UPDATE: Comcast responds.
Comcast asked Frank to cut back his unlimited internet usage. Frank was confused. He thought unlimited meant, well, unlimited. Frank was wrong. Very wrong.
Comcast replaced Frank’s faulty cable modem in November. Frank’s wife received a warning from Comcast in December. Their excessive internet required upgrading to a business account for an additional $10 per month. Maybe $20. The CSRs weren’t clear. Frank decided something wasn’t right and stopped trying to resolve the situation.
January 19, Frank tries to check his e-mail. No internet. No internet? NO INTERNET?! Frank’s wife calls Comcast. There’s a note in their account. They must contact Comcast’s Ministry of Love Network Abuse and Policy Observance Department.
Comcast accused Frank of downloading 305GB in November and 297GB in December. It’s Comcast’s policy to suspend any account that exceeds usage limits twice in any year. Doesn’t Comcast advertise unlimited use? What are the usage caps? Comcast representatives would only say “I’m sorry but I cannot divulge that information.”
Frank escalated the call until reaching the omnipotent Geovanny. The dialogue from his conversations with Comcast, inside…
Me: Can I please speak with a manager. I would like to escalate this and find a resolution.
Geovanny: There is nobody available. I’m the only one in the department and my word is final.
Me: I thought Scott was also part of the “Policy and Abuse Department”. So you have more than just one employee. I’d like to speak with whoever writes your checks.
Geovanny: It’s just me here.
Me: Even the CEO of the company has to account to somebody such as the board of directors.
Geovanny: As far as you’re concerned, I am the CEO
Me: I understood Brian Roberts was the CEO of Comcast? If a complaint was directed to him and the board they would need to take action in resolving this problem. We did not receive sufficient notification and your customer service was clueless to the problem with our account last month.
Geovanny: He would just bounce the complaint to me.
Me: I’m looking at the caller ID number. It says you are calling from 856-638-4000. Customer Service last month said I shouldn’t see an 856 number if it was a legitimate call from Comcast to my state.
Geovanny: We’re an up and coming department and don’t go through the normal Comcast lines.
Me: So how do I know it’s not some guy trying to gather information on me. Ever heard of identity theft??”
Geovanny: I don’t know. You should have taken the call seriously however.
Me: “You have to be kidding me”. People can spoof a caller ID phone number easily (I checked Google in December). So how can I take it seriously? I would have expected a letter or something.
Geovanny: We prefer to make a phone call to personalize the communication.
Me: That being said, how come Customer Service didn’t know of the problem with my account?
Geovanny: Customer Service doesn’t have access to our database.
Me: Why the @#$@ not?
Geovanny: It’s to protect our customer information
Me: Somehow I don’t feel very protected. Your customer service has access to my name, phone number, address and other personal information when we signed up. Your organization has failed miserably. Don’t you understand. I have no other options for internet without Comcast. Not even DSL is in the area? Had I known there was a
problem I would certainly have taken action.
Geovanny: There is nothing to be done now.
Me: In my research I’ve learned that Cox Communications had the same problems as you guys and in 2003 they caved in to customers demanding they post the bandwidth/data caps… and it will happen with you guys sooner or later.
Ok. Comcast won’t budge from its perch atop Mount Jerk. Dial-up is the only alternative, and let’s not kid ourselves. Dial-up is as viable as biking across the Pacific.
Frank did what we would do: call Comcast and ask to sign up! He got an ambitious frontline CSR, Ryan, who tried to arrange a business account. But that note from the Network Abuse and Policy Observance Department was a deal-breaker. Frank, a Senior Systems Engineer with seventeen years of professional experience, even offered to build a separate linux firewall to guarantee his traffic wouldn’t exceed usage limits, if only Comcast would say what they were. No dice.
Frank’s wife got ahold of Sarah, head of Comcast’s Ministry of Plenty Escalation Department. The February 1 conversation below:
Me- Hello
S- I’m looking for Frank or Elizabeth
Me- I’m Elizabeth
S- This is Sarah from Comcast …
Me- Oh yes you called last night and I tried to call you back and left you a message.
S- I know, I had to leave early yesterday.
Me- Ok, So what’s going on?
S- Well we aren’t able to give you residential or business acct., but we can give you a commercial acct.
Me- What is that?
S- It would be a direct line for your own use connected to your house.
Me- Wow, how much would that be?
S- About $1700 to install and then about $1000 a month service fee.
Me- What the? Are you kidding me, we can’t afford that!!
S- Well that is your only option.
Me- Why not the business account?
S- You use to much to be eligible for those accounts and since you have a business that uses so much broadband, you need to have your own direct line.
