Cox Cable Woes (May 1, 2009)

Case in point: Cox Communications. I bought an ATSC/QAM TV last year. I hooked it up to Cox directly and got all of the analog cable channels plus a dozen digital TV channels, all of it either local or cable-only, plus a dozen local FM channels.

What's confusing is that in order to access the in-the-clear digital channels, you literally have to hunt and peck around the digital tuner after it scanned the cable looking for presets until you find some of the obscure channels like a 24-hour channel 10 news or something that looks like a shopping channel, which I don't care about.

You have to, say, tune in something like 90.14 to get the 24-hour channel 10 news. For some of the FM channels, you have to tune until you fund some of them at the channels of 82.xx or whatever.

You get all of the channels in the so-called Limited and Expanded Basic services in analog. What's not fair is that you have to pay $10 a month extra plus $5 a month for a cable box rental to get all of the ones you're subscribing to in digital, or $6 a month for an HDTV cable box so you can get most of them in HDTV. That's just so you can get all of the same channels in standard and high definition as digital signals. HD service is free for the basic channels you're paying for from Limited and Expanded Basic servies. Does this sound confusing? Sure does.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that Cox should give us all of the Limited and Expanded Basic channels in standard or high definition without the need for a converter box if we're already paying for them in analog form. Why do we need to pay $15 or $16 extra a month to view the same channels we're already paying a whopping $49 a month for?

Cox offers digital tiers for $3 a month. Up until now, you had to pay $3 a month per digital tier package for additional TV sets in your home.

I received this flyer from Cox just this past week. It's titled "Welcome Home...To The Great Indoors."

It says that you can add Cox Digital Cable programming to additional TV sets in your home for free. This is not an introductory rate.

I'm saying, OK, since I WAS (more on that later) paying $9.99 for four digital tier packages for one TV, plus another $9.99 for the same number for a second TV, I figured that I could call up the Cox cable rep and ask them if this meant that I would no longer pay $9.99 for the digital tier packages for the second TV set, right?

This is what I got. After I called 619-262-1122 for customer service, I had to explain to about five different representatives about the flyer and what I was trying to do, which was to simply pay $10 less a month for my then-current lineup of services I was paying for.

After all of the runaround, the last rep that I got told me that it would be free on a third TV set in my house, but I would still pay $10 a month each for the digital packages for the two TV sets in the house. Huh? They're saying that I can't qualify for the deal even though their company has changed their rates for digital cable service for additional (second, third, fourth, etc.) TV sets to $0, while you pay for the digital cable service for the first TV.

So, I'm reading on the flyer, and at the bottom, it says to add Cox Digital Cable to additional TV sets for Free. Cost of rental boxes are still required, though I wish Cox would find a way to get around the requirement for renting their converter boxes in order to receive digital services.

To pay $9.99 a month for the digital cable services for the first TV is fair. To charge $0 for the second, third, fourth, and more TVs in the house is something that should be automatically applied to all of their existing customers who already pay for digital cable services on additional TV sets. I say horray for the change, but boo to Cox for not extending the change of rates to their existing customers like myself.

Here's what I did. I unplugged the two cable converter boxes I was renting. Packed them up in the box along with the remote, AC cords, and other accessories. I took them down to the Cox Customer building along Federal and Euclid. I asked the rep to downgrade my services. He took back the cable eqipment that I was renting, which was $11 a month, and now that's gone. The $20 a month I was paying for digital cable service on two of the three TV sets was gone. I also asked the cable rep to downgrade my cable modem speed to a lower priced package, which he did, for a lower price, about $10 lower. Because of that, I no longer qualify for the $10 discount because I no longer subscribe to digital cable.

Anyway, that's my story on why cable monopolies continue to suck. I won't go to AT&T because I'm guessing that their cable service is incompatable with my analog VCRs, which I still use today, as I can't find a digital VCR replacement in the local stores.

The horrors of converting from analog to digital TV continue on with confusing equipment that's hard to learn and use. Can't anybody make it simple for us to enjoy digital services like we still do with analog cable services?