heliosj's news, thoughts, geek stuff, and more...

Update 02-01-08 - (later in the day) - An e-mail from Mark Butler, the assistant city manager in Altamonte Springs.

Mark T. Butler wrote:
> Jeff,
> Yes, BrightHouse requested an Altamonte Springs Police officer accompany
> one of their technicians to XXXXXX XXXXX Avenue this morning.
>
> The City of Altamonte Springs does not charge a user fee for police
> services.
> Mark

Update 02-01-08 - Well, holy crap. They just came and disconnected my cable. They sent a uniformed officer from the Altamonte Springs PD with them. It's unbelievable. I never threatened them. Not once. I was never violent, what did they think I'd do? I hope they paid for the protection, because it was unwarranted by all imagination.

Update 01-18-08 - The saga continues. I thought we were making progress, but the left hand doesn't seem to know what the right hand is doing.

My roommate called them on Wednesday and they said we could keep our service. And then just 15 minutes ago, they called and said that's not the case...

Update 01-04-08 - So the threat to shut us off wasn't just a threat.. the BrightHouse lawyer sent us a letter on New Years Eve declaring Feb 1st our disconnection day.

I'm going to roll over and die. It's simply not worth it -- if a cable monopoly wants to strong arm a little guy with a legitimate problem, so be it.. I figured I have nothing else to lose, so I posted the letter and my final rebuttal.

The ironic thing is, December 23rd, the connection has been stable. Did they fix it just after deciding I wasn't worth it anymore?

bhlawyerletter.jpg -- letter from the BH attorney.

bhrebuttaldraft.pdf -- my brief rebuttal.

So I'm going back to comparatively slow DSL -- oh well. Just be careful when dealing with this company. If you get involved with the wrong people, you'll find yourself burned in a trail of dishonesty.

Update 12-31-07 - The letter from BrightHouse attorney came today. Feb 1st is our disconnection day. We're discussing how to proceed, but it's far from over.

Update 12-28-07 - I haven't been around much with the holidays and all, so hard to say if there's been any noticeable improvement. However, there's been another unrelated network issue for weeks which is causing slow download speeds from many different sites -- including YouTube. Dozens of people have called in about this problem and it's constantly misdiagnosed. Read about it here...

Update 12-21-07 - Screen shots from my BrightHouse modem (with time stamps). But "national industry standards", eh? Are you listening BrightHouse? It's indefensible.

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My BrightHouse Experience

I'm in shock. After all my problems, yesterday, December 13th, I received a call from a lawyer at BrightHouse Networks. He told me my service met the national industry standard and I could either deal with the problems I was having or they would have to disconnect me in 30 days. He mentioned my uptime was 99% over the last 14 days.

I've been using BrightHouse services for as long as they've been offered in this town. Their Internet and television packages always seemed like the best deal in the area. Though I may have had a sporadic problem, it was usually due to a splitter going bad or the like. But whatever it was, it was always trivial and easy for BrightHouse to fix.

Then I moved across town to a nicer area and my experience with BrightHouse began to change. From the very first day in May 2006 there were problems with the modem staying online and the cable boxes restarting randomly. After multiple frustrating calls to BrightHouse they began to send technicians out to diagnose the problem. Admittedly, for the first few months they were very diligent finding dozens of potential problems inside and outside the home. I was convinced at this point that my service would improve and it did – for a month, maybe two.

Within a short while my Internet was back to going out randomly almost every day. Not for very long, maybe 30 seconds to 2 minutes at a time. Just enough to knock me off of my VPN or out of my SSH terminal session for work. Based on my years of technical experience, I know this is not an expected result when dealing with broadband Internet connections.

After going back and forth with BrightHouse, they put me in touch directly with a 'technical supervisor', Greg Wingate. At first Greg Wingate put on a good show. Almost every morning he'd have a technician sitting in my drive way monitoring the service from the street. Every time the service would go out, I would walk out side and sure enough the technician would see the disruption too. Doing this was a fairly effective way of isolating where the problem was – e.g. Not inside my home.

After they determined where the problem may be, they referred my problem to their maintenance division and they made small changes that seemed to do nothing. At best they were able to mitigate the problem for a few weeks at a time, but ultimately it always comes back.

Many phone calls, many promises later I obviously felt like I had to escalate my problem to executives within BrightHouse. I contacted Chris Fenger's office, President of BH Central Florida. He immediately referred to me a customer service escalation person who basically repeated all the above processes.This same cycle continues multiple times and still my Internet service was unstable.

I don't know I can dispute that 99% figure that the lawyer mentioned – hard to say, I haven't tracked it. But when a company offers a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99%, they say that so there's a reasonably understanding among the client and the service provider that 'stuff' happens. Sometimes someone hits a pole, sometimes there's a network hardware failure. There can't be an expectation of constant service at all times and I fully understand that. I'm not unrealistic, the service is $60 a month – it won't be perfect. But to use that 99% figure when my service literally disconnects multiple time a day is just using a vague clause to get rid of a vocal customer.

It's fair to say that I have never been so disappointed with a company in my life. I had always been a big fan of BrightHouse. Though now I have photo and video evidence of my Internet service being interrupted multiple times a day though BrightHouse tells me their service meets 'national industry standards'. They've simply given up. It's a very sad day for customer service.

Thanks for listening.

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There are some other more absurd tidbits like having to throw a contractor out of my house at one point, because he didn't do the job he was told to do by his superior, because he knew better, despite having no previous knowledge of my situation. He started yelling at me and that was that was that.

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This article was titled "BrightHouse Sucks". I've decided to take a more civil tone, so I renamed it. The high road is the better road, I guess.

Update: December 14th - Lots and lots of entries in my log from mybrighthouse.com. They seem interested, at least.