Posted on 10/24/2007 7:32:37 AM PDT by steve-b
So the solution is of course reasonable rules for ISPs provided by FedGov four our safety and happiness. Currently they are private companies managing things the best an evil private corporation can do, and we find this lack of Federal Control to be disturbing.
Management of data flow to citizens is essential.
Comcast is saying that it never planned it’s network capacity to support file sharing of the scale of these video and music apps. Supporting these apps means that service degrades for everyone else. Do you charge the content provider to guarantee them access to Comcast’s customers or do you charge the user for asking for more of the network?
The solution is to permit more competition for internet, cable, and telecommunication services.
The only model that really works is to charge the user for demanding too much bandwidth then.
yet another reason to hate comcast.... as if I needed another
So let me tell you a story. I moved into a house with my girlfriend and a couple roommates at the start of this past summer. We subscribed to the Comcast triple play plan (internet, tv, phone). We soon realized that our internet was not performing to the standard they said it would. In other words, we’ve had to fiddle with the internet on a daily basis just to get standard access.
After a slew of technicians came to our house to diagnose the problem, nothing was solved and we were told to ask for a Linksys gateway (modem + router combination) because the Netgear gateway has caused problems in the past. Three weeks after the order for a Linksys gateway was put in, three different technicians came out and all that happened was the gateway was replaced with another Netgear gateway.
This past Saturday around 2pm, I went and bought a modem to replace the gateway since I have a wireless router already. After hooking up the modem, I received an error directing me to contact Comcast. I called and registered the MAC ID of the modem, the standard procedure when you install a new modem. The lady from Comcast who was assisting me informed me that there was an error and that a ticket was generated and sent to the next highest tier.
For four college students, reliable internet access is important. No internet was unacceptable and after calling Comcast a few times and being hung up on a few times, I learned that there would be a 72 hour or less waiting period until I was contacted about fixing the problem. I decided the best option would be to reconnect the gateway.
Reconnecting the gateway yielded further problems on Comcast’s side. After several more calls to them, I was repeatedly informed that there was nothing they could do to get me internet. Around 9pm on Sunday, I called again and was connected to a technician who was dedicated to helping me. He found that other technicians had messed up our account information and that was causing problems. After fixing it, the gateway worked but he was unable to get the modem working. That was acceptable because we at least had internet.
All seemed fine and dandy until I tried using a virtual machine to access the internet and was told that Comcast was blocking internet access from the virtual machine. The odd part, however, is that no more than 3 weeks ago I accessed the internet on the virtual machine. While I cannot recall exactly what Comcast has done for us in terms of compensation for our countless hours on the phone with them (more than 6 hours on the phone between Saturday 2pm and Sunday 9:30pm), here are some of the things they have done for us:
Multiple monthly bill cuts, up to a maximum of $120 from one month
Free HBO and Showtime for a year
Luckily, Verizon is installing FIOS in the neighborhood as I type this and we will be promptly switching to Verizon as soon as FIOS is installed. Comcast has treated us so poorly that we have been hung up on more often than we have been helped. We have lost phone connection while in mid-sentence with supervisors attempting to help us with internet connectivity.
FIOS is nice and fast. You need a fast computer to process the downloads though. When my wife kicked me out of the house to go to work in an office instead of home I was left with crappy DSL.
well don’t they have tiered service? My cable provider Charter communications does.
If you pay for the band width, how it is used should not be controlled by the provided.
They have tiered service, but it never solved my problems. Honestly, I didn’t even notice a difference when I got a new tier, but I had hoped it would solve my Comcast internet woes.
They do but not in the way they want to apply it apparantly. If you have a 2 MB connection and use that throughput constantly then you and a few other users will degrade their network. What they should be charging you is for total packets/mbs moved, not connection speed.
Basically, we have FiOS TV and Internet, no Verizon phone service. They were SUPPOSED to bill the TV and Internet together, and automatically charge it once per month to a credit card.
Instead there were two separate bills, accessible only online, through separate websites. Te TV portion was done right...but for three months our internet went UNPAID. They weren’t billing our credit card no matter how many times we told them to, if we tried to pay manually online it said “our record indicate your bill is currently bundled with your TELEPHONE service” (difficult since we don’t have Verizon phone service) and to make a long story short, after about 12 phone calls to customer service over a 60 day + period, they finally fixed it and combined the bills. We just printed the online bill and mailed a check to bring it current, it was the only way we could do it.
The technology and speed is great. The billing and customer service leaves MUCH to be desired.
That said, they did credit us one month of internet service and I still like them better than Comcast.
Common carrier status was applied more or less automatically to ISPs. But if Comcast is acting as an editor, if it's making determinations based on content, that status falls into doubt. If they're exercising editorial control, they could be on the hook for piracy, child porn, fraud, or any other shenanigans that cross their wires.
Unless they can look at the content then that would be hard. They could elect to tell you sites they won’t allow access to though.
Thanks for the info. We were planning on getting Verizon’s equivalent of the triple play plan since Comcast is handling all our stuff.
Sounds like Verizon’s customer service is a little more understanding than Comcast. After our past weekend troubles, Comcast offered to refund us $7. My girlfriend said she needed at least $100 due to mental anguish.
I have FIOS, love it. Much faster than Comcast. But if you are hoping Verizon has better customer service, think again. They are even worse than comcast.
Not hard, impossible. That's why phone companies and ISPs take a hands-off stance. They're just connecting circuits or forwarding packets -- no idea what's in them.
If Comcast is sniffing packets for their content, it's venturing into dangerous territory. Technically, they're filtering by protocol rather than substance, but the courts usually aren't very clueful on making such subtle distinctions.
I do have their phone service (I have FIOS TV, Internet, and IP Phone service) but their billing is horrendous. Every single month (that is not an exaggeration) the bill is messed up, necessitating a call. and as I've noted previously, their customer service is atrocious.
There are many different ways of connecting to the Internet. People, who have a problem with Comcast blocking some of their usage, will simply use another ISP. It’s called the wonder of the free market.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.