I ordered, I saw, I canceled.
Guys, up until last year we had comcast/at&t/tci/local cable for who knows how long, all I can say was that since like the 25th, we had nothing but a fiasco.. which was a surprise considering they were pretty good with their service in the past.
Either way, I wasn't impressed with all the effort I had to put in both in waiting on the phone and waking up really early to wait 4 hours (they almost always came 3 hours into the 4 hour "window") to tell me that someone else needed to do a wire run. In essence, unless I wanted to take out one of my satellite coax runs, I had no cable.
Um, so I did that for a little bit, the internet service was pretty damn impressive for the price (though I could do better if I was willing to commit to a new contract with a dsl company out here, just can't do that right now because we're gonna move to a different service area!)... and uh..
The cable box.. it was alright, for a like 4 year old box that it was, though the menus and such on it being the "most recent" -- it resembled something from 4 years ago. It took forever for OnDemand to show up, and when it did I was impressed for the most part, too bad everything else was really not favorable..
The GUI on the box looks .. well.. it's basic, with gradients.. video preview on menus/guides was not always there and the guide was slow, but so was channel surfing.. no that was PAINFULLY slow.
If you flip channels too fast, the "flip bar" goes blank until you wait long enough for the picture to show up, and then what's the point of having that in the first place? That "flip bar" is HUGE too.. and not even translucent, so you either have it at the bottom of the screen, or in a really awkward space near the top..
I loved the music channels, tons of neat info.. HOWEVER the one deal breaker was this, and this only about the digital cable:
Their boxes provide no way at all (that I could find), to make your own channel surfing list of sorts.. you can't 'hide' blocked channels/locked channels from the surfing list (they just bring up a password window), and the favorites list.. yeah aint easy to get to.
Hitting "FAV" to surf channels in one direction without seeing stuff that's not on the list is LAME. It's slow too.
That, and the DCT2000 is 2x the size of my Dish 322, which has 2x the tuners, a 64bit MIPS chip vs the 32bit MIPS chip, and well.. technically leaves the comcast box in the dust. Honestly, it bugs the heck out of me that they hand this stuff out.
That, and unless you pay $7 a month for each extra TV, you only get "expanded basic" cable on the other TVs, which has a declining amount of channels.
Speaking of which, the original reason we dropped comcast in favor of dishnet was that the expanded cable was becoming pretty expensive. We dropped it when they were charging $48 a month for it with taxes! According to the bill I got after having no usable service for a week and not getting any response regarding who would be over to install the line properly (without jacking my house wiring that I was already using).. this would be $52 a month now!
Either way, I understand there's plenty of promos, and given the whole thing, if Comcast had boxes equal to E* and D*, I'd be all over this stuff.. Being able to pause/fast forward without a DVR and "for free" was addicting (man I'd LOVE to have a 522, someone at E* fufill my wishes!!) RAWKED. Having a local weather channel was sweet..
And I have to admit the people on comcast's support line are really nice too, they were always very willing to help as they could, the problem is that locally, things just.. didn't come through as I had hoped.
So in the end I called to cancel, they were pretty nice about it and will have someone over next week to pick up the boxes (which I have neatly stacked on the TV next to the dish box).. It kinda made me feel a little sorry, but hey what can ya say.
In the end I'll just keep dishnet, not have to worry about getting used to another channel lineup again, and be able to have the same TV service when we move since well, all I have to do is call them and tell them we're moving (I don't even think they require a contract extension anymore).. shoot at this rate I'd be glad to refer the people we rent this house to, it's a dang good deal for what you get
Woulda loved that cable internet though.. no contract and nice for the price. Geez wish it was available last year before I got a contract with SBC for that whole year, thing is that contract's over now, and I'll have to pay $60 a month for my DSL (and another $19 a month for its landline, or pay $14 once to get it dropped to $4 a month, which I will since I never use it, VOIP RAWKS!) -- for the next few months till we move..
Man I can hardly wait anyway
In essence: Comcast's service is pretty good, their reps are awesome for the most part, but be careful with the installers. Unlike Dishnet (so far), if the first person screws up, the 2nd set of people might not be so willing to fix it.. And their non-promo rates are expensive, not to mention their hardware is old, worse yet I was disgusted that they expect people to use USED REMOTES and such ... yuck!
OTOH, cable providers vary extremely across the country. In other places, I'm sure Comcast might be much better with things, this is just my experience afterall.
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