Today the internet just fell off around 11:45.  Some people could get to different sites some couldn’t get anywhere but brighthouse was down.  First thing I did when my wife called was tweet Etan at the Orlando Sentinel as he is the only person I know with a direct contact at BH.  Ok, he posted a blog and everyone flocks to twitter to search on brighthouse and we find out how wide spread the issue is.  Skip to a few hours later and we have these lovely responses from Sara Brady:

“If you can’t get through it means they know there is an issue and they are working on it,” Brady said.

WHAT?!?!? You need to fix your issue reporting Brighthouse, we pay good money for a service and we DEMAND to know when you’re having issues. Telling us that a busy signal means you know and are working on it is like me going to the doctor, finding his door locked and assuming he knows I’m sick and going home knowing I’ll just get better.  PLEASE!.

Next we have this statement with some background from Etan:

Brady said that although Bright House owns Central Florida News 13, the cable company treats the channel like all other local news outlets when there is an outage. However, she was open to a suggestion that Bright House put a crawl message at the bottom of CFN 13 altering people about service interruptions.

“I will take that advice and maybe we will do that next time,” Brady said.

WHAT?!? This is next time, do you not remember the huge outage last month.  How awesome was that?  Again we had to rely on Etan to get us the information.  Have you learned nothing?  Do you care? You’re not showing it.  U-Verse can’t expand fast enough and then you’ll wonder why all your customers are leaving.   I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again.  Get on Twitter, Comcast is there, Bankof America is there be involved with your customers.  Why can’t Sara set up a twitter account to let us know what’s going on at LEAST?

Argh…

Long time for a DB restore…should have a hot spare back-up DB server, just change ODBC connections and back up and running.  Oh yeah that’s right you really don’t care…

From the Brighthouse Website, that is down for people on the brighthouse network, ironically…

For Immediate Release 12/8/2008	For further information contact: Brian Craven Phone: 407/215-5597 brian.craven@mybrighthouse.com
Bright House Networks is Experiencing a Temporary Video Service Outage But Service is Expected to be Restored Soon
Maitland, FL–Bright House Networks is experiencing a temporary video service outage due to a corrupt database. Digital phone and High Speed Data services are not impacted. We expect to have service restored soon. We apologize for this inconvenience.

LOL, Who wants to start the EPIC fail list?  I’ll start it

1. Have an off network site that give network status status.cfl.mybrigthouse.com, so we can get current status.
2. C’Mon even Comcast is on Twitter, you should be too.  We are more technical now, we want to know what’s going on when, where, how, ASAP.
3. Admit there is a problem, don’t tell me you don’t see a problem and need to send a tech out.  It was find yesterday, its broken today, nothing I MEAN NOTHING has change in my house, street, poll.  Its on your side just fix it.
4. ……. Who has more….

So its almost 7:30PM here in Orlando and I still don’t have a functional cable box.  I’ll do a quick fail round up later but I can really say this has been the worst handling of a system outage that I have ever seen.

Keep up with Etan’s blog for details:

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/etan_on_tech/2008/12/central-florida.html

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/etan_on_tech/2008/12/central-florida.html

To quote:

UPDATE 5:03 P.M Just heard back from Bright House spokeswoman Sara Brady who confirmed the digital cable outage, which she said began at about 3 p.m. today. Brady said Bright House hopes to have service restored between 6 and 7 p.m. tonight.

Sucks!

How much does this new software suck, I hope we get the tuning resolvers soon so I can use my TiVo again because this just doesn’t make sense.

Here are a few things I’ve noticed:

• Lose buffer after switching sources
• HDMI freaks out from time to time resulting in no picture just the channel banner (unplug and replug HDMI to resolve)
• Awful interface (I know nothing compares to TiVo, but this is just horrible)

What are some of the things you’ve noticed?

I am amazed that I am getting comments on the original post.  I put this up just to see what would happen but its nice to see more people realize what a shitty company this is.  More to come, I am going to add a forum so maybe we can get some discussion going so people can start to learn what tricks work to get you the best service and so others can learn what to avoid.

Please email tips to bigdave914@gmail.com, I will categorize them and get them on the site ASAP!

I finally have the time to get this site up and going. More to come…

Welcome to Bright House REALLY sucks.com. This will be THE place to air your Bright House issues. I can’t do anything to help you get them resolved because we all know Bright House isn’t about customer service. What I can do it give you a place to find others who have dealt with this beast and lived to tell about it.