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ISP horror stories have long been a staple of Ars Technica, and over the past 12 months we’ve chronicled some of the most horrifying broadband customer experiences we’ve ever heard.
Comcast, the largest home internet service provider in the US, played a prominent role in these stories as usual. Let’s take a look back at the biggest ISP horror stories we covered in 2022.
Comcast wanted the man to pay $19,000 after false advertising on his street
This April 6 article details Jonathan Rowny’s plight after he and his wife and child moved from Virginia to Washington State. Rowny fell victim to a common problem in the broadband industry: ISPs falsely told customers that service is available.
Rowny said he scheduled a Comcast installation for the day after they moved into the new house, in May 2021, only to have Comcast cancel the order because the house was not wired. Despite Comcast falsely advertising that the service was available, the cable company told Rowny that he would have to pay more than $19,000 for a line extension.
Rowny reduced his initial cost to about $10,000 by hiring a contractor to do some of the work. But the family was without a wired internet for more than six months, in part because Comcast’s construction took longer than expected.
Even after construction appeared to be complete in mid-December 2021, Comcast initially refused to schedule an installation appointment because the company’s internal systems incorrectly indicated that the home was still unserviceable.
“I called Comcast for weeks and they said, ‘Your house is not usable and our records show it can be serviced in April.’ [2022]Rowny said. Staring at this junction box in my yard that I paid $10,000 for and still can’t get internet – I think that was the most frustrating part,” he added.
An email from a Comcast store manager told Rowny that “the current hurdle is the billing system. You can’t activate any equipment or service in our system until the billing codes are entered. I can’t enter the billing codes until I can get the Serviceability team to recognize that the address is usable.”
Desperate for a solution, Rowny had to escalate the problem to a Comcast regional vice president. The executive was able to help, and Rowny finally got his Comcast service connected on January 13, 2022. Comcast told Ars it was “deeply sorry for the inconvenience this has all caused.”
A couple bought a house in Seattle and then learned that Comcast Internet would cost $27,000
Zachary Cohn and his wife, Lauryl Zenobi, assumed that if they bought a home in Seattle, they would be able to get Internet at home. The house was surrounded on all sides by homes that had Comcast service, but they learned after hours that it was never connected.
“All six of the neighbors I share a property line with are connected to Comcast, but our house never was,” Cohn told Ars. Internet.” Because the house “is in the middle of Seattle, it didn’t even occur to me that that was possible,” he said.
It was almost impossible to get information from Comcast. After about eight months of trying to get an answer on how to get Internet service, Cohn gave up trying to contact Comcast directly and reached out to a member of the Seattle City Council. Finally, Comcast revealed that it would only provide internet service if the homeowners paid more than $27,000 upfront.
Cohn and Zenobi decided not to pay and remained dependent on a mobile hotspot despite working from home. “I’m just really nervous about dropping $27,000 to lock myself into a company that can then raise rates, and we don’t even have the classic ‘send me to your retention department because I’m going to threaten to quit and switch to another company’s argument. You just have to pay what they want to charge,” Cohn said.
Comcast Wanted $210,000 For Internet So This Guy Helped Expand A Cooperative Fiber ISP
This October 2022 story combines elements of horror with feel-good vibes. Sasha Zbrozek bought a house in Los Altos Hills, California in December 2019, only to find out later that the house was not wired.
Zbrozek recalled a Comcast agent telling him it would be “no problem” to plug in the house he bought, and several of his neighbors had Comcast service. But after Zbrozek spent more than a year trying to get information from Comcast about a line extension, Comcast told him in February 2021 that it would cost him $210,000 to run about 800 feet of cable.
By the time Comcast finally provided that estimate, Zbrozek had become involved with a cooperative ISP called Los Altos Hills Community Fiber (LAHCF). He is now an LAHCF board member and he organized an expansion that brought multi-gigabit fiber optic internet service to his home and others on nearby roads.
“Residents are just getting tired of dealing with telcos, and they just want to take this into their own hands,” LAHCF Board Chairman Scott Vanderlip told Ars. LAHCF’s network was built by a company called Next Level Networks, which uses a model in which residents own the infrastructure and share initial costs.
Next Level has six broadband networks built or in progress in California and plans to expand to other states, CEO David Barron told Ars. Next Level’s approach is based on “the idea of micro-scale networking rather than doing community-wide builds, just neighborhoods, housing associations, buildings, whatever the case, where you know there’s a demand, and actually let them cover the cost parts of the network,” he said.
