Cancelling my Comcast service for cable television and internet involved these steps.
1) Gathering up all of my Comcast owned equipment (cable boxes and remotes, but importantly, NOT my cable modem, which I owned outright) and going to the local Comcast office. There I waited in a long line in a crowded, un-airconditioned office (in the heat and humidity of a hot August day in Maryland) for almost 2 hours. Then handing over the equipment and marking my account as cancelled took 25 minutes.
2) Calling the Comcast support line after they tried to bill me at the end of the following month for not actually supplying service to a home I no longer lived in. I was placed on hold for almost an hour before finally speaking to a representative, who told me that she didn't understand what the problem was because Comcast had no record of actually sending me a bill for the month after I moved.
3) Receiving a call a week later demanding I return my "Comcast owned equipment" before I could receive a refund on my deposit. I countered that I owned the modem outright and had merely given Comcast the MAC address of the modem so that they could authorize it on their network. The representative demanded that I prove that I actually owned the modem. The receipt I emailed from when I purchased the modem was not enough for them, they demanded "more proof" but could not actually offer an example of what proof I could offer. I hung up on that representative and immediately filed a Better Business Bureau complaint (I know, the BBB is a bit of a racket, but sometimes it gets some results).
4) The following day I received a call from a senior customer service manager apologizing for the "mix-up" with marking my modem as being a Comcast-owned piece of equipment. I received a refund of my deposit a few days later.
One piece of advice is to make FTC/FCC complaints instead of BBB complaints. Those agencies are actually pretty effective at suing companies into better business practices.
I have since learned the comparative uselessness of BBB complaints and the effectiveness of FTC complaints. This is the one instance where a BBB complaint worked for me. I've not had cause to make an FCC complaint since this happened, but I agree, the FTC has been very helpful.
1) Gathering up all of my Comcast owned equipment (cable boxes and remotes, but importantly, NOT my cable modem, which I owned outright) and going to the local Comcast office. There I waited in a long line in a crowded, un-airconditioned office (in the heat and humidity of a hot August day in Maryland) for almost 2 hours. Then handing over the equipment and marking my account as cancelled took 25 minutes.
2) Calling the Comcast support line after they tried to bill me at the end of the following month for not actually supplying service to a home I no longer lived in. I was placed on hold for almost an hour before finally speaking to a representative, who told me that she didn't understand what the problem was because Comcast had no record of actually sending me a bill for the month after I moved.
3) Receiving a call a week later demanding I return my "Comcast owned equipment" before I could receive a refund on my deposit. I countered that I owned the modem outright and had merely given Comcast the MAC address of the modem so that they could authorize it on their network. The representative demanded that I prove that I actually owned the modem. The receipt I emailed from when I purchased the modem was not enough for them, they demanded "more proof" but could not actually offer an example of what proof I could offer. I hung up on that representative and immediately filed a Better Business Bureau complaint (I know, the BBB is a bit of a racket, but sometimes it gets some results).
4) The following day I received a call from a senior customer service manager apologizing for the "mix-up" with marking my modem as being a Comcast-owned piece of equipment. I received a refund of my deposit a few days later.