** Update September 23, 2014 ***
The conspiratorial side of my brain wants me to point out:
1) The Outage notifications on Comcast’s site ceased immediately after this blog post
2) My service has been.. spotty ever since, including a complete outage that lasted around an hour the following night….
Where my Download / Upload speeds were consistently 50/10, now I’m thrilled if my download is in the 20’s.
Just ran another check and can see that I’m sitting at 23.2/10.4.
Just saying’ . Not that the only available option of our local duopoly would *ever* stoop to vindictiveness… would they?
** End Update **
I had a recent dealing with Comcast that had me logging on to their site pretty much every day for almost two weeks at the end of August/beginning of September.
Something that started to bubble up in my consciousness was how many outages they were reporting in my area, none of which seemed to be affecting me.
I decided it would be an interesting exercise to, for one week, log into my account periodically throughout the day whenever I was working on my computer (which I do quite a bit) and check my status.
Of greatest interest to me was the fact that not once in all the times I logged in was there ever NOT an outage in my area.
I will concede that there was at least one day where I was impacted by some issue so these notifications are not 100% bogus. But the continuous nature of the notifications has me thinking what a great way this would be to keep folks from calling in if they *did* have a complaint. After all how often do you log into your Comcast account anyway? I know I certainly wouldn’t (haven’t) noticed the notifications during my monthly visit to capture my billing statement.
Below are the details of when I logged in and what the current outage situation was. You tell me – am I just having a spate of issues or is Comcast saving money by reducing customer service call volume?
| Date and Time | Outage Notification | |
| 9/10/14 9:41 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 1 AM tomorrow. | |
| 9/11/14 10:00 AM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 12 PM today. | |
| 9/11/14 1:02 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 4 PM today. | |
| 9/11/14 4:36 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 8 PM today. | |
| 9/11/14 7:25 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 12 AM tomorrow. | |
| 9/12/14 7:52 AM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 11 AM today. | |
| 9/12/14 1:56 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 3PM today. | |
| 9/12/14 6:50 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 11 PM today. | |
| 9/13/14 10:46 AM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 2 PM today. | |
| 9/13/14 6:28 PM | An outage has been reported. We’re working to fully restore service as soon as possible. | |
| 9/14/14 12:15 AM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 2 AM today. | |
| 9/14/14 11:51 AM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 1 PM today. | |
| 9/14/14 1:12 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 5 PM today. | |
| 9/14/14 4:33 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 9 PM today. | |
| 9/14/14 11:27 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 1 AM tomorrow. | |
| 9/15/14 7:56 AM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 12 PM today. | |
| 9/15/14 7:07 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 8 PM today. | |
| 9/15/14 8:13 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 12 AM tomorrow. | |
| 9/16/14 7:41 AM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 11 AM today. | |
| 9/17/14 7:55 AM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 10 AM today. | |
| 9/17/14 12:02 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 2 PM today. | |
| 9/17/14 6:13 PM | An outage has been reported in your area. We expect this to be resolved by 10 PM today. |