Quote---"I've never heard of ANY cable company with a good reputation for customer service."
Well, now you have. We had Cox in Roanoke, VA and the LOCAL phone customer response time and service were actually quite good. I left Cox because then, then only had about 8 HD channels when Direct had already rolled out their big HD additions. Cox had less "misses" (being wrong) on tech support/customer service, too.
Meanwhile, Cox has added most of the HD channels and a few HDs like Lifetime, Lifetime Movies, Hallmark, Travel and more. Still ... I think I'm gonna hang on for D12. But I digress.
At least Direct DID do some workarounds to get me my HR20 and H20 so I could get OTA back when we had no HD LILs. (I still use OTA for extra channels and backup.) They get service points for that.