About two months ago I got a letter in the mail introducing me to my new COMCAST Concierge Representative, this person was to be my channel into 1st class customer support from COMCAST; this is important because if you have ever tried to purchase services from COMCAST or get them to support the services they have already sold you its a challenge at best, they know you don't have many options and treat you as such.
My COMCAST Concierge guy was nice, and helpful he even answered questions via e-mail; frankly I was impressed but its clear from the discussion he did not have the same sort of power DirecTV gives its escelation CSR folks.
That being said, while I was impressed with my experience to be honest the thing that exited me the most was that the fact that COMCAST gave little old me this level of care meant that competition was coming, the uncaring COMCAST machinery knew soon I would have choices!
About two weeks ago, I confirmed this; when I came into my neighborhood surveyors were there marking phone, gas and power lines with their neon paints, I asked one of them what services were coming in and they told me it was Verizon with FIOS.
Yesterday when I came home there were a dozen or more guys working to plumb the infrastructure through my neighborhood, none of the ones I could find spoke english, they all spoke Spanish and I really only know two spanish phrases:
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Donde esta el bano (Where is the bathroom)?
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Una cervesa por favor (One beer please).
And unfortunatley these two phrases were not going to help me here (though they have served me well in the past). In any event though I don't know when they will be done, or when it will be live, but I do think I have a reasonable chance of getting service from Verizon FIOS in the not so distant future which is just great.
Why do I care? Well for one I really don't like the way COMCAST has treated me in the past, its also more expensive than the comparable Verizon offerings, more over Verizon FIOS offers down speeds as high as 50Mbps and up speeds as high as 20Mbps; that just doesn't compare to my COMCAST BLAST 16Mbps down and 950Kbps up.
The big deal for me is the up speed given the telecommuting I do, but moving to a cheaper service that is faster overall doesnt hurt.
Only time will tell when I can switch, but I strongly suspect I will.