I Changed Internet Providers

[easysurfer]

Done deal. Put in the cancel order for my old internet.

Of course had to do that dance that went like..

Operator: You are cancelling, so sorry to hear that?

Me: Yep.

Operator: Guess what? You are in a U-Verse area, we can set that up for you. Is that ok?

Me: No, I just want to cancel my dsl.

Operator: Who do you have for TV service?

Me: I happy with OTA, don't have a tv service or cable, use my own antenna.

Operator: Do you have your cell phone with us? We have a plan, your wife and kids can be included too?

Me: (thinking to myself...I'm not married and don't have kids, but they just assumed I do. Their customer profiling didn't know that?).. No that's okay, I just go use a prepaid phone.

Operator: You'll get a free phone

Me: No thank you.


Finally...knowing that I really just want to cancel, the operator says if I change my mind, I can get the connection reactivated within 30 days.

She goes ahead and writes up the cancellation order.

Me... left feeling like someone just tried to sell me a car that I wasn't looking for

 

[aja8888]

Done deal. Put in the cancel order for my old internet.

Of course had to do that dance that went like..

Operator: You are cancelling, so sorry to hear that?

Me: Yep.

Operator: Guess what? You are in a U-Verse area, we can set that up for you. Is that ok?

Me: No, I just want to cancel my dsl.

Operator: Who do you have for TV service?

Me: I happy with OTA, don't have a tv service or cable, use my own antenna.

Operator: Do you have your cell phone with us? We have a plan, your wife and kids can be included too?

Me: (thinking to myself...I'm not married and don't have kids, but they just assumed I do. Their customer profiling didn't know that?).. No that's okay, I just go use a prepaid phone.

Operator: You'll get a free phone

Me: No thank you.


Finally...knowing that I really just want to cancel, the operator says if I change my mind, I can get the connection reactivated within 30 days.

Me... left feeling like someone just tried to sell me a car

They are all trained on the upsell these days. Once upon a time, customer service was there to help you with a problem.

 

[ChiliPepr]

After a bad email switch I picked up my own domain name and a hosting service for my own email. My email addresses are owned by me and I can move to different host services as needed. Way less than $50/year if you just get the basics.

I did something similar... I use "Pobox Lifetime Email - Mailboxes, Email Forwarding, Spam Protection and Personal Domains" and have used it since sometime in the '90s. It is a forwarding service that you pay $10/year. basically you send an email to your pobox.com email and it is forwarded to which ever email you like. I have changed my email provider many times, but have always kept my pobox.com email address... For me it is well worth the cost.

 

[W2R]

Done deal. Put in the cancel order for my old internet.

Of course had to do that dance that went like..

Operator: You are cancelling, so sorry to hear that?

Me: Yep.

Operator: Guess what? You are in a U-Verse area, we can set that up for you. Is that ok?

Me: No, I just want to cancel my dsl.

Operator: Who do you have for TV service?

Me: I happy with OTA, don't have a tv service or cable, use my own antenna.

Operator: Do you have your cell phone with us? We have a plan, your wife and kids can be included too?

Me: (thinking to myself...I'm not married and don't have kids, but they just assumed I do. Their customer profiling didn't know that?).. No that's okay, I just go use a prepaid phone.

Operator: You'll get a free phone

Me: No thank you.


Finally...knowing that I really just want to cancel, the operator says if I change my mind, I can get the connection reactivated within 30 days.

She goes ahead and writes up the cancellation order.

Me... left feeling like someone just tried to sell me a car that I wasn't looking for

Notice that they did not even try to negotiate your cost for the DSL service that you were cancelling.

My experience was much the same when cancelling my cable television. I told them that it was because I needed to lower my bill. No negotiation or bargains on television service were suggested at all. I made it pretty clear I did not want to "save" by including phone and consequently increasing my bill.

They seem to have taken me off their "please pay more to bundle!" snail mail list. It's been two weeks and I haven't received a single one.

 

[easysurfer]

Notice that they did not even try to negotiate your cost for the DSL service that you were cancelling.

My experience was much the same when cancelling my cable television. I told them that it was because I needed to lower my bill. No negotiation or bargains on television service were suggested at all. I made it pretty clear I did not want to "save" by including phone and consequently increasing my bill.

They seem to have taken me off their "please pay more to bundle!" snail mail list. It's been two weeks and I haven't received a single one.

I purposely avoided talking about the rates of my new provider as I really didn't want to have the operator "work on me" to get me to switch back. In fact, I intentionally made no mention of Comcast or Tracfone to avoid a rate comparison conversation.

When asked why I decided to drop my DSL, I just said "I wanted to try the other company out to see what they are like." Which actually is not a lie.

 

[tmm99]

I finally decided to pull the trigger and changed my internet provider from the very basic ATT DSL to faster (and hopefully more reliable) Comcast Internet. I got internet only as I'm still sticking with OTA TV.

I'll miss the $20/month rate I was getting for the basic DSL for about the last 15 years, but it'll be great to actually view something on Amazon Prime and Youtube and not have to quit cause of just stopping or constantly buffering. With Comcast I got their Economy Plus plan which is $19.95/month for the first year, then will go up to about 29.95 - 39.95 month.

The Cable Guy (sounds like a movie) is gonna do the install on Sunday, 6/1.

Of course, I could have just upgraded to U-Verse and kept my email. But that would've been too easy, plus I have an ax to grind

The irony is that over the last couple of weeks, my spotty DSL service actually has been staying on most of the time.

Your comcast cable rate is very good IMO. Mine was $60 and they wanted to charge me over $70 if I dropped my cable, and that's when I dumped both. I have DSL now (highest speed possible which isn't much, but Uverse is not available in my area), but it works fine - no buffering. And one thing I like a lot about it (besides the lower fee) is that it hasn't flaked on me since I got it installed a few months ago while my Comcast internet used to go down a lot and I will then have to disconnect/connect cable/power cycle modem/getting it reset by Comcast, etc.

 

[easysurfer]

Your comcast cable rate is very good IMO. Mine was $60 and they wanted to charge me over $70 if I dropped my cable, and that's when I dumped both. I have DSL now (highest speed possible which isn't much, but Uverse is not available in my area), but it works fine - no buffering. And one thing I like a lot about it (besides the lower fee) is that it hasn't flaked on me since I got it installed a few months ago while my Comcast internet used to go down a lot and I will then have to disconnect/connect cable/power cycle modem/getting it reset by Comcast, etc.

For me, at least so far, I've had the opposite result where the DSL would go down often requiring me to cycle the modem and or try to wait the problem out. Whereas, at least for the first day, no problem whatsoever with Comcast.

To be fair the last couple of weeks, my DSL was up and reliable. I think because a neighbor had just moved in and after bumping me offline when ATT installed her service, I said to the installer to watch out and he probably fixed what was not working. But now I have over twice the speed as before and connection has been reliable.

 

[easysurfer]

Been gone for a few days. I come home and in the mail get an offer from AT&T to sign up for a bundle and get a $400 reward card. The letter is going to my recycle bin.

 

[easysurfer]

Experienced my first outage yesterday since switching internet providers from ATT to Comcast. At first, when the internet went down, my reaction was "this can't be" as the main reason I switched is to have a reliable connection.

At least the outage didn't last long and during the intermittent connection I was able to go to my account summary and see a post showing Comcast was aware of the outage and working on resolving it..with an expected fix time.