Comcast rebrands services, new name is marginal at best

So… how do you overcome negative public perception and customer service issues that won’t seem to go away? Fix the root of the problem? No. You re-brand yourself of course! Today, Comcast announced that the company name will stay the same; however the services have been renamed to… XFINITY? Yes, XFINITY. Starting next week, Comcast will be rolling out the new name in 12 major markets. Comcast customers of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Hartford, Augusta, Chattanooga, and San Francisco, you are now XFINITY Internet, XFINITY Cable, and/or XFINITY voice customers. XFINITY…sort of rolls off the tongue… wait, actually, no it doesn’t. Here is the corporate justification for the move: “XFINITY is about offering our customers more — more HD, more speed, more choice and more control over their services.” We would love to see Comcast improve their services and stop spending money on fighting net neutrality and changing all of the logos on their letterhead, but hey, that’s just us.

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Tags: cable, Comcast, Internet, phone, XFINITY

NoFan

Walks like a duck, talks like a duck…still a duck.

Andrew Munchbach

I was hoping you would go with the infamous:

“You can put lipstick on a pig…”

Craig

My personal favorite:
“You can’t polish a terd”
red014

The Mythbusters did. ;)

http://www.tmikwid.com Striggity

Terrible, do not like.
MilenkoD

That’s like instead of calling it sh*t, let’s call it “turd”
grrr

Comcast is lame.
James

Does this mean an end to the stupid “Comcastic” commercials?

Chris

OK, so there is a good thing that comes from this!

T Mac

Comcast is robbery. They stole my cables!

red014

My house too! They came to install and took all the coax wiring out of my house except for the one room with the box. Asses.

Mrwirez

Serious? I thought T Mac was just kidding.. Wtf is the explanation for that?
red014

“Sir, that’s not in our policy. That wouldn’t have happened.”
~phel

I bet the price of copper was real high when they did that.

toddk

Mr Munchbach hit the nail on the head, Comcast has deeprooted and long-standing issues at the very core of its company that no re-brand is going to change. They laid off my own father the week before Christmas this past year because he was getting to close to retirement…yet reported record fourth quarter profits. Comcast is a company that fails to respect its employees, value its customers, or have any sort of clear vision for the type of successful company it would want to become in the future.

With AT&T and Verizon steamrolling Comcast’s footprint for HSI and CVOIP and now even cable television, it’s only a matter of time before Comcast finishes digging its own grave and jumps right in.

Andrew Munchbach

@toddk

Sorry to hear about your fathers plight. Hope it all works out.
~phel

wow that makes time warner sound like a warm fuzzy company…

Ausfest

FUCK COMCAST
JohnO

Hmmm, seems an awful lot like “Dunder Mifflin Infinity”
Mrwirez

Comcast blows.. so expensive. Who do they think they are fooling? As soon as Fios is here, Comcast is gone. Get the deal, then move to something else. Xfinity=Comcast =ripoff
http://www.fullchipdesign.com fcd@fullchipdesign.com

Tough to say the new name
ChocoTaco

FiOS > Comcast

Comcast $42.95/mo for 6Mbps
FiOS $37/mo for 15Mbps/5Mbps

Real fios speed:
25Mbps/22Mbps

I kid you not.

Plus, I get way more TV channels AND Comcast SportsNet with FiOS, On Demand, etc, for WAY less. All with much better picture quality.

After years of torture, I’m done with Comcast.

PedroJoe14

I agree that Comcast has it’s problems, but being more expensive than FiOS is not one of them. You need to research that pricing. There’s a lot of factors that you are not including in that. And you can’t get FiOS base internet service for less than 54.99 by itself. I live in the DC area and I can tell you that Comcast speed is actually comparable if not better than FiOS. I’m not trying to defend Comcast per se, but FiOS is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Mrwirez

@ChocoTaco: Thanks for the info..
FIOS is literally across the street from me (different township), yet I can’t get it yet.. Comcast is bombarding my area with commercials aimed at FIOS.. I see at least four per day and I really don’t watch that much TV. They must be denting into Comcast’s customer base.. Comcast appears like a politician that is losing in the polls, then they start going all negative.

* Btw.. We want/need net neutrality*

iLikeWhiteBreadW/Ocrust

Sounds like a dern porno flick…

Team RamRod!
Nicholas

I have had Comcast for 10 years. There have been some ups and downs, but mostly it has been a good product with good service. I haven’t done any hard research around pricing—but I doubt there is a HUGE difference, otherwise everyone would be jumping on the FIOS boat.
I will leave Comcast if it becomes clear that FIOS is better/cheaper—but for now I will stick with what I have.

The only thing that would definitely make me leave is if Verizon got a version of the iphone and began bundling FIOS and Cell service. That would be hard to beat.

Chris

Was paying $110 a month for Comcast, now am paying $49 a month from Dish. A few less channels (like E and food network) and one of my DVR’s is SD now instead of two HD boxes, but for $60 month I can live with a non HD DVR box on my bedroom tv.

Dish is by far the best price, but even if you go with Direct you’ll save $20-30 a month. You really should do some research for your area.

