TCI Sucks

TCI Sucks so bad that they get their own page...

Totally Crappy Infrastructure

Even when they change their name to AT&T Broadband Services (or whatever the final name may be) ... Well, you know the saying "A Rose by any other name..." still sucks!

These jerks bought Santa Clara's cable system two years ago with the promise of an upgrade. Santa Clara's cable has the shortest channel lineup in the entire SF bay area. TCI promised to re-wire the city and add more channels. State-of-the-art HFC two-way data, digital cable, blah blah blah blah.... This was to all be 75% done by September of 1998. Well here it is in November 1998 and the only things they have done to date is:

1) Re-arrange the channel line-up twice (no new channels)

2) Raise our rates.

3) Big update !!! They ran a new coax on the pole in our yard, snapping a large branch off of our magnolia tree... Does it go anywhere ? Does it do anything ? Does it even hook up to our house ? NOT YET.

4) OK so now (December) they hooked up the new cable from the pole to the house. For the next three days, the reception sucked ! This is an upgrade they're supposedly doing ! Also, the doofus who hooked up the cable left a big wad of extra cable dangling from the line and slobbered garbage in our yard.

5) The BUTTHOLES decided to put the Sci-fi channel and HGTV on digital cable only. So of you want to see those, it's extra money for digital service and leasing the stupid set-top box. With all those new channels they opened up on the analog service, they put the two channels I really wanted on digital... It's just another way for these greedy SOB's to gouge us for more money.

6) The past few days our reception really sucked. Ro called TCI customer service (whatta joke) and was on hold for twenty minutes (not unusual for TCI). They sent out a "technician" to our house even though we told them the whole street had bad reception. He climbed the pole and in just a few seconds our reception went from annoying interference to un-watchable! Then he told us that was the best he could do and that he couldn't fix it. "It was a line problem" Well DUH ! That's what we told them in the first place. As I type this, the cable is blinking on and off and each time the reception gets worse. What a surprise.

7) For no apparent reason, the TCI gnomes were in our backyard sometime in March of 1999. They put a big ugly metal plate on our circuit breaker box, hooked a big ugly green wire to it and then connected it to their cable. They never notified us that they were coming, they didn't leave a note that they had been here or tell us why they did what they did. Calling them to ask, would be a waste of our time.

8) The TCI gnomes were in our backyard again in May of 1999. This time they fixed their crappy wiring job on the pole. I knew someone was in the backyard because they left our gate open and left more wire scraps and crap in our backyard... slobs.  I wonder if someone at TCI saw our web site? We didn't ask them to fix the mess.

9) The rates go up again in next month. (June 1999)

10) The rates go up again. (July 2000)

11) A guy tried selling us AT&T Phone service through their cable lines HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I hope AT&T does them some good. Unfortunately, think it's a lost cause. Can you imagine TCI providing telephone service? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. When was the last time your phone went out? It usually takes something along the magnitude of an earthquake to knock out the phone system. When it gets windy, our cable goes out. If it's hot, our cable goes out. If they DO decide to make a phone system out of the cable system, TCI will finally have to answer to the public utility commision.

Once we got a "service representative" (TCI has no idea what service is) with an original, honest answer: "It will be fixed when it’s fixed." Honest? Yes. Rude? Yes. Informative? No!