Link This |
Email this |
Blog This |
Comments (3)
Consumers Take Cable Complaints Public
September 11, 2007
Gone forever are the days when consumers fume and suffer in silence in the face of unreliable service. Now, instead of just telling the person next to them squeezing the tomatoes in the produce department, they vent about their cable customer service complaints in the press and on the Internet.
Take Joe Salerno of Mooresville, N.C. He thinks that if he pays $139.82 a month for telecommunications services, he should get $139.82 a month worth of services, available whenever he chooses to use them.
But that’s not the case in his suburban neighborhood in the Charlotte, N.C. area, he told me in an interview. The retiree said his telecommunications services, provided now by Time Warner Cable, have gone out repeatedly in the last year, sometimes for days at a time. He got some improvement from the company but only after he repeated his complaints to the Charlotte Observer.
“Then, a small army of trucks showed up and they changed out modules and amplifiers,” he said. “But the problems won’t go away” for good, he noted, because local cable officials have said that the plant serving his home, which Time Warner acquired from Adelphia Communications during its bankruptcy liquidation, is in dire need of an upgrade.
Salerno’s in a tough spot: his city is part of a regional consortium that exercised its right of first refusal to buy the local system instead of letting it become part of Time Warner. The consortium is in the process of that purchase and city officials vow a complete upgrade of the plant. That’s contributed to Time Warner’s upgrade delay, for until one month ago the company did not know if it would be the ultimate owner of the local system. But now, no one can tell Salerno if he will ultimately be served by the new municipal provider, or Time Warner.
His neighbors are reacting to the poor service by dropping cable in favor of slower, but reliable, digital-subscriber line services or direct-broadcast satellite, he related.
“But it shouldn’t be like that. The solution is to make the company responsible for what it’s supposed to do – fix it!” he said.
Time Warner officials intend to upgrade the plant but can’t give Salerno any information on when that might happen.
“At this point, I’d be happy with a start date,” he said. He’s frustrated with the fact that consumers a few miles away in Charlotte, paying the same amount, get reliable service and cutting-edge products like on-demand programming.
He’s so irked he’s trying to get other residents to form a committee on the cable outages, a group which will take its complaints to state utility regulators.
“I’m hoping they will put a little pressure on (Time Warner),” he said.
Got brickbats or praise for a telecommunications provider? Tell me about it.
Posted by Linda Haugsted on September 11, 2007 | Comments (3)
