Astound | Arlington — Attraction in Arlington

We have had astound for about 8 months. Yesterday, 7/2, our internet went out after Astound had someone working on the system in the neighborhood. We called and were told our modem likely blew due to a surge during the maintenance. They assured us we just needed a new modem, but they would schedule a tech to come in on 7/5 in case self installation didn’t work. Today (7/3) we drove over to pick up the modem and after several tries couldn’t get it connected. We talked to three reps over the course of a few hours only to find out we needed a new appointment for Friday, because the old appointment was for our old modem, and when then rebooked us, our old appointment time was no longer available because someone else had taken it. I took off the whole week from work to study for my specialty boards, and my partners mother is in town. I can’t study and we can’t go anywhere in Friday because now our appointment time is 11am-3pm, which we have to be home for. When I asked about compensation for our inconvenience, they offered us $5 off our month based on the number of days and the rate we pay per month for internet. When I reiterated this was not our fault and I was losing 4 days of internet access for studying for boards and we were losing an entire Friday of a holiday weekend, we were told that essentially nothing could be done. The customer service by the reps we talked to was top notch, with two of them reaching out to their supervisors to inquire about additional compensation. The company’s policies are trash and I’m amazed that the max they could offer is $5 for 4 days of no internet, with the additional of 4 days of annual leave I took for the purpose of studying. We will likely be looking for other internet options once I have...

That awkward moment when Comcast monumentally has better customer service than another provider.

First off, I was psyched by the 49.99 deal for TV and internet! With a TiVo service? I was pumped. I got a T6 and a mini for my room. Living in Brighton, I have an older house that only has one coax port. I knew that the tivo mini could use moca or ethernet, so I asked what functions I could get from the tv mini. First, they said Tivos had no streaming powers, which I said was one of the Tivo's main features. I directed them to the main tivo site on RCN and showed where they were wrong. They said only coax would work, so I had to direct them to their own website where it showed ethernet or moca. They still insisted they were right and wouldn't let me speak to anyone else. She later called and apologized and said she was wrong.

During installation, my person came an hour early and shut off my internet during a work call. We then set everything up in the main room, and he let me install the tivo mini myself. It's super easy once the main Tivo is connected. You plug the hdmi into your tivo, the ethernet port in, and the power, and it sets itself up based on the main tivo on the same network.

I enjoyed having this in my room - my roommate wanted to add one for hers. They said they'd charge $50 for the install, and wouldn't let me install myself. I said I could definitely do it and did it myself before, but they insisted on charging $50 and having somebody do it themselves.

The service itself is okay - very old user interface - but honestly I'm probably going to switch back to Comcast as they make everything difficult. Comcast allows self installs, has more informed tech support, and...

Direct customer since September 2014 and indirect customer as of January 2014. I'd say that it's average service with slightly below average costs but we do seem to have regular internet outages at least once a month when it will stop working and we need to reset the router. (I tried having Billcutterz help negotiate a lower rate, but I guess this is the cheapest option so far.) I've never really bothered to call them about this since it usually fixed itself within a few hours.

Not sure if my roommate was already a long time customer but we were paying for internet and cable and it was $120/month. However after he left I took over as a "new customer" and was able to snag the introduction offer of $59/month + fees for Internet, basic cable + HBO (very useful for watching Game of Thrones and all those other good shows). Instead of letting us use the current equipment they actually had a cable guy come by and reset up the connection and they gave us another router which we then had to use after our old one was infected with a virus or something. Ever since 2014 the bill has been steadily going up by either $2 or by $20. It is currently around $86/month and I suppose it will continue going up so it might be time to shop around for another provider soon.

I've had limited interaction with the customer service mostly about billing. It's ridiculous that paying over the phone incurs an additional $7 processing fee... One of the customer service agents I talked to processed this payment before letting me know of the fee and had to reverse it. What a headache. I have it set on auto pay now to save the headache...