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Grande sucks

January 18, 2005 at 01:28 PM

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before, but Grande Communications sucks.

We've had one difficulty after another with them since moving up here to Dallas in June. We wanted to get Dish Network or DirecTV, but because our balcony doesn't face the right direction we couldn't get either of those. Then we called Comcast in hopes that somehow we could use them instead, but as expected we were told that Grande was our only choice of cable providers at our apartment complex. No digital cable or HD for me.

Grande Communications

So we broke down and called up Grande to sign up for both cable and Internet service. Their DSL prices and speed were competitive, but they didn't have the great introductory prices that you usually are able to get when signing up with a new ISP. For the most part the service has been good. A few outages here and there, but not any more than I'm used to with other ISP's. But last weekend the Internet was down all day Friday and most of Saturday. We call them up and they claim they don't even have any record of us subscribing to DSL.

Umm... Not this crap again. This is the same stuff we went through with them before with the cable. All of a sudden our cable goes out and when we call they have no record of us ever getting cable from them. Are they accidentally deleting records from the database or something? Maybe it should be harder to delete things.

So they customer service guy claims it'll be Tuesday before someone can come out and fix the problem. But I thought you just told me the record just got deleted from the database, can't you just add it back in? Why in the world does someone have to come out to our apartment? They've got no freaking clue what they're doing.

So this all takes place Saturday afternoon and by Saturday night it's back on. What happened to sending a guy out on Tuesday? I've got no idea. But at least they fixed the problem... for a while. The Internet was down again last night and this morning. Did I mention Grande sucks?

At least we got some better information on the timetable for digital cable and HD for our area. This time they said we should have it sometime during February. Of course back in August they said October, but this person seemed more knowledgeable. Plus I found saw this graphic on their homepage this morning. It definitely implies that somebody in Dallas is getting digital cable from them. It's just not me.

Comments

1 doppler said...

Bummer. Everyone I know in Austin who's on Grande, including myself, love it. They recently doubled our download bandwidth, so I'm now enjoying 8Mb/1Mb down/up speeds. We also have digital and hidef channels.

Disclaimer: Grande and my employer have some kind of deal wherein Grande hooked us up with a 100Mb/s connection at our office. Needless to say, it's sweet.

Posted on January 25, 2005 at 12:30 AM

2 Brian said...

Yeah I get the feeling most of my issues are due to the transition here in Dallas from Advantex to Grande. Every other area Grande's offerings at least compete with Time Warner and Comcast, hopefully we'll be able to say the same about Dallas soon.

Posted on January 28, 2005 at 01:16 PM

3 Nooboodyy said...

im trying to connect to xbox live thru my grande high speed internet service but im having trouble!! Is Grande compatible with x box live???

Posted on March 06, 2006 at 11:03 PM

4 Brian said...

Nooboodyy, yeah it should be. I haven't had any trouble with that at all.

Posted on March 07, 2006 at 07:05 AM

5 Al said...

Sir, you do not know the half of how bad Grande sucks. I worked there for five months as a temporary Help Desk Rep. If you have had to call there you know it takes four or five calls to solve a simple problem. The only thing they train their employees to do is get you off the phone in ten minutes or less. I was let go because they said I spent too much time trying to help the customers. I had no Supervisor.
A lot of their customer base is small-town rural whites and the Customer Service Reps sat around making fun of them all the time. I had to bite my tongue listening to some fag make fun of small town "redneck" whites. There is a white guy there named Mike who makes fun of every rural white that calls in. I asked him why he did not make fun of blacks or Mexicans? He was a chicken-shit politically correct idiot.
God help you if you have to have a technician come out. They schedule you three days in advance between 8am and 5pm. So you are expected to take off work just to wait on the Grande technician. Who may or may not speak english. I had one customer call me up and say she was scared because Grande had contracted out some service techs from another company to go to her house. No one called her. Some guys in a white van with no Grande sign showed up at her house. They did not knock on her door. They just walked into the backyard. She called her husband and he came home from work and figured out they had set up a cable drop two weeks earlier. I suppose it was asking too much to call the customer and let them know.
What their problem is is they are too small-time to train their employees. They had one technician accidentally turn off all of the Grande phones in San Antonio for a full day. Can you imagine?
There is one tech that was there that breaks down and cries anytime someone calls and yells at her. believe me they call in and yell a lot. I am sorry that you had a bad experience ther. Unfortunately, there are a lot of stupid untrained people there. Time Warner sucks also, but not as bad as Grande Communications. I hope this piece of crap company goes under.

