On Feb 9, 2009, at 10:46 AM, swaite at sbn-services.com wrote: > Welcome to the Comcast Haters Club. Believe me, you certainly are not > alone. Pretty simple to figure out, they sell you the idea of great > speeds, but just don't bother to tell you that your not suppose to use > it. Too cheap to invest in infrastructure, so the alternative is > basically to cancel anyone who takes advantage of what they are paying > for. Look around the net and you will find lots of Comcast haters who > have had their accounts canceled for usage. > > I myself got my account temporarily suspended a year ago. I had no > service, thought I was maybe late in payment. Checked, payment was > made so I called them. After a very long run around I finally talked > to someone who explained I had excessive usage. I had about 120GB > month transfer between home and office. Basically most days I worked > from home just using a VPN, and transferred files and backups. Their > solution was to try and sell me Comcast business for home. Sorry, but > if I stay at home and use my phone...do I need a business phone line > to make calls? No, never had Qwest complain about my phone usage. > > You might want to consider waiting for Fiber to reach you. From what I > read after my problems with Comcast, I got the feeling Fiber is going > to be the future unless cable changes their model. Most importantly, I > read interviews with Verizon where they specifically addressed what > cable companies like Comcast do, and they stated quite clearly this > will not be an issue with fiber. Problem is we really do not have > honest to good competition. > > I simply can not understand why cable can not be opened up like the > telephone system was. Can anyone explain that? Where I live I have > gone through 2 different cable companies, so it is not like Comcast > can lay claim to the infrastructure as theirs, since they bought this > area from Time Warner. They really need to open this up, because it is > ridiculous the prices now. $60+ for basic commercial supported cable! > For $60 I should be getting commercial free movie channels. I do > believe that part of the deal they make to carry each channel, Comcast > gets their own time slots they can advertise and re-sell. There is a fair amount of uneducated statement of so-called 'fact' in your email message. Fibre doesn't fix the over-selling of bandwidth at the higher end. Fibre, DSL, dial-up, and coaxial cabling are simply mediums of transport, with varying technological limitations on bandwidth. This has less than nothing to do with who's connected at the other end. It's easy for Sprint, or whomever, to claim they won't have the same policy as Comcast, but they don't have the volume Comcast does, either, on their residential/retail side. I'm not a Comcast proxy, or shill, but get some things straight. Over selling of bandwidth is common. It's easier to upset the 1% of your high-use customer base, than allow them to affect the other 99% of people on their node. In regards to your last paragraph, choose satellite, or over-the-air for your TV viewing. The fact is, they're charging you $60 for X service. Either you find value in that, and pay for it, or you don't. There are other alternatives, as well, such as online content via various hardware such as Popcorn Hour (http:// www.popcornhour.com/) or Netflix. /rant --- Eric Crist