I’ve seen a lot of tragicomic Comcast customer service disaster stories over the years, which isn’t surprising considering America’s favorite cable company generates more FCC complaints than AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner Cable combined. Given this, you would think that I’d be a grizzled, cynical person who is incapable of being surprised by anything Comcast does.
But you’d be wrong.
Ars Technica reports that a Silicon Valley tech startup called SmartCar last year tried signing up for Comcast service. Since then, the young company has received no Internet service from Comcast… but it did receive a bill from Comcast for $60,000!
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“Comcast never fulfilled its promise to hook up the business, blaming the delay on construction and permitting problems,” Ars explains. “Neighboring businesses were making do with painfully slow and unreliable DSL Internet from AT&T, and ultimately SmartCar reluctantly signed up for AT&T as well.”
However, this DSL proved too unreliable for SmartCar to deal with, which was why it decided to move to an entirely new office building where it could get better Internet service. The company called Comcast to request a refund for the $2,100 deposit that it paid for cable Internet service, only to be told that it actually owed Comcast $60,000 for breaking its contract early. You know, the contract that was signed for the service that Comcast never delivered.
You cannot make this up.
Comcast decided to waive this early termination fee after being contacted about the story by Ars Technica. SmartCar founder and CEO Sahas Katta nonetheless expressed indignation at the ISP and fumed to Ars that it shouldn’t be “this difficult for startups in Silicon Valley to get Internet.”
Read the whole sad, hilarious story for yourself at this link.
