[cfgeeks] Anyone have BrightHouse in the Altamonte Springs area - 436/434 intersection...

[Jeff Iddings]

John Mayson wrote:
> On 12/13/07, Jeff Iddings <jeff at iddings.us> wrote:
>> BrightHouse's company lawyer just called me. Told me that they were
>> disconnecting me in 30 days and have a nice life. Told me my service
>> exceeded national industry standards. Yet I have a photograph of my
>> modem going off 7 times today.
> 
> You ought to Slashdot this story.

I'm not very elegant with my words... but if I was to post this on
Slashdot or the like.. how does this sound? I removed my snide comments
and hatefulness. ;)

-----

My BrightHouse Experience

I've been using BrightHouse services for as long as they've been offered
in this town. Their Internet and television packages always seemed like
the best deal in the area. Though I may have had a sporadic problem, it
was usually due to a splitter going bad or the like. But whatever it
was, it was always trivial and easy for BrightHouse to fix.

Then I moved across town to a nice middle class neighborhood and my
experience with BrightHouse began to change. From the very first day in
May 2006 there were problems with the modem staying online and the cable
boxes restarting randomly. After multi frustrating calls to BrightHouse
they began to send technicians out to diagnose the problem. Admittedly,
for the first few months they were very diligent finding dozens of
potential problems inside and outside the home. I was convinced at this
point that my service would improve and it did – for a month, maybe two.

Within a short while my Internet was back to going out randomly almost
every day. Not for very long, maybe 30 seconds to 2 minutes at a time.
Just enough to knock me off of my VPN or out of my SSH terminal session
for work. Based on my years of technical experience, I know this is not
an expected result when dealing with broadband Internet connections.

After going back and forth with BrightHouse, they put me in touch
directly with a 'technical supervisor', Greg Wingate. At first Greg
Wingate put on a good show. Almost every morning he'd have a technician
sitting in my drive way monitoring the service from the street. Every
time the service would go out, I would walk out side and sure enough the
technician would see the disruption too. Doing this was a fairly
effective way of isolating where the problem was – e.g. Not inside my home.

After they determined where the problem may be, they referred my problem
to their maintenance division and they made small changes that seemed to
do nothing. At best they were able to mitigate the problem for a few
weeks at a time, but ultimately it always comes back.

Many phone calls, many promises later I obviously felt like I had to
escalate my problem to executives within BrightHouse. I contacted Chris
Fenger's office, President of BH Central Florida. He immediately
referred to me a customer service escalation person who basically
repeated all the above processes.

This same cycle continues multiple times and still my Internet service
was unstable. Then December 13th, I received a call from a lawyer at
BrightHouse network. He told me my service met the national industry
standard and I could either deal with it or they would have to
disconnect me in 30 days. He mentioned my uptime was 99% over the last
14 days.

I don't know I can dispute that 99% figure – hard to say, I haven't
tracked it. But when a company offers a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of
99%, they say that so there's a reasonably understanding among the
client and the service provider that 'stuff' happens. Sometimes someone
hits a pole, sometimes there's a network hardware failure. There can't
be an expectation of constant service at all times and I fully
understand that. I'm not unrealistic, the service is $60 a month – it
won't be perfect. But to use that 99% figure when my service literally
disconnects multiple time a day is just using a vague clause to get rid
of a vocal customer.

It's fair to say that I have never been so disappointed with a company
in my life. I had always been a big fan of BrightHouse. Though now I
have photo and video evidence of my Internet service being interrupted
multiple times a day though BrightHouse tells me their service meets
'national industry standards'.  They've simply given up. It's a very sad
day for customer service.

Thanks for listening.