Me- We have a very! Small business and have had it for 3 + years and never had this kind of usage as has been the last few months. That is a ridiculous thing to suggest and doesn’t make any sense. We have 6 children and a budget. This is outrageous and I can’t believe you would even consider suggesting such a thing. Would you do it?
S- No, I don’t need it and you have a business that apparently does use that much.
Me- Haven’t you heard anything that we have been saying as to our ideas of why the usage was so high. Like the spyware that my husband found on his machine that was piggy backing and downloading through our line. Also it isn’t a coincidence that the same month our modem was switched that the usage went through the roof. That would cause it if it wasn’t capped.
S- We have never had that happen before. It was checked and it doesn’t seem to be the problem and as to spyware you should be using an application to detect such things so you don’t have those problems.
Me- He does have those and it still can happen and did, and as to the modem I don’t believe you could have checked it, since it isn’t running right now and it is too much of a coincidence to ignore.
S- What is done is done, we can’t reverse it, but you can get the commercial line.
Me- No we aren’t going to do that. There is no way we could afford that. You are basically leaving us without any real options and that is unacceptable. We don’t have any other ways to get high speed internet and DSL isn’t in our area. But that doesn’t matter to you.
S- I understand how you feel but we can’t do anything about it.
Me- I don’t think you really do understand or you wouldn’t be doing this to begin with.
S- I am sorry you are having this problem, but you ignored the warning.
Me- Are we back to that again. As far as I am concerned you all are responsible for our loosing the internet acct. If the customer service had actually confirmed to us that there was a problem we would have looked into it and tried to resolve it last month. We wouldn’t have ignored it. We rely on internet a great deal. My husband needs it for work and we wouldn’t have wanted to jeopardize that.
S- We are sorry that the customer service didn’t deal with you properly and we are dealing with that. All the same you were called and you were given a direct number to call the abuse team directly.
Me- We tried with what we had and just got messages and so we tried to call customer service to help us. They told us it was probably a hoax and to ignore it. They should have had some kind of note logged in our acct. to confirm a problem. Based on what they told us, what were we to seriously think. Want to talk about confusing.
S- I can understand how you feel and they shouldn’t have said that.
Me- It seems to me that you all should take responsibility for your part in this mess. Your customer service should have given correct information to us. As a result you should be dealing with the result and be apologizing and trying to rectify the problem.
S- I understand how you feel, but we can’t do anything about it.
Me- You know thinking about it, when I did talk to the abuse team that they even had suggested a business acct. upgrade and based on what you are saying we wouldn’t have been able to do that either.
S- They shouldn’t have suggested that. Based on your usage the business acct. would have been to light for your use.
Me- So they gave us the wrong information too. So how can we be blamed for something you all are telling us. How are we supposed to know what to do?
S- Well you should have limited your usage for starters.
Me- We don’t normally use that much. We have been with Comcast for about 4 years and have always been doing the same thing, nothing has changed and now we have excessive usage. I just don’t see how that is possible. We need a residential or business acct. We will make sure we don’t go over our limits, whatever those may be.
S- I understand your dilemma. But based on recent history, you would be back to square one and we can’t take that chance of reversing the acct. and letting you back on to do the same thing again. You will have to wait til Jan 2008 to get reconnected.
Me- I don’t think you are getting it. Aren’t you caring at all about the predicament you have put us into? There is no way we can wait a year and you know it. That is nuts.
S- We apologize for your inconvenience, but you should have dealt with it.
Me- It seems to me we are just running this around in circles, not getting anywhere. So it doesn’t matter our reasons and no matter what I say nothing will change your mind. Is that where we are at?
S- That is right, we can’t help you at this time.
Me- (Looooooonnnnnnngggggg pause, trying to keep from crying). I finally say, well I guess there isn’t anything left.
S- I’m sorry.
Me- I’m sure you will be. Bye
S- Thank you and have a nice day.
Me- (mumbling and rolling my eyes) yeah right.
No unlimited internet. No explanation. We’d be pissed, too.
In twelve months, Frank can submit an “application for reconnection.” But only if he agrees to abide by Comcast’s Terms of Service.
It’s not as if Frank’s relationship with Comcast is completely severed. Though he’s still without precious service, the business account Ryan created just sent Frank the first, of what we expect will be many, bills. — CAREY GREENBERG-BERGER
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Next time, get a Mac!
(giggles)
If I remember correctly – the way that they are figuring bandwidth depends on how dense your network is in your physical neighborhood. You could live on a street w/ all non-computer users and so your usage would not be a big deal. But the opposite could be true – if there are 3 BitTorrent or Kazaa users on the same node w/ Comcast, the cap could be much lower.
That is why you don’t get a static ip; the company finds it easier to reassign resources regularly based on how each node is performing. It is also why there is not set limit – the limit is based on the total capacity of each node divided by the # of users.
