For those of you who have, or are thinking of getting Comcast, read this.

First off, I have been with Comcast since September of 2008. In that time I have found the service to be decent and in some instances even reliable. However the company themselves, leaves more to be desired.

Comcast's Man on Twitter

In this day and age where Customer Service seems to be dissappearing faster than gasoline in Nashville, there’s one man on the Internet who has done more to turn around customer (and non-customer) perceptions of his company than all the marketing dollars they throw around as a corporation.

That man is Frank Eliason.  Frank is best known to the social media crowd as “ComcastCares” on twitter, and is the point man for a new customer service organization inside the Cable industry giant.

And it’s not just the social media crowd that’s seen what Frank can do.  the New York Times and USA Today have both profiled Frank, touting his can do attitude, his quick responses.  He’s also been highlighted on the Customer Service 2.0 blog.

Comcast Employees sleeping during FCC meeting

So, you think your cable connection is 6 megs of high speed internet goodness?

Think again.

Believe it or not, the connection that you’re paying for is monitored with infinite scrutiny, and now, even if there was a “problem” with your service, there’s no way to get help.

Back in the day when free enterprise flourished, such tactics would have only been employed by a corporate monopoly, which would have been ruled unlawful, and eventually struck down by a judge or another prosecuting government officer. In today’s world, monopolies all too common in the corporate landscape; but eventually, something’s going to give.

I’ve got to say, I’m amazed.

I knew that wireless internet would get to this point, but I must say that I didn’t think it would happen this soon.

Nothing better than his own words.

“Comcast has made a major mistake in attempting to hinder peer-to-peer file sharing as an aspect of its network management,” Boucher said. “The inability of customers to (share files) significantly diminishes their ability to utilize the Internet for one of its most important applications, which is user-to-user content.” He also noted that “file sharing is already being used for a wide variety of perfectly lawful and appropriate applications.”

Comcast claims they don’t block Bit Torrent, and other applications. The proofs exist that these claims are flat out Lies.
The underlying problem is one of of corporate greed, as Comcast wants to be able to market their service as “all you can eat”, and “no limits”, because those terms draw customers, but then Comcast doesn’t actually want to provide what they are advertising (that previously mentioned “all you can eat” Internet service) because actually providing that level of service would cost them significantly more in upstream bandwidth charges, and infrastructure. Their chosen solutions, “Lying about it”, and “throttling traffic for Quality of Service purposes” don’t work, and here’s why.

GameDay.biz is reporting that they got clarification on what Comcast considers “extreme use” (ie, what they’ll consider enough to chuck you off the system).

According to Charlie Douglas (a spokesman for Comcast Corporation) they’ve ” defined … ‘excessive use’ as any customer who downloads the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month.”

Wow. Could we please have that in some meaningful measure? Bits? Bytes? Gigabytes?

Well, well, well. This just in. It seems that Comcast’s throttling of bittorrent connections by forging tcp reset packets in and out of customers connections violates several laws across many states, most of which are criminal impersonation statues.

Now, we here at All That’s Evil don’t condone piracy, but we do see the benefits of the bittorrent networks to distribute large files such as Linux distributions.