Posted on March 30, 2006 at 03:11 AM

6 Russell said...

policies are different now. Theres an extensive training class that everyone must go through. They teach everything technical as well as customer service and how to use the billing. But you're right, the service still isnt that great. Also, I can schedule most tickets for same day truck rolls and in rare cases I have to send them out the next day. I make sure that I keep in contact with my customers if I need to for things like fixing switch issues, or contacting other departments about tickets. Most techs here do their job, but yes, like all companies, some techs just dont give a shit.
And also what you say about advantex is true too, advantex blows ball sacks and grande just renamed it to grande from advantex. You have no idea how F***ING annoying it is trying to troubleshoot this huge massive pile of S***.

Posted on April 18, 2006 at 03:49 PM

7 It Could Be Bob said...

I also had the pleasure of working with this company until I realized it was a dead end job. They do not give a s*** about their employees or their customers all that matters to Grande is trying to "go public" and if you are a employee what ever you do don't try and go the extra mile for a customer. All that will happen is you'll get chewed out for your low production. GRANDE IS THE MOST UNETHICAL COMPANY I HAVE EVER WORKED FOR : BUYERS BEWARE!!! Oh I almost forgot Mr 8 down 1 up I challenge you and every other Grande cutomer with "high speed internet" to go to Grande's own speedtest site and test you speed I'll bet you don't get a quarter of what you think you do!!!
The site is @
http://speedtest.grandecom.net/

For the user name and password you should use your e-mail address and password.

Posted on May 03, 2006 at 11:22 AM

8 Zac said...

I know. Many apartement management companies and owners get in with the 3rd party cable systems when they build the aparement. What they do is give a kick back to the apartment for each sale, at the same time add some CCTV channel in the mix and call it "Gate security" or some shit like that. Then you get stuck with 60 channels of shitty content that is piped down from, guess where.. your cities main cable company, for me its comcast (notice the comcast comericals anyone?). No HDTV content, no digital cable, no a/b, no high mount cable (channels over 60+ because all that takes equipment manufactured in the late 80s and something to expensive for grande). Then they charge you just as much. Apartments are loosing business on these shitty third parties. Fuck 'em.. I sent a 5 page letter to Equity apartments because not one in the country uses the main cable company. I even floated a patition around my apartment and put up signs at the mail boxes with an anoymous url (down now) that showed the truth. Shit drives me nuts.

Posted on July 02, 2006 at 06:23 PM

9 Brent said...

I worked for Grande in Waco for a while and you cannot believe how bad they treat their employees. As with any cable company service guys work through holidays to include Christmas day. The company does not care about their employees and their families. They are way understaffed and do not have plans to add any extra help to relieve some of the pressure on the workers. Management forces the installers and the service technicians to sell even though this is not part of the job description. They tell them that they will receive commission but when I had sold about $300 worth of services I never got a dime. The worst part about Grande in Waco is the fact that they had everything built brand new from the ground up on their cable plant, but because of lack of training now they have so many problems with their system that their customers are not going to get their digital cable in good reception. Just food for thought if you are hoping for video on demand, not going to happen. Grande has said numerous times to their employees in meetings that it would cost the company too much to install the equipment for video on demand. What does all the money go to that you spend every month on their unreliable cable phone and internet? Good question, the quarterly bonuses that are promised to the employees never came through. If you have Grande for any of your services just keep in mind that the company that you give your money to every month doesn't care about you any more than their employees. They will show you this every time you need some type of service work done on your services and they charge you $35 just to show up, and don't forget the $45 to $60 if you need a new outlet run because "your old line is bad." But hey this is just my point of view good luck on your choice of cable provider.

