0xCAFEBABENow with 4 more bytes… 11001010111111101011101010111110

Most of my close friends can tell you that I do not like Mediacom.  In fact, I hate most telcos in general.  But Mediacom holds a special place on my shit list.  They are particularly evil.

• They have this thing where for the first year you get fair priced service.  $90ish for digital cable + broadband.  The only problem is that after a year, it jumps up to like $120.
• A few years ago, they put in the DNS resolution stuff that sends you to their paid search results when you look up an invalid domain.  When they did this, they introduced frequent artificial outages that lasted for at least 3 weeks.  It didn’t take but an hour or 2 for me to figure this out, and I pointed my DNS resolution to Open DNS.  After that, I no longer had issues.  But everyone else that I knew with Mediacom continued to suffer.
• Their customer support is just this side of worthless.  At one point, years ago I paid a few extra dollars for a static IP address.  The install kit did not contain my IP, subnet, gateway, etc.  I called customer support to get this required data.  The 1st and 2nd tier support did not know what a static IP was.  In fact, the 1st tier insisted that I did not want this anyhow.  Finally after about 30 min, I was sent to someone that knew the first thing about networking and I had my data.  Several times when I used their services, the customer support insisted that they dot not support Linux or non-M$ systems.
• Their interface for their Digital Cable is non-intuitive.  If you press the up button while watching a channel, it goes up one (channel 13 –> 14 for example).  But, when you are navigating the guide pressing the up button results in going down a channel (channel 14–> 13).  I’m a little anal about GUIs, so that my be insignificant to most of you.

But back to the hack…

I had a friend who just got a new apartment.  This person called Mediacom and they quoted her $90 for Digital Cable + Internet.  The friend agreed.  After a couple days, the person changed their mind and canceled right before the installer arrived.  My friend had discovered an open Wi-Fi network nearby.  The next day, this person got a phone call from Mediacom.  They called to offer her the same package, but this time for $50.  Rock on.  That’s pretty cheap.

By canceling, the friend was placed on a cancellation or save list.  This enabled the person for significant discounts.

Cheers,
Jonathan