L.A. gripes surge as subs dwindle.(Los Angeles Board of Information Technology Commissioners requires cable operators to explain complaint calls)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

Multichannel News, May, 2002 by Haugsted, Linda

Complaint calls to Los Angeles city officials soared 61 percent last year, and regulators called on cable operators recently to explain why. According to a complaint summary by the Information Technology Agency, 641,201 consumers made 21,233 calls to the agency last year. Of those, 6,410 calls were handled as formal complaints requiring municipal intercession.

The biggest complaint category was "technical services," including outages, digital upgrades or downgrades and picture quality. Next came consumer services, including busy or unanswered telephones and missed appointments. Then came billing issues. The report also noted that the cable customer count in the city's 14 franchises actually dropped 0.78 percent in 2001, at a time when operators...

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