"We probably do a daily complaint," said Darlene Burke, who lives on Elwood Road. "Sometimes Comcast admits they've been working and there's been an issue. Other times they act totally dumb." Burke said the service goes out in the morning, and sometimes never returns. "This morning I already had one. Maybe it's out for a minute, two minutes, but you never know. We had three nights where it never came back on." Last week she said she lost service six times in two days.

Burke said the company does issue refunds—but only if a customer calls each time the cable goes out.

Another Elwood resident, Darlene Bradley, said a Comcast representative told her there were no problems in her neighborhood. The representative offered to send a technician to her house—for a fee. When Bradley called again, the company said it was making upgrades in her area, but couldn't tell her when to expect outages or how long service would be interrupted.

"It's either 12 hours at a time, or three or four hours at a time. We periodically check just for the heck of it," she said. "If you're not really interested in the news or a certain show, that's OK. Why pay $47 a month and you get really poor service? And you just get told 'Well, they're working in the area,' and you check a few hours later and it's still off."

Cecala Drive resident Vera Siporen said she got a letter two months ago from Comcast warning of possible problems due to the upgrades. "Minor disturbances didn't bother us," she said. "Then every day, for almost a month, I'd lose service. I'd be watching a movie, and [then] no service."

She called customer service, then started asking for supervisors. "One gave me a credit of $3.45 for Feb. 3. But he told me he was only giving me credit for one day, because I'd gotten credits before. Now I was annoyed. I called back at 5:45 p.m., with a total blackout on both TVs. At 6:30 p.m. I still had nothing."

Finally Siporen reached a sympathetic Comcast representative who gave her a $13.31 credit. But she hasn't seen any of the credits on her bill yet. She pays $107 a month for premium service.

As the outages continued, Comcast sent technicians to Siporen's house four times. Service improved, finally, on Feb. 6 when one technician replaced both of her cable boxes. While she spoke to the Almaden Resident on Feb. 12, though, her cable was interrupted once again. "Little disturbances I can live with. If this continues, I will switch to DirecTV," she said.

Comcast Corp. Vice President of Communications Andrew Johnson, per company policy, refused to disclose how many subscribers live in the Almaden area or how many refunds have been given. The company has 21 million customers nationwide and announced a $66 billion hostile takeover bid of the Walt Disney Company last week.

"As much as we can stress, we appreciate the patience of the folks in the neighborhoods at any given time. We're trying to get the work done as quickly as possible," he said.

The upgrades will add high-speed Internet and more channels, and provide support for telephone and video-on-demand services, Johnson said. Work in the Almaden Valley­Blossom Hill area started two months ago.

According to Johnson, each subscriber got a letter talking about the upgrades and warning of possible outages.

He confirmed that customers have to call 1-800-Comcast each time their service goes out if they want a refund, "because we have no way of knowing how long we'll be working in the area or how long the outages will last," he said.

However, Johnson said, service should be restored every day before the evening news comes on. "That's our goal. But it's like taking your car to get it fixed every day; and the shop has to rebuild the engine and get it back to you by 4 p.m. We have to take the cable down, then reboot by afternoon." He said the company keeps a service truck out until 8 p.m. in affected neighborhoods so outages associated with the upgrades can be fixed as quickly as possible.

Upgrades in the Almaden Valley should be finished by summer. But residents might not wait that long.

"We might have the DISH Network by then," Bradley said.

Last week, according to Johnson, Comcast upgraded the service to 3,163 homes. As for customers having problems even after the upgrades and outages lasting well into the night, he said he couldn't suggest solutions without knowing more about each subscriber's problem.

"Most folks in Silicon Valley are not home during the day. There's a lot of two-income families and kids in school, so I would say it's a small minority of folks who see that impact," he said.