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Comment by heavymark | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I imagine the rebranding will be as ineffective as Comcast rebranding as Xfinity, where everyone knows they are the same.

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Yea it is hilarious how Comcast thinks rebranding to xfinity etc is going to help. To be fair to them, the internet service mostly has been excellent where I live. The issue is the predatory pricing/cost and ever decreasing TV channels for existing customers.

Having worked there during the rebranding, a big part of it was more to drive clarity around the business units (think Alphabet vs Google, only in reverse). "Comcast" refers to the overall holding company over the cable business, media business and stadium / real estate holdings.

They referred to the cable business as "Comcast Cable" for a while before rebranding it to Xfinity. The public rebranding was definitely intentional, but it wasn't the only reason behind it.

I don't know what you're talking about, Comcast has had amazing support the last few months in my area. We even had a rep come to our house, and leave a handwritten note on the door when we didn't answer, asking if we had any questions or concerns and to give them a call if there was anything they could do for us.

... I'm sure this has nothing to do with the city fiber to the home buildout that is going on in our neighborhood... ;-)

My Comcast connection is rock solid. Except when it rains. And I live in Oregon.

FYI: I had that problem a decade ago, and the problem ended up being a nick in the coax sheathing on the run from the house to the neighborhood box. Water would get in and ruin the signal, but it was fine when it was dry.

I just got comcast installed in a new home, and the experience was completely different from what I've experienced in the past -- think "apple store", rather than "we're the phone company; we don't have to care". The customer service rep that helped me said they just finished six months of training, and even they were surprised that the system "just worked" when I went in to pick up the gear (my choice to pick it up two hours after calling them rather than waiting for delivery). I won't go into detail about all the other things that "went right" to avoid sounding like a marketing bird, but from what I heard it is a corporate initiative and not just for the fiber buildout.

My kid recently moved apartments from one served only by Comcast to one not served by Comcast. He filed the cancel request online and took his cable modem to a Comcast office in a nearby mall. The cancel process took about six minutes total; nobody called to beg for him to stay or stall him on the phone for over an hour.

My view is that the indication is how a company treats you when you leave versus when you arrive and, at least this once, Comcast did well on both.

It took 4 of Comcasts contractor technician visits to my house to fix a bad coax running to the building. The first tech identified the problem and said another would come to fix it, and no one did. The next two were completely useless beyond checking that the modem connected, and wasting my time.

Aside from that my 300Mbps service frequently tops out at 30Mbps, seemingly whenever I want to download something large. The upstream bandwidth they offer is also abysmal.

Their stock price certainly has a much better slope post rebrand. Though I don't know all the factors.

It doesn't matter that everyone knows they're the same, rebranding often works.

Rebranding works when it’s paired with significant changes.

Without that people tend to keep using the old name for a long time. People still call the Willis tower the sears tower and that change happened 11 years ago.

As much as I dislike Comcat/Xfinity, I don't think they are hurting at all.

I've never understood the comcast hate. I've been using Xfinity for years and it's been very reliable and fast. My only gripe is the price.

Comcast used to do some pretty bad stuff, but they've definitely cleaned up their act. I've been a customer for 10+ years, and have had zero significant issues with my service.

It's not so much the service itself as the crappy customer support, shady billing processes (eg, accidentally overcharging on a regular basis...) and things like that.

they enforce data caps on home internet

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