Adelphia Cable -- The Cable Monster of the North
Written: Jun 19 '05
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Pros: provides all my favorite shows, automatic deductions
Cons: costs, customer service, unseen price increases
The Bottom Line: Adelphia is a below average cable company at best, and on its worst days just horrible to deal with.
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| three_ster's Full Review: Adelphia |
Adelphia cable has been my provider ever since I started living on my own. They are the local provider in my area, and I would guess I have used the company for roughly 3 years. I don't think that those three years have been entirely pleasant though, because not only is it an expensive service, but I have had numerous problems with their customer service and billing centers. Competition is non-existent in my neck of the woods, so unless you are going with satellite or a dish network, then Adelphia is all there is. This is a negative, because then they don't have to really care about doing anything wrong, or think twice about a customer deciding that they are a terrible company. There are a lot of services available, but it comes down to what you are willing to put up with to get them.
The Company
Sitting as the fifth largest cable company in the America, Adelphia caters to 31 states. Besides offering cable programming, the company also offers analog and digital video services, high-speed Internet access and other advanced services over its broadband networks. A lot of these services can come right through one cable hook-up, and for some, the Internet access is a great benefit to get with their cable. Since I live in an ethernet system within my apartment complex, my use of Adelphia has been primarily with the basic and digital cable programs, and with everything that it entails. The company claims to be very customer friendly, and when you are watching television in our area, they always have commercials claiming to be just that. Meaning that they aren't selling enough local advertising, if they have this many open slots to toot their own horn. And toot they do, though I have yet to ever see this family-friendly side of the company.
Basic Cable
For the basic cable programming offered by Adelphia, you receive 64 channels in my area. This includes the major networks, and many of the cable channels you would expect. This includes TNT, CNN, MTV, VH1, and The History Channel just to name a few (full list provided at end of review). The basic cable plan is often advertised for only $29.99, but read the small print, which says it is actually only an introductory amount for each of the first six months. After that, it bumps up to $42.95, and a little over $47.00 after taxes in my area. Sure it might not seem too steep, but at over $600.00 for a year of cable, it becomes a pretty heavy expense when you add it all up. So having already paid thousands of dollars into Adelphia, I would assume that I would be receiving the utmost attention from customer service, which is not always the case. Instead, the longer I stay with the company, the more complaints I seem to have.
Digital Cable
One of the things that Adelhia also offers, is the ability to have digital cable, which gives you a few more channels, and the access to pay channels. To do this you are given a box to check out(at a rate of $3.25 per month)and a Universal remote (which is also charged per month). This is referred to as a cable box, and gives the channels beyond #65 that basic cable gives you. This is where you can get things like the Biography Channel, The GameShow Network, ESPN Classic, and BBC America. This also comes at a charge, as nothing is free when you are dealing with a cable company. By having the digital cable, you are put into what they call the "Bronze Package" which runs at $19.95 on top of your normal cable bill. Not very cheap, but if you like having the additional channels, and the Universal remote it can be really nice.
A couple of other things make the digital cable worth having as well. The cable box provides menus for nearly everything you could ask for. By using one of the drop-downs, you can see what show will be coming on at any specific time on the schedule. You also are given the ability to scroll through the time schedules with a TV guide that tells everything that will be coming on for the next few days. Using that information to your advantage, you can then mark shows, and set alarms that will come up on the screen when you are suppossed to be watching a particular show or shows. This helps if you are a channel flipper, because it reminds you when to go back to one of the previous channels.
Besides giving access to the pay channels such as HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax, the Digital cable also gives you the ability to use Pay Per View and the Music Channels. For Pay Per View, there are about 30-40 channels that are set up just to order movies from during the day. At specific intervals, you can order the movie through the box, and click over to the channel where it is going to be shown. This saves the time of having to go to the video store, and costs $3.95 per movie. There are also adult selections that are available for a few bucks more. The music channels entail about 30 stations in the 400's, that are designed to offer an array of different musical selections. There is everything from a rap channel to a polka channel, and they play music of that genre for the duration of the day.
Bonus Packs
In what was billed as "a way to make things easier for customers", Adelphia recently moved all of their digital cable channels into what they deem "bonus packs." The intent they claimed, was to make it more understandable, easier to pay for, and give the sections of their additional entertainment set names. With Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum levels it gives users the feel that they are getting more for their money. But, when the smoke cleared it turned out that this was just another way for the company to rip off its users. Were I had been able to upgrade to additional channels before, and was happy with how much I was paying, they decided to increase all the prices, and for each additional group of channels you got, you now had to pay more for it. For example, their Bronze means you choose one set of premium channels from their list which includes Showtime, HBO, Cinemax, and Star/Encore. Selecting one of these bumps you up 1 level, 2 up two level etc.