This is unsubstantiated on my part, but definitely would explain all of the different observations in this thread – one guy dl’ing 400gigs and never hearing a peep, but he switches ISP and got capped at 120gig.
And the fact that the CSR’s have no info on it – it is probably a different cap depending on the area and so it would look really bad to say that Boston’s cap was 100gig a month and East Bum’s cap was 500gig a month, even though both nodes or pipes have the same 100 TB capacity per month. Verizon is smart enough to not give that info out to the low level CSR’s who might blurt it out while getting cussed out by you, and so only the techs and the abuse group get to see what you did compared to the rest of your pipe / node / neighborhood.
With all of the new movie downloading services coming out, I wonder how ISP will deal with the increased bandwitdth. Each movie is between 700MB to 1GB, depending on the quality.
Chaluapman, how many movies are you expecting people to watch? If you watched 2 movies a day that’d only be ~60GB.
With netflix, you could hit this peak seeing they now have plans for watching 48 hours of DVD quality video.
Combine that with surfing, minor bit-torrent, IPTV shows like diggnation or dl.tv, youtube, trailers, XBOX 360 gaming traffic and XBOX/ITUNES movie dowloads, blah blah etc… You could start to hit 100-200GB GB easy.
People will start increasing their Dl’ing and the networks are going to have to get used to it, it will only get worse over time.
2 cents,
F.
I calculated how much a regular legitimate user who loves media could use today:
Format:
Source: detail, usage per month.
Netflix: 48 hour plan at 1GB p/hour, 48GB p/month.
ITUNES: 4 1-hour shows p/day at 100MB p/show, 12 GB.
XBOX 360: HD movies: 20 per month, 4GB p/movie, 80 GB.
Torrents: Legal IPTV / media; 300mb per day, 9GB.
IPTV: direct download per week: 1GB, 4GB.
surfing: 300MB per month, 0.3GB.
Gaming: 2GB per month, 2GB.
Trailers: 1 GB per month, 1GB.
Youtube, 1GB per month, 1GB.
My total per month would come to 156Gb per month. I consider this to be the average techno-geeks media-junkie usage patterns. This is today. Big-corporate wants you to consume and pay for product and media, just as long as it’s on their terms, WTF?
As more and more legitimate media gets put on the I-net, my usage will increase, comcast better get used to it or make room for someone who can provide my with the media I am willing to pay for.
3 cents,
F.
The easy way to fix is this to call your mayor or whoever runs the city/township/village you live in. Cable is a franchised industry, and if you squawk enough to whomever controls the franchise, they can push on Comcast to do what’s right here. The issue is that they advertised an unlimited service. (OK.) Turns out it isn’t unlimited (OK, I suppose, although deceptive in its own right.) Then they won’t tell you what the usage cap is, or permit you to reactivate service at all (NOT OK.) Most franchise agreements I have read (which is not a fun job) specifically stipulate that service MUST BE MADE AVAILABLE to everyone living within the franchise area. Generally this only applies to basic TV service, but you may have gotten lucky and found out that you live in an area where that applies to all services.
Seriously – call your politicans and raise a stink. You might be able to get this fixed.
yahonza, You can reach me at u235sentinel@gmail.com. I’m interesting in exploring what options are available. I’ve been in contact with several other people whom Comcast has shut off their HSI both in the Salt Lake Valley and other states.
Next week I’ll be addressing the City Council of West Jordan and presenting them with my story. At this point I’m not willing to allow Comcast to abuse me and other’s any further. I’m pushing utopianet.org for Utah starting with my city. We’re speaking to as many neighbors as we can to attend.
Competition has a tendancy to make mega corps become less abusive and arrogant.
I hope we can connect. BTW, Thanks for all the support!
First off, I am not a techie, so maybe I am oversimplifying this.
However, I see this as very similar to a credit card. If, all of a sudden, my credit card usage was unusually high, I would expect: my account to be frozen AND to be contacted immediately via all contact information given in my account: all phone numbers, in writing, and via e-mail. I would also expect that if my card was declined before I received the previously mentioned notifications, that I could reach any CSR for the credit card and they could say “your account has been temporarily suspended due to unusual activity, so let me transfer you to our ??? department”.
Shame on Comcast for treating a trouble-free customer of 3.5 years like a criminal instead of working to resolve the problem, which sounds like quite a few people riding out on his wireless after he got the new modem and possibly reset everything to default passcodes.
