Comcast is rapidly becoming a monopoly, so you have no choice in most areas of who to use for television. Apparently they are using that as the reason they have so many problems and refuse to fix them.
1. The cable box freezes up periodically, refusing to accept any input from the remote for anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes. When it finally wakes up, it processes all of the keypresses at once. This is extremely annoying when you’re trying to change the channel but the box decides it doesn’t want to, and you end up missing the first 5 minutes of a program. I’ve noticed that the box typically does this at the top of an hour, as well as when it’s starting a recording on the secondary tuner.
2. Some channels always have issues. The high def channel 38 constantly has a snapping noise in the left speaker. Other channels do not do this.
3. High def channels occasionally lose sync, so the video is maybe a half a second off from the audio.
4. The DVR will often not accept fast forward or rewind commands. The icon on the screen shows < or >, but it’s still playing. Other times it will fast forward or rewind, and then simply not stop when you hit play. I spent 15 minutes one night trying to get it to stop at a particular spot, because the box kept scanning right over the spot I wanted and would not acknowledge the PLAY button.
5. For a long time, USA network has video noise. The LAW AND ORDER logo would have white horizontal streaks across it. I complained for months before they finally found the problem – apparently it only showed up on high def televisions (even though it’s not a high def channel) and at that time I guess I was the only one in town with a high def television who wanted to watch Law and Order. (Yeah. Right.)
6. They keep touting how great their On Demand service is, yet half the time it doesn’t even work. You select something on the menu and get “One Moment…” Maybe it works, maybe not. Usually, it coughs up a communications error and says try again later.
So, I call Comcast and complain about all this. Do they care? Hell no. I get some high school dropout who barely speaks English, arguing with me that all she can do is send a tech out, even though I know damn well that won’t help. Every tech that has been out here shrugs their shoulders and says “yeah, we know, a new box won’t solve it.” We’ve tried replacing the box several times – all that does it lose everything we recorded because Comcast has blocked the function to pull video off the hard drive.
And yet, just like Windows crashing and forcing a reboot, we have become conditioned to just accept it as normal and move on.