Gilbert Ricci

No matter the name they will always be terrible! Wish I had more options!
1jaxstate1

LOL, they still gonna charge 100 bucks for their “professional” installation with no option to do it yourself.
Rang3r

Idk what all u guys r talking about serious. Comcast is seriously great. I love comcast. I really really wish Comcast and Apple come together n do something great. It would be awesome! To H E L L with android n wut the F U C K you think

~phel

I wonder who signs your paycheck…
Giorgio

Way to strategically avoid the non-existent profanity filters…

Jeff

Is this kind of like Dunder Mifflin Infinity?

Oh, that didn’t work either… LOL
Tepper

It’s too bad Comcast/Xfinity has a stranglehold on high speed anything in the SF Bay area.

Residential choices are between ATT (some areas have Uverse) with max speeds of 6Mbps or Comcast/Xfinity with max speeds of theoretically ’50Mbps’…

Verizon won’t tread up here with fios and the current two companies cannot seem to see a reason to invest in a drastically new infrastructure in these parts.
What??

You CAN polish a turd…
But at the end of the day it’s STILL a turd.
Mike2128

Hey, it worked for Cingular, right?
weep

lol i know atleast one person that fell for the name change. he was telling me how he switched from att dsl to this “new cable provider in the area”. haha can’t wait to break the news to him.
Chris

Was paying $110 a month for HD service with two HD DVR’s. Switched to Dish, got the same service (two HD, only one DVR) for $49 a month. Comcast will get me back when they stop charging $14 per HD DVR box.
Mrwirez

@nicholas– There will never be an iPad/iPhone on verizon, period. AT&T will see to that. Everyone keeps talking about AT&T’s exclusivity ending this summer, the reality is, only Apple and AT&T knows if it ends anytime soon. Apple has stated numerous times they are very pleased with AT&T, they aren’t going to risk putting their beloved iPad/iPhone on a subpar network…end of story.
Ben

I live in Chattanooga and can’t wait for all their advertisements to change to Xfinity. I don’t know why they’d change it here though, because they have a monopoly on Cable in Chattanooga. There are NO other cable providers here. We do have DirecTV and Dish but I live in an apartment complex where that’s not allowed.

I can honestly say that Comcast is the worst company I’ve ever had to deal with it and if I wasn’t forced to choose between cable with Comcast or no TV at all, then I would certainly not have chosen Comcast.

They shaft me literally every chance they get. After setting up my internet service at the start, after 2 weeks it was going unbearably slow, and so I called customer service which told me that I was experiencing heavy data loss due to improper wiring (which the Comcast techs caused), so they sent someone out to fix it….2 weeks later. Not only that, but they charged ME $35 to fix the error and didn’t even tell me they were charging me that until it came on my bill. I called them, but they said that I could ONLY go into the local Comcast office to fix the issue. After I did that, they informed me that to much time had passed and I couldn’t get that refund.

Needless to say, Comcast should not exist and I hate them with the strongest passion imaginable.

MattJ

By fcc law, if you have a private use area, aka a balcony, pointed the right direction, they can not legally stop you from putting up a dish. You may have to get fancy getting the cable into your unit so you don’t do any permanent damage but there are ways to do that too..

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/facts/otard.html
Darnell

As MattJ mentioned, you can mount a dish legally, but I guess it depends on if your apartment is able to pick up a signal. And that does not help you regarding Internet or phone service. Dish Internet is too slow and DSL is slower too. Home phone service with AT&T is a rip off.

Glad you now know there is a better option already rolling out in Chattanooga, http://epbfi.com/ Hope they reach you soon. Hope they reach ME even sooner :-) .

I’ve had Comcast try that $35 service charge game for their own problems, more than once. I always make them take it off. That “too much time” excuse is bogus. Over just $35, I don’t know what options you might have to force their hand other than repeated complaining, they know $35 is not worth you filing a lawsuit over. I personally just always paid them for all except $35 till they removed it fromt my bill and I kept complaining. I didn’t accept any excuses and told them I started making my complaints the moment the charge showed up on a bill, so they can’t tell me I waited too long. They often wait long after the service was performed to actually try and apply the $35 charge. So for them to even try and claim a customer waited too long to complain is totally bogus.

I do hope someone may be able to get some sort of class action lawsuit going over that though. Because Comcast has been running that $35 service charge game FOR THINGS THAT ARE NOT REALLY INSIDE WIRING PROBLEMS CAUSED BY THE CUSTOMER for a long time now. Soon as the economy took a downturn, Comcast and even some other companies started trying to hit customers with more fees, to make up for their own losses.

The only sad thing, is that even if there was a lawsuit, it would likely only result in something like a free COMCAST PPV movie for customers who were part of the class. Not an actual refund of the $35. Comcast knows the game they’re playing.

When they need to do service for me, I tell them I don’t want the guy doing anything inside and they claim he can’t come at all if I don’t agree that he may come inside. (Although I know the problem is outside and it always is.) So next time, I will tell the tech when they come, to not do any inside wiring, but I don’t know how that will go over. They come in to do silly stuff like check the cable is connected to the box and TV and then claim some splitter they installed might have gone bad and they replace it. Or they claim they have to come in to run diagnostics on the cable box. It does not fix the problem, but they’ll note that they did inside wiring work and try and charge me $35. Which I have to fight to get off my bill later.

All I can say is, once EPB Fiber Optics is available for my place, I’m running from Comcast. And I’ve told Comcast more than once after they started that $35 game with me, that I’m leaving soon as I can get another service option.

Comcast rebrands services, new name is marginal at best

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