Goodbye, Xfinity
My promotional rate for Xfinity internet service expired a few days ago. I’d planned to renew my Xfinity contract with whatever the latest promotion is, hoping to get roughly the same price. But Xfinity made it so fucking obnoxious to accomplish this renewal that, halfway through the process, I begged my wife to let me switch us to Quantum Fiber, which has a $50 price-for-life deal going right now for gigabit fiber internet.
Today is my first full day having switched to fiber, and I’m feeling happy and relieved.
The Xfinity renewal
Here’s a summary of my Xfinity experience, written for my own catharsis:
I try to choose a new internet package off the website, and I see the prices are much higher than what I’d been paying.
I get on the Xfinity chat to try to get at the current promotions. (See the bottom of this post for thoughts on better approaches.) I get caught up in the automated chat logic, but eventually get through to a human. After 20 or more minutes of back and forth, they offer me a deal at the same price, a much lower speed, and a “free” Apple Watch. I initially said yes to this out of impatience, figuring I could live with the lower speed and sell the watch to offset the price. They send over the contract, which includes a $10/month charge for the watch. This is after they assured me there was no extra charge for it. I was out of time at this point and left the chat in frustration.
A few days later, I get back on chat. I stumble my way into a human agent, and I again ask for the promotions. After 10 or 20 minutes or back and forth, they offer me a deal with a “free” iPad. I say no, I don’t want any devices or extra charges. They assure me there are no extra charges. I say no, I only want internet.
Several minutes of more waiting. Eventually, a new chat person comes online, introducing themselves and saying they’re getting up to speed on my request. Several more minutes pass. I reiterate what I’m trying to do. They say they’re looking into it. More minutes pass. I hope I’m making some headway.
About 40 minutes into the chat, that person disappears and a third person comes into the chat, introducing themselves and saying they’re getting up to speed. I start to lose my cool, saying something like, “Omg. You’re the third person. Please just have someone call me.” They assure me they can help, and within a mere 5 or so minutes, they provide me a list of all the current promotion deals. They also schedule a callback call. Finally. I guess that’s what it takes to get a clear answer: an angry outburst from a customer pushed over the edge.
There is no promotion on the list that is even close to my current one. I could drop from 840mbps to 600mbps and pay $10 more than my current deal. I might have done that. I don’t need 840. (Or was it 860? Not sure.) But at this point, I’m so frustrated with the game and don’t want to reward Xfinity with any more of my money.
While I’ve been waiting, I look at what Quantum Fiber is offering: $50 price-for-life for 940mbps symmetrical fiber with no contract. That means 940mbps up as well as down. Xfinity is fixed at 35mbps up, and requires a contract to get a decent deal. I know many people who have been using Quantum’s (fka CenturyLink’s) service for years and say it’s been rock solid.
I thank the agent, decline the callback when it comes, and prepare fiber-switching negotiations with my wife, who hates when I change this stuff without a true need. My wife gently pushes back, saying she doesn’t want another cable and box on the house. I expect that and give in quickly. But later that night I do another round with Xfinity chat, or fighting with the website, or both. I can’t quite remember. The point is, my wife witnesses my growing exasperation and eventually acquiesces.
All along the way I keep trying to solve this problem on the website. I would have paid the non-promotional rate just to be done with all this. But the website was broken in so many ways and I could never get it done. It would let me put a package in my cart but error out during checkout. It would get into an auth-fail loop, throwing 400 errors on every single page. I’d have to open a private-browsing window to try again. Sometimes the page with the package listing would just spin forever. And even for those pages where it did work, it was so awfully slow.
I book an install appointment with Quantum. I feel a rising exuberance at the thought of being done with Xfinity.
I transfer my phone line to Mint Mobile to test it out before transferring the others on my family plan. (We were also Xfinity Mobile customers.) It’s easy and works fine. Gods be praised: I don’t have to talk to an Xfinity person for this.
My Quantum appointment arrives, and the install goes smoothly. The technician is great — very thoughtful about the house and communicative with me. My Firewalla happily switches over to the new network without any work from me.
I eagerly get on Xfinity chat to cancel internet service. I get bumped through what seems like a different chat logic, and I wonder if they keyed off the “cancel” word and added extra hoops. I eventually get a person, who then asks me why I’m cancelling. I’m sick of the doing the promotion dance each year, I say. It’s too time consuming.
About 20 minutes into the chat, they cheerfully tell me Xfinity will soon have the option to sign a 5-year contract instead of 1- or 2-year ones. That’s their solution to the promotion game: locking customers into longer contracts.
No, I reply. I’ve already switched to another ISP, and I only have 5 minutes left before a meeting. Can you do this in 5 minutes? I beg.
Yes, they say, they’ll help me.
Five more minutes pass, and they say they’ve done the work on their end, and now they need a verbal confirmation. They schedule a callback. I explain I’m going into a meeting and ask what will happen if I can’t pick up? Will they retry the call? The agent doesn’t seem to understand the question, and I leave with 30% confidence.
The callback happens right when my meeting starts. The meeting is an important one, but I take the call in case it’s quick, gesturing to the other person on the Google Meet call that I’ll be just a minute. I tell the callback agent that I’m canceling and just need to give him a verbal confirmation. “May I ask why you’re canceling?” he cheerfully asks. UGH! My gut tells me this call won’t be quick, and I ask him if he can call me back in 30 minutes after my meeting. He confirms my number and says yes.
I was thoroughly unsurprised that he never called back. Ninety minutes later, at Reddit’s suggestion, I go to the Xfinity store, which is about 10 minutes away. I wait 20 minutes at the store to be seen. That person was actually helpful, and quickly canceled my service. He did ask why I was canceling, but just nodded and didn’t try to sell me anything else.
Xfinity themes
Xfinity is a lot more expensive than fiber in my area — like, more than double the price if you don’t get a promotion. And the promotion game is ridiculous. I couldn’t see a list of the current promotions without navigating the automation labyrinth to a human being, and even then they were being cagey about just listing the deals. I couldn’t buy a new package on the website — both because the good deals aren’t listed there and because the website was fatally broken when trying to buy even a standard-rate package.
The chat experience is awful. Don’t try to get anything done there unless you have a full hour blocked off, or perhaps even longer. I had to cut short multiple attempts because I ran out of time. And when I did devote a larger block, the agents rotated multiple times in the middle of our chat, practically starting the process over and extending the time required.
So. Xfinity costs a lot more money. It costs a lot more time, which is perhaps our most precious asset. It provides worse internet access — significantly slower download speeds per dollar, dramatically slower upload speeds, and higher pings (as measured by my Firewalla after my fiber switch).
Why stay with them, then? Ignorance and inertia, I have to assume. People don’t know there’s a better option, or they do but feel it’s too annoying to change. It’s easier to just live with a worse deal.
Well, not this guy. Not anymore!
Oh hello, fiber
Here's my Firewalla's speed test:
And here's its ping measurements. Xfinity was 14ms, and fiber less than half that. (Does this actually matter? Probably not. But I'll take it.)
What I could have done differently
I could have tried harder to use the phone number instead of the chat. I tried once but hung up as soon as the automation dance started. I got the sense from web searching that the phone number was just as annoying as chat, plus I was trying to multitask and get work done while managing the chat. But maybe a phone call would have gotten me to the list of actual promotions the first time around.
Better yet, I could have just gone to the Xfinity store. I read that you can get the best deals there with less bullshit.
But in the end I’m happy I didn’t do these things. My frustration finally overcame my inertia and got me out of Xfinity’s game.
Bon voyage, Xfinity. Please do better.