Here is a list of monthly charges for these "bonus" packs:
Bronze (digital basic): $57.05
Silver (Digital Plus + 1 Premium) : $79.21
Gold (Digital Plus + 2 Premiums) : $84.49
Platinum (Digital Plus + 3 Premiums) : $92.66
Ultimate (Digital Plus + 4 Premiums) : $99.24
For $42.95 or $23.00 extra on any of the cable plans, you can also get the high-speed internet connection that Adelphia provides. It all makes everything quite expensive, and when you think about paying over $100.00 per month after taxes and fees just for cable, it gets a little unreal to me. You would think that if the expenses got this high, this fast, that you could then expect great customer service to go along with all the money that you are paying into it. But, that is not really the cost, and they find lots of little ways to add fees to your bill if you even need the slightest amount of help with it. In fact the latest price increases have just gone into effect, raising prices from between 5 and 25 percent depending on what level of service you already have. This does NOT include any additional benefits, just rising prices to suck more money out of the consumers.
Customer Support
Saying those two words "customer support" is really misleading, because the only support that they really give you is to help lighten your wallet. They want to make sure you aren't carrying around any unnecessary funds, so they remove that burden from you. To start with, the local office for me does not have a public phone. Meaning that they only use it to call out, and will NOT accept calls coming in to it. This is a huge problem, because then I am required to put all of my phone calls through the national office, which doesn't help me very well, because then they just have to call back to the local office. It gets frustrating when the cable goes out, and you have a simple in-town question to ask, or if something is wrong with the service and you need help with it. To get adjustments made to your cable, it sometimes takes weeks for the local office to make it around to you, simply because there is so much red tape for them to go through in their own organization.
Things to watch out for are the charges and fees which they attach to just about everything you can think of. Besides charging for remote control rentals, they will also charge for trip charges, downgrades are charged a fee of $25.00 if you ever do it, Any additional outlets beyond the primary in your house or apartment are charged, and there is also an additional charge to get hooked up in the first place. With all of the money we already pay into this monster, you would figure that the customer service would be free. Talking to them on the phone is even worse, because they are so far from the specific location they even deal with. There 1-888 number sends you to a bank of operators who refer you to different people each time that you call. When I tried to set up my auto-pay account from my bank account, I was told that it was set-up over the phone, only to have my services turned off, because the local office didn't complete the transaction. This is funny, because I basically lost service, because they didn't charge me. Not so funny when I was missing my weekly shows.
Overall Impression
Adelphia is a terrible company in both working with its customers, and in making them happy with their services. They don't try and compensate you when they make mistakes, and they are so unattached from their own consumers, that it would seem they could care less if they had one more or one less person paying them thousands of dollars. Being a company with a monopoly, it becomes hard to not argue that they are providing what I want, but it makes me angry everytime they have a problem, or they raise the prices without fixing any of their internal problems. If I had other choices, I would drop this company in a heart beat, and the only reason I even use them is because I am addicted to television. If you are forced to deal with them, always make sure to read the fine print, and make sure that you are planning far in advance when you want them to do something for you.
Basic Cable Channels in Eastern Washington
2 KREM (CBS)
3 KLEW (CBS)
4 KXLY (ABC)
5 QVC
6 KHQ (NBC)
7 KSPS
8 Public Access
9 KAYU (FOX)
10 KWSU
11 Community Bulletin Board
12 KUID
13 PEG Public, Educational, Government Access
14 Paxson Satellite Network
15 KSKN (WB)
16 Educational Access
17 Eternal Word Television Network
17 The New Inspirational Network
18 KQUP (UPN)
19 Home Shopping Network
20 TV GUIDE
21 C-SPAN
22 C-SPAN2
23 The Disney Channel 24 ESPN
25 ESPN2
26 Fox Sports Northwest
27 CNN
28 USA Network
29 The Discovery Network
30 Nickelodeon
31 ABC Family Channel
32 AAmerican Movie Classics
33 Arts & Entertainment
34 Headline News
35 The Weather Channel
36 VH-1
37 MTV
38 TNT
39 Comedy Central 40 Spike TV
41 E!
42 Sci-Fi
43 Fox News Channel
44 CNBC
45 The Learning Channel
46 Cartoon Network
47 CMT
48 Northwest Cable News
49 Animal Planet
50 TV Land
51 Court TV
52 Travel Channel
53 The History Channel
54 FX
55 BRAVO
56 TBS
57 HGTV
58 Lifetime
59 Hallmark
60 SHOPNBC
61 Food Network
63 MSNBC
64 OXYGEN
65 BET Black Entertainment Television
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 48.84
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