I have oversea tv and our only cable company is Comcast(unfortunatly they took over for Adelphia)I can not run those service via dialup,DSL or satelite. I am guarntied 3 mgbts and more thats what I am paying for. I can run my tv for maybe 4-5 hrs a day then my speed goes down drasticly, I’ve contacted Comcast for the past 2 month w/out results. I am as angry w/them due to their lack of response and empty promises. I’d need at least 2mgbts. I understand how that couple feels. As long as there is no competition they can do w/customers whatever they want. I did already complained to my mayor etc. Not much there. But I did send this site to him now, plus our newspaper, I posted it on myspace too. But it will take lots of ppl to beat the giant.
Really, is it too much to ask for your six kids to just cut back a little bit on their BitTorrents of porn?
Comcast did the same thing to me, but they would never tell me exactly what I did wrong- only that I was using an ‘unacceptable’ amount of bandwidth and 99.99% of the other comcast users do not have this problem. I tried for quite some time to get a definition of ‘acceptable usage’ and they would never give me info- they just kept using the 99.99% reference.
I canceled (actually they did, so there were no contract cancellation fees) and went with DSL; I have been using BellSouth 6Mbps DSL for over two years now with the same usage and there have been no complaints from Bellsouth.
If Comcast doesn’t have the network to support what they offer, they should get out of the game – or at least give an honest contract.
For all you cry babies saying “no one ever told me about a cap.”
Ignorance of a policy is not an excuse for violating a legally enforceable agreement. Even if the agreement sucks, the company is within its rights to enforce if. And according to the terms of the agreement, Comcast can change it at anytime WITHOUT NOTICE TO YOU other than posting it on their website.
You can see the current Comcast TOS at http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp
it it states “You shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or degrade any other user’s use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network.”
So if you use to much, you are toast. Sorry.
I had the same experience in 2003.
CC: “You must comply with our bandwidth limits!”
ME: “How much should I limit my usage to?”
CC: “We cannot disclose our bandwidth limits.”
Comcast should offer “abusers” a throttled account option, like 128Kbps for a month, as a last resort.
Fortunately I had competative services in my area. Since being cancelled for exceeding the double-secret bandwidth limit, I’ve switched to DSL and then to low-end FIOS. Verizon has had no problem with 0.9 TB/Month. (They must have a *real* network). However, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were to change when they roll out IPTV…
Ironically, four years after also cancelling Comcast cable and phone services, I still get monthly bills for $0. It’s like they’ve never lost a customer before…
spdickey says:
You can see the current Comcast TOS at {snip}
So if you use to much, you are toast. Sorry.
U235SENTINEL’S RESPONSE:
Uhhh… Are you a consumer? Purchase anything in the last few years perhaps? Car? House? Clothes? Yes? Do you know what you are purchasing when you put money down or send a check? Do you know what you are purchasing when you join Comcast and order HSI?
I believe that’s the heart of the issue. You are sold a product (6 meg pipe) and told not to use it. If you have an 8 Meg pipe, you can’t use more than 7% of what you purchased. Is this resonable?
The answer is apparent. Your copy/paste response is inadequate.
Similar issues with newsgroups. They’ll tell you your usage (usually), but won’t say what the cap is. At least they quit counting downloading message headers as ‘usage.’
Actually now, I don’t even know my newsgroup usage. I log onto their site with my primary account to find out my ‘current’ usage, and I get the message “The feature that you have tried to access requires that you sign in to Comcast.net using your Primary user name and password.”
What stellar service! Thank goodness for Comcast.
@FLAMAEST
And those numbers are asssuming that you’re the only person using the internet.
I have 3 techno geeks in my house >.>
@ISTAS45
That’s because your neighborhood is on the same network as you are. DSL is a direct line to the office while cable internet is shared by everyone near you.
So when a lot of people log on, they’re using the same bandwidth as you are.
@DROPPEDD
The point here is, why stop at a mysterious bandwidth limit? Why not deny users of VoIP traffic that they don’t provide, or IPTV unless it’s through them, or redirect your [www.google.com] link to [www.yahoo.com]
Because we pay for “unlimited” and unfettered access to the internet, and we _SHOULD_ make a stink when they decide to screw their customers in any way shape or form.
time warner customer here. i download ALOT. constantly deleting, updating, redownloading, ect ect. ive never been warned once about my internet usage. ive gotten an abuse letter once or twice regarding emails i send, but thats about it.
ive had time warner service since roadrunner was launched. never once gotten a letter regarding downloading/uploading.
look into sprint mobile broadband. i have it for work, runs me 76$ a month. i get 200-400k down usually, 30-50k up when i need it.
This sounds like adequate grounds for a False Advertising lawsuit, perhaps coupled with a few others.
Besides, 305GB is not an “unacceptable” amount.
@jerkius:
That’s good to know! I’m moving at the end of the month to a different area that uses TW. I was planning on getting their 12M package as there’s going to be 10 internet ready devices in the house and a lot of usage. Thanks!