Plaidophile

Hopefully he's using the feedback he's getting to encourage the rest of Comcast to actually improve the site and the general clarity/accessibility of their information and processes (for example, even with his help I still haven't gotten a straight answer about whether any HD QAM stations are available on analog cable, and another long-time niggle of mine is how you can't order TV service and self-install for Internet simultaneously, even knowing that I can't do the Internet self-install until after the TV service goes live).

I have a feeling that the reason DSL providers are doing so well is because of general distrust of the cable companies. There's a huge base of potential customers who want Internet and don't care about a landline, and Comcast fills in that gap much more cheaply than the DSL providers if you know where to look, but most people don't. I don't mind Comcast marketing their higher-end TV services, but it's as if they want to pretend the lower-end ones don't even exist. It's gotten easier to find analog cable information on their site lately, but it's still practically hidden, and it's still difficult to get an idea of which channels are actually available at the different analog tiers (their channel lineup interface is atrocious).

It's a bit telling that when I first asked about QAM lineups, Frank actually pointed me at some random webpage that a student was maintaining with frequency listings for MythTV or something, rather than any provided-by-Comcast document, and of course this document didn't say anything about the service level, it was just a list of channels that this student had identified with his tuner card.

So, I really hope this customer service experiment goes well. I certainly welcome any change which leads towards acknowledging the "customer" and "service" parts.