Maybe not so Comcastic for some

The switch is on, but not all newly Comcasted users are happy about the experience.

Tony Speller, Comcast senior vice president, said less than 1 percent of the 750,000 Comcast customers in the Houston area have experienced problems during the technical switchover to Comcast's network in recent weeks. As of Thursday morning, all Internet and digital phone customers had been switched to the Comcast network, Speller said.

"What has happened to date has exceeded our expectations in terms of our success rate of over 99 percent of our customers' devices have come over with no challenges at all," he said. "When you do a transition of this magnitude, obviously you're going to have some fallout. We don't want to see any fallout, but for those customers who have, we've definitely been very active to get someone out there as quickly as we possibly can to get those resolved."

Dozens of customers have told the Houston Chronicle about problems with Comcast in past weeks. These have included failing Internet or phone service, hourslong waits for technicians who never showed up, holding more than 30 minutes for a customer service representative, a modem that would not work with Comcast's network, or being unable to send or receive e-mail since being switched to Comcast.

Hard to say how good or bad this is. Time-Warner had a lot of customers, and some of them are going to have a bumpy ride no matter how competent Comcast is. And obviously, the folks calling in to complain are a self-selected lot. You can't judge from that. The only way to know what the overall experience has been is to do a customer-satisfaction survey. Which I'm sure Comcast will do, though they may or may not make it public.

As I said in the previous entry, the switch seemed pretty smooth for us, and as far as I can tell the Internet service is about what it was before. For what it's worth.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on July 28, 2007 to Technology, science, and math