Goodbye, Comcast

We are disgusted with Comcast and thinking of switching to Fios. Just about every night around 9 p.m., we lose Internet access. This is a problem since streaming is our main medium of entertainment. A lot of shows come on after our early bedtime so we like to catch up the next night and we also stream movies and previous seasons of TV shows. I got sick of wasting three nights trying to watch the same episode of Mad Men only to have the screen freeze six times during the credits. The last straw was last weekend when we couldn’t even watch a preview of a movie. It’s also annoying since we are moving away from DVDs due to space considerations and would rather stream everything but with the lack of Internet, we have no guarantees.

 

Yes, first world problems, people in Iraq don’t even have electricity all night, etc. But when you’re paying a premium for Internet and cable and phone, the system really needs to work, or what good is it? It’s especially true as I work from home once a week and really hope I can get online during the day because I enjoy the perk.

 

We have had technicians come out four times in the last few months but they just have not been able to solve this problem. One of our neighbors is having the same issue and getting a runaround. So we’re pretty much done. If you’re not going to earn our business and fix this problem, goodbye.

 

Comcast seems like a terrible company anyway. Even the network it owns has been awful lately. NBC was, for at least 25 years, wall-to-wall quality programming. Thursday nights was like going to church – a really entertaining church that nobody ever missed with four great sitcoms in a row. Even the Saturday night schedule was killer in the ‘80s and when was the last time anyone wanted to stay home on a Saturday and watch TV?

 

Now there’s exactly one show, Parks and Recreation, that I will watch on NBC. I was reading a book about how Jeff Zucker pretty much destroyed the network by airing insipid crap instead of the highly polished shows it used to have in abundant supply. The last straw for me was when NBC aired the execrable Whitney on Thursday night. That was like a sacred timeslot for gold standard shows like Cheers and now you’re just letting any half-baked crap air there? No thanks. It amuses me to see that Zucker went to CNN and is still peddling nonsense non-stories, given that it aired blanket coverage of that cruise ship with overflowing toilets, as if it were some matter or national importance.

 

But anyway. Comcast is the worst.