Odd.  I've had the exact same experience with Comcast, and 98% of the time their customer service has been super friendly.  The only exception was when I moved into my new place recently and wanted basic digital cable turned on.  The technician came out on time and got things set up.  Because a few other things had been delayed a day, I wasn't able to stick around until he was done.

The next day, when I finally got around to checking the reception, I discovered that none of the HD channels worked.  I called, explained what I had ordered, and noted that the description included those channels.

The woman on the other end did a little typing and then said, "Oh, you didn't ask for the HD box."

I was confused.  "But I did order basic digital?"

"Yes."

"And basic digital includes those channels?"

"Yes, but you don't have the right equipment for them."

"Um . . . why didn't you guys give me the right equipment for it?"

"You didn't ask for it."

We went round this way a couple of times-- me annoyed that she seemed to think it was axiomatic that I would specifically ask for the equipment necessary to receive the channels I was paying for more than anything else-- before she finally transferred me to her boss who agreed to send out the right box for me to set up on my own and packing material to send back the stuff that didn't work.

For services like cable or phone, it's a bit difficult to make generalizations about a company's service on a national level since it's so locally dependent.  The reason for this is that these companies, cable in particular, were grown by acquisition of local companies.  So, the name might be Comcast, but you get your hands on service from the people who worked at the same place that was an independent operator 5 years ago and in many ways still has a semi-autonomous business culture.  If they were good then, they're probably still good now, and vice verse.  Even landline phone, as represented by Verizon, is subject to this to some respect.  The entity known as Verizon is only about ten years old, born of the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE.  The cultures of the two entities are vastly different, and there is still to this day conflict between the two.

the secret to happiness is to have you pay for my cocaine and mountain climbing-p0157

I've had terrible service from Verizon on both the internet (DSL, but I hear that Fios isn't very much better) and the landline side. Louis CK makes a joke that it's silly to hate Verizon, but it's not so much the product, but the customer service they are assholes about.

With Comcast I have had reasonably reliable and prompt service, both on the residential and business side, but more so on the residential side. And that's kind of weird, because you would expect business customers (since they are paying more) to be treated as priority over residential customers. Others have ran into similar situations. Just a little while ago I remember seeing pricing for business and residential, and business customers were paying more from less service. Weird.

I hear complaints about At&t as well, but rarely have ever had issues with service or customer service. I will say that I have been with these companies for years so I am sure there's a bit of "relationship marketing" built into my interactions with them. The decade long At&t customers gets treated much better than the held-hostage-by-the-2-year-contract customer.

Comcast sucks where I am.  I had RCN for years at my old place and never had a problem.  Now it seems like every month I'm having multiple day outages.  Worse, because the service comes in through some kind of package deal with my building, they won't even pro-rate the bill to reflect days without service.