COMCAST's Commitment to Disservice

After being slapped by the FCC for protocol discrimination, COMCAST has now set up a new way to throttle Internet usage based on how much bandwidth a user is found to be taking up. They propose to do this every 15 minutes; this is in addition to their previously announced 250GB per subscriber usage cap.

I thought about this and realized that all of these shenanigans take a toll in technology and labor. In other words, their Nickel-and-Diming costs hard dollars. Wouldn't this money be better spent improving their networks?

In their grand tradition of offering poor customer service, this erstwhile cable operator now ISP (and ersatz telephone company to some), is insuring that their customers will go knocking on competitors' doors. They did it with cable programming by driving customers to DISH or DirectTV, and now they are doing the same with Internet access.

I am not saying that COMCAST does not have the right to limit bandwidth. As long as they are upfront about it, I do not object. The problem is that they tout their "high-speed Internet service" suggesting that it is unlimited. When your cellphone provider tells you that weekends are free, how would you feel if they cut you off after you've been on the phone for 4 hours?

All I ask of cable companies is honesty. Stop saying you offer unlimited Internet access; put your cards on the table. State upfront how many gigs the user will be allowed and how much of it per hour they are allowed.

I want some truth in advertising from cable companies such as COMCAST. Instead of putting advertising lipstick on the pig of the crappy service package they offer, how about investing in technologies that will make these services more desirable?


As someone who can count among my mentors a cable television systems engineer, I am not unsympathetic to the technical challenges and regulatory obstacles cable operators face.But the cable television industry is not alone in facing obstacles. The big difference is that cable companies appear to be most resistant to innovation —or decent customer service, for crying out loud!

Satellite and phone companies have been improving their services, but many cable companies, COMCAST chief among them, remain stuck in the 80s. To make matters worse, they appear to recruit their customer service reps from among people who were not nice enough to work at the DMV.

It takes as much effort, if not more, to setup a four TV receiver setup at a suburban home with a satellite dish, receivers and DVRs as it is to do the equivalent with digital cable. Yet, a satellite company can get someone at your place within a 15 minute window no more than a couple days away and get the job done, while COMCAST needs weeks to get you an appointment and impose the dreaded 8am-to-4pm-on-a-workday window once a date is arranged. But I digress.

So, you guys COMCAST, here is what you need to do. In those colorful ads or commercials where you show the smiling families with their shiny new computers, specify at the bottom of the display or mention at the end of the commercial your 250GB upload-download limit and your quarter-hourly connection re-prioritizing — in the same way that pharmaceutical companies list the side effects of of their drugs. Then users will realize that other technologies such as DSL, FiOS, DirectWay or even ISDN might be better propositions.