Comcast business class: not ready for prime time.

Comcast has been sending me snail mail about their Business Class services. They offer 6 or 16 Mbps downloads, 1 or 2 Mbps uploads, hosted Exchange services (though they oddly call it "Outlook mailboxes"), along with telephony at some very acceptable prices.

My office is over 10,000 feet from the nearest ATT central office, so the fastest DSL I can get is 1.5 Mbps (I use Covad). The idea of getting 6 or 16 Mbps for about the same cost is attractive.
The call to action in the Comcast ad is a phone number, not a website, but I want in-depth information so off I go. Soon I find a link to a detail page.

The suits at Comcast have decided to position their packages by size of company. This is a serious mistake. A media company with three employees may need better Internet connectivity than a flooring retailer with 30 employees. The further you are from reality, the harder it can be to make decisions, so they were probably still scheduling meetings about what size fit which package when the website went live:

We'll ignore the grammatical crimes.

I don't need their opinion of how large my business should be, anyway. But when I get down to where some of the real technical detail should be, it gets even worse:

This pretty bad. I hope their tech support people aren't using this site as their reference.

But when I look at the category called "Dedicated Lines" my heart just goes out to the poor copywriter:

Comcast obviously has some broken processes. Or perhaps there are no processes. It's fun to speculate: maybe the copywriter's contract was canceled, and the semiliterate manager told the lazy webmaster to post whatever was already done ... so he did. 

My DSL service is slow, but it has been relatively trouble-free, and Covad has great support techs available around the clock ... I'm thinking twice about switching to Comcast.

Comments

[hobgoblin]

In almost all cases calling and speaking to someone in your area is a far better bet.

I find it strange that a business owner has the time to create posts and pages like this instead of putting the effort into productive work.

Oh well

[David Burns]

I find it strange that it seems you'd rather I didn't write about my experience with Comcast, hobgoblin.

You'd be surprised how much productive work you can get done, and still write a bit, if you put your mind to it.

I did try calling Comcast, twice. The first time I was disconnected almost immediately. The second time there was a message - something like "Thank you for calling Comcast Business Class" - then the line went silent for five minutes. No typical call queue messages or anything, just silence. I finally hung up.