How Astound thwarts you from canceling service during an outage

Last Wednesday there was an Astound Internet service outage in my neighborhood. Unlike previous outages, this one lasted over 24 hours. Each time I called their support phone number, their automated voice prompt system would give an ETA on restoration about 1-2 hours into the future, which was a total lie. But even worse, it would not allow me to speak to a live agent to complain about it. I’ve experienced outages with Astound before, and they would be resolved within a couple hours, but this was the last straw for me.

After six hours of this madness, I subscribed to CenturyLink (fortunately, my building is prewired for CenturyLink service, so this was easy to do), and got reconnected to the Internet again, albeit at a higher cost. But Astound would not allow me to speak to an agent or make any service changes to my account until after their outage was restored. I had to wait until late the next day before I could speak to an agent to request cancellation of my service. And even after that, I have received zero confirmation, email or otherwise, that my service has been canceled. The web site doesn’t show any indication of my service cancellation on my account.

I’ve read a number of complaints from Astound subscribers about their continuing to be billed / charged after canceling service. So as a protective measure, I turned off autopay and removed the payment method from my account. My current bill is due in less than two weeks, so it will be interesting to see what happens then.