A fresh new reason to hate Comcast

Wednesday, April 16, 2008 by Dave Winer.

As long as I've been a customer of Comcast I've been writing how much I wish they'd sell their Internet business to a company that doesn't hate its customers so much. But sometimes you forget, when the service is good, you just cruise along, happy and forgetful.  

And so I was blissfully forgetful until I read, on Twitter, that Dave Sifry was testing the bandwidth on Comcast with PowerBoost and was blown away by how great it was. I had Comcast as a backup, never used it, so I hooked it up, and tried it out and I got even better bandwidth than Sifry did. Amazingly I was getting 28 megabits down, about 5 megabits up. So I started using it on my LAN, I kept my DSL service, but I'm not using it as much. 

Then this morning around 9AM the service went down. I called the service number, and was quickly directed to call a special number. I couldn't record the call because I didn't have Skype working, but I wish I had found a way. The recording said I was talking to their legal services department, Press 1 if you are stealing content, Press 2 if you are using too much bandwidth, Press 3 if Comcast hates your guts, Press 4 if you're a criminal. (I don't remember the exact wording, this wasn't it, but the word "criminal" was actually part of the presentation, to me, a paying customer, in good standing. Amazingly bad customer service.) 

I was quickly connected to a man who told me I had been deliberately disconnected because they had tried to call me and I didn't pick up. The number they called was my Blackberry, which I disconnected a couple of months ago because I never use it, I much prefer the iPhone. Then he threatened me. He told me I was in the top 1/10th of 1 percent of all their Internet users and that if I didn't immediately stop using so much bandwidth they would suspend my service for 12 months. I asked if I could get this in writing, he said no. I asked how much would be acceptable, he wouldn't say. I told him this wasn't much of a threat if they weren't willing to put it in writing, and I wasn't intimidated by it. I also told him I was a blogger and would be writing it up. He said he didn't care.