watered-down 911 service

I recently had to place a 911 call for a sudden cardiac arrest situation on my Comcast landline.  It's my understanding that when you place a 911 call on a landline, the exact location from which the call was placed is immediately displayed on the 911 dispatcher's computer screen and this information is also immediately available to the first responders.  All that I should have needed to say when the dispatcher answered was "cardicac arrest" and an ambulance would be immediately dispatched to the location from which the call was placed.  

This is apparently NOT how things work with Comcast's 911 service!  The dispatcher began by asking me what county I was in, then what town I was in, my street address, and so on and so on and so on.  Every time I responded to one of his questions, I had to wait for several seconds while he typed each of my responses into his computer.  At one point, he even asked if I was ther person experiencing the emergency.  If I were the person in cardicac arrest, I would certainly not be the person making the 911 call!

More than a minute went by while I was answering questions THAT THE DISPATCHER SHOULD HAVE ALREADY KNOWN THE ANSWERS TO if Comcast's 911 service worked the way that 911 service is supposed to work.  My wife was doing CPR on our son while I was wasting time answering questions to which the answers should have already been known.  Our son did not survive this experience in spite of the heroic efforts of the EMTs who responded to the 911 call when they were eventually made aware of it.  While I cannot state that Comcast's unacceptable delay in getting an EMT dispatched was a factor in my son's death, it certainly reduced the possibility that my son would survive his medical emergency.

The only reason I even have a land line is so that if I ever had to place a 911 call, it would be responded to as quickly as possible.  But if you happen to have a Comcast landline, this doesn't happen; the dispatcher who answers the call doesn't even have the faintest clue where the phone that the 911 call is coming from is located.  Precious time is lost while a 911 dispatcher located in who-knows-where asks you questions that 911 service is supposed to immediately provide the answers to!

While Comcast claims to provide 911 service on its landlines, the service does not come close to what REAL 911 service is supposed to be.  Apparently some efficiency expert at corporate headquarters has decided that having a single dispatcher respond to calls from multiple counties and not having the origin of the call immediately displayed to the dispatcher is a cost-efficient way of providing a service that lives depend upon.  If people happen to die as a result of this cost-efficient approach to providing 911 service, that's just collateral damage resulting from the need to maximize corporate profits.  

If anyone who is reading this is under the impression that the 911 service that Comcast provides on its land lines is "the real thing", you're badly mistaken.  Help won't arrive any faster than if you placed the 911 call on your cell phone.  If you have an emergency during a power outage and didn't have the foresight to have your cable modem on battery backup, you won't even get a dial tone when you need to place a 911 call.  Xfinity voice service is a complete and total waste of your money - dump the service and transfer your landline phone number to a cell phone - but not one on the Xfinify nerwork!

Comcast makes more than enough money to provide REAL 911 service on its voice service - lives are at stake here and it's time they got their act together and provide more than a "meets minimum requirements" emergency service.  But our expeience with Comcast tells us that they will only provide the cheapest possible solution to any  problem - if they provide any solution at all.