Complaint Review: Mediacom - middletown New York

We bought a brand new house in Dwight, Illinois June of 2008 when I retired from active duty military.  It was a new construction and we were the first occupants.  The house is on the edge of town in a new subdivision with several empty lots around us still.

Because it was a new construction and on the edge of town there was no drop close enough for Mediacom to hook us up right away.  We had to wait 2 months for them to come out and dig a new line and install a new drop close enough to the house to hook us up.  So we had a new house with new wiring which Mediacom installed after they installed the drop and hooked up the new wiring from the drop to our house.

We ordered the digital tier with a DVR, internet and digital phone and immediately started having problems.  Originally it was just the cable that would act up.  The picture would freeze (they called this tiling), sound would go out or just skip.  The remote control would be completely unresponsive and/or lag.  We would change the batteries but it wasn't a case of the DVR/digital box not receiving the signal it was a case of I would hit fast forward and 10 seconds later it would start fowarding.  I would hit play and 10 seconds later it would start to play.  If I got upset and was doing a bunch of button presses pausing, playing, rewinding and fast forwarding the box would respond with lengthy delays long after I had pressed any buttons...but responding in the order in which I had pressed the buttons on the remote.

We recorded the shows with the tiling problems and showed them to the tech who showed up.  They checked the wires in the house, said everything was good and they would get back to us.  They never did...it was a bad foreboding of what was to be 4 years of hell with their tech support.

The next couple times different techs would come out, tell us they tightened or replaced this wire or connection or that one but the problem was never fixed and we were constantly calling them back out.

Finally we got a guy who really went thru the whole system, stating he had to tighten NUMEROUS connections in our crawl space, he had to tighten all the connections at the drop, and he went down the line throughout the whole block tightening connections at each drop.  This still did not fix the problems.

I was recalled to active duty service for a period of 6 months in 2010 and we were living in North Carolina.  My nephew house sat for us but didn't mention any problems with the cable when he stayed there.  However we noticed the same issues when we got back November 2010.  They seemed to come and go intermittently, at one point we gave up on watching TV because it was so bad.

2011 all 3 services went out at once.  No phone service for months, internet would go out every 5-10 minutes for a few minutes at a time and then come back.  The cable was going thru horrid tiling sequences where you couldn't watch anything.  I recorded everything and am getting ready to post them to Youtube so everyone who considers buying from Mediacom can see just how bad their tech support is.

The tech came out spring 2011 and said the cable connections to our DVR box and internet modem were broken, he wasn't sure how we ever received a signal with such bad connections.  He replaced every wire in the house and had a new cable installed between the house and the drop, which they left unburied until October 2011...very nice, thanks Mediacom.

For the most part the tiling problems went away, we left this summer 2012 for Phoenix to help some family members out, come back in the fall....and the tiling problems are back again?

We are now being told we have to wait 1 week for a maintenance call and that we do not qualify for emergency maintenance because we haven't had enough problem calls in the past 1-3 months.  I guess they haven't looked at the 3 dozen or so times they have been out in the past 4 years trying to fix THE EXACT SAME PROBLEM!!!.

To make matters worse they keep lieing to us on the phone.  When this problem originally started in 2008 we were told that we would be reimbursed for any loss of signal problems.  Instead, the tech upgrades us to HD.  I didn't order HD, and quite frankly the HD channels tile just as bad if not worse than the regular channels.  I would have been happier if they had given us channels we didn't have instead of HD versions of the channels we already had which also have the same problems.

What is Mediacom going to do about our problems?  Are they capable of fixing the problems?  I don't see it, I have asked for different techs to come out, they send the same ones every time.  I have asked for refunds for the service we have lost, for all the shows we wanted to watch which we recorded but were completely unviewable because of the tiling.

Superbowl games lost, Olympic's lost, season premieres of our favorite movies lost.  One of my coworkers has Dish Network and when they lost AMC channels and he complained about missing his favorite shows they sent him a box which allows him to view Amazon.com shows on his TV and gave him credits for all the missed episodes.  Do you think Mediacom ever once contemplated reimbursing us in this way for the programming we paid hundreds of dollars a month for but couldn't watch because of their incompetence?

I've never had these problems with a cable company.  I've lived in Georgia, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico and have never had such horrid cable connections, and those were in old houses and apartments.  I had better connections when I was stationed in Japan, Korea and Germany.  Shoot even the adhoc setups in Saudi Arabia and Turkish airbases were better than this.  I've used DirectTV on occasion and even with storms and inclement weather the signals were never this bad and the dish networks are at least willing to work with you when you lose signals and miss programs.  Mediacom is not, and what is funny is how they advertise how much better their signals are supposed to be than the dish networks, funny how they advertise on TV about their fiber optic service...I'm not seeing it...especially when the commerical for their fiber optic service is lost to tiling I almost lost it I was laughing so hard.

I'm done paying hundreds of dollars for crappy service, problem is I'm in a rural area and there are no other options other than dish networks.  They know they have me by the balls, and they continue to squeeze for everything they are worth and ignore my complaints and pleas for help.