone she threw at me was a $10 discount off the $35 installation fee I was previously quoted.
Despite the price change, I ended up signing up for service. Comcast s first-year price for broadband service was still less expensive than AT&T s for download speeds that are — theoretically at least – more than twice as fast. I also figured that at the end of a year, instead of paying Comcast s regular rates, I could renegotiate with the company, switch back to AT&T or sign up with Sonic.net, which is supposed to be coming to my neighborhood in the next few months.
In response to the price hike on the modem rental, I also decided to buy my own modem, something I wasn t planning on doing before. I picked up a Zoom cable modem (the 5341J, if you are interested) from Best Buy for about $70 before taxes; even if the rates stay at $8 a month, it will pay for itself within 10 months.
But Comcast s failure to honor its quoted price wasn t my only frustration with the company. I also wasn t super pleased with the installation process.
I initially scheduled to have Comcast install my service on a Saturday afternoon. But late in the afternoon, Comcast called and left a message, warning that its technician was running late and asking me to reschedule. We rescheduled for Monday morning. But that morning, we received another message from Comcast that its technician was running late and couldn t make it that day. So we rescheduled for Tuesday. Finally, the technician came out.
It turned out to be OK, because we had someone home at all those times. But many folks don t have that flexibility to keep changing their schedule to accommodate Comcast s whims.
The final frustration with Comcast had to do the way it configures its modems. I have my own WiFi router that I wanted to continue using even after I we got our new service. It s not brand new, but it s still fairly fast and I didn t want to have to go through the process of reconnecting all my devices to a new router.
But that was easier said than done. Comcast doesn t allow customers — or even its field technicians — to change the settings on its modems. Instead, those settings can only be tweaked by Comcast s phone support representatives. Worse, my particular field technician didn t seem to understand what I wanted to do. It took several phone calls and something like an hour to just get Comcast to turn off the WiFi in its router and let me use my own router instead.
(I had to make a similar call to phone support after I bought my own modem, although that process didn t take nearly as long.)
The final disappointment has been the speed. In simple tests, I ve seen speeds of more than 50 megabits per second. But in real-world usage, the speed hasn t been that impressive. If anything, Web pages at times have seemed to take longer to load than they did with my nominally slower AT&T service.
Comcast didn t present the only frustrations in my Triple Play switchover. I also ran into some annoyances with Ooma, which I chose for phone service.
Ooma provides a Voice over Internet service. Once you buy an Ooma device called the Telo, which you plug into your broadband network and to which you connect your phones, you generally don t have to pay anything else except monthly taxes on your service.
The first problem I ran into was that the discounted price I expected to pay for Ooma was no longer available. When I was originally shopping for services, Ooma was running a special on the Telo; you could buy it for $109.99, compared to a normal price of $129.99. But buy the time I got around to signing up for service, the discount had gone away.
Fortunately, Radio Shack was offering a $30 rebate on the Telo, so I could get it for even less than the discounted price. Unfortunately, it was a mail-in rebate, which can be a pain to send in.
The bigger problem I had with Ooma was with porting my home phone number. I knew when I bought the Telo that Ooma charges $40 to transfer your phone number to its service. What I didn t realize until I started the process was that the porting process can take up to four weeks. And in order to transfer your number, it has to remain in service until it gets ported to Ooma.
That left me kind of stuck. I didn t want to give up our home phone number, because it s easy to remember and is well known among our friends and family members. But in order to keep it, I d need to retain phone service from AT&T for up to a month longer than I d planned.
My initial thought was that I d simply switch my phone service with AT&T to a very basic, local toll-only plan until the number was transferred. But it turns out that AT&T doesn t really offer basic plans anymore — at least not to anyone other than lower-income folks. The cheapest regular plan the company offers here costs about $25 a month — which is what I was already paying. Gritting my teeth, I agreed to continue my phone service with AT&T for another month, even as I cancelled all my other services.
In the end, the porting process took only a week, so I won t have to continue paying AT&T for long.
By contrast to Comcast and AT&T, my switchover to Dish went smoothly. The company upheld all the terms I was quoted in my initial conversations with its representatives. And there were no surprises in terms of new or different charges or installation problems.
The only thing that raised an eyebrow for me was that the second year price I was quoted for Dish could change. The second-year price is the company s every day price for my tier of service, which right now is $69.99. But if Dish raises rates sometime in the next two years, I would be paying more than that in my second year.
I m still getting used to Dish s DVR and service. But I ve been fairly happy with it so far. And I m happy most of all that unlike Comcast, Dish keeps its word.
File photo from Matt Rourke/AP Photo.