Posted on January 04, 2007 at 11:03 PM

10 Im Telling said...

Help! I am currently employed at Grande (in the unfortunate world of tech support) and am surrounded by incompetent idiots. Not only does the tech support department suck, the management is even worse. Since I've worked here, I have never once sat down with my manager to discuss my calls, I have no idea if I'm doing good or bad, there is no direction in the call center, and I am sick and tired of there being "an outage" almost every single day. I'm stuck working here right now because of personal reasons but oneday I will be free soon. The tech support department is a joke. You are pressured to keep your average talk time below 8 mins. 8 mins for tech support?! how do you effectively identify, troubleshoot, and resolve a problem (especially the "i can't get online" call) in under 8 mins? Oh, I'll tell you how...if grande's tool says your modem is online and you cant browse, its automatically your routers fault or pc issues, please refer to your manufacturer. If you call tech support, listen for background noise...since there is no effective management in the call center, you'll hear numerous tech's who are on calls but put their customer on mute, insulting the customer with very nasty language...so I'm guilty of that too. The people that have it the worst are our Dallas area customers because everysingle day an apartment complex has a cable or dsl outage because of "a squirrel chew" or something like that. How many squirrel chews are acceptable in a month period? There are maybe one or two really technical savvy people in our department but the rest of us are people who just know a little about tech support, went through a pointless 3 week training class which doesn't provide any technical training at all, just training on how to use the various databases/resources, and then we're stuck on the floor working unsupervised, not knowing if what we are saying is correct or not. I do have to admit it is the most laid back job I have ever worked for, but it is terrible, unethical, poorly managed, and I am not the only one in tech support that feels this way. Trust me.

Posted on February 07, 2007 at 11:44 AM

11 Jeff said...

Grandecom Definitely SUCKS. Unfortunately I live in a housing development in Frisco, that is locked to Grandecom for telephone and internet (DSL).

My only other option is Comcast, and I've previously sworn I would never return to them.

All I needed were a couple past statements. After speaking to 5 people, I got a different story from each, and the price increased with each person.

First two people said they would send them to me - they never mentioned a charge, but they never did send the bills. Far as I know they did nothing.

Third guy wanted me to drive to a Grande store, and then told me there would be a $2 charge for each statement.

Person number 4 told me that I had to be transferred to collections.

And for the grand finale, the collections person - number 5 - told me that it would not only be $2 per statement. But it would be $60 an hour for the time it took to get the statements.

Internet regularly drops off, although it's intermittent, so I can't get them to fix it. And the phone service goes to complete static for about 10-15 minutes at least twice in every 3 days.

Unbelieveable what you can get away with when there is no competition. What a horrible company, that could never survive going head to head with a real Cable/Phone company.

I feel slightly better venting, but not much. Knowing I'm paying $52 a month for 1.5m DSL. When only a few miles away, people in Plano are enjoying the slowest Verizon/FIOS package at 5m for only $39.


Posted on March 20, 2007 at 11:56 AM

12 Jonathan Fair said...

Grande Communications is friggin horrible.

Picture Quality - Sucks
Sound Quality - Sucks even harder

But the absolute WORSE is the SERVICE and even more so.. THEIR TECHNICIANS...

They told me they would be out Saturday to change a receiver. Well they came Friday, while I was at work, and my GF was home. I need to be around when these dips come work on the stuff because my system is very expensive and very precisely set up.

Well the tech proceeds to pull out my tv, scratches my table, screws up my wiring, and when my GF saw what he was doing, she told him to forget it and that I would just handle it when I got home.

I called them to see why they came out on the wrong day, and the guy told me that they didn't even reschedule it.

This is the icing on the cake, I hate this company... I never want to do business with it again, I'm just glad I will only have to deal with them for another 2 months.

Posted on March 23, 2007 at 09:27 PM

13 Yep it sucks.... said...

I currently work for Grande and I hate it. Management is a bunch of friggin morons. This company and all of its equipment is going to f***ing go down in flames because they refuse to spend any money on up keep. Not even Jesus could save this hellish spawn of a company. Working here is like being raped by a pride of angry lions. The management here is so unethical that they will surely go to Hell when they die to have pineapples shoved up their asses alongside Hitler.

Posted on September 18, 2007 at 08:14 PM