The Intersection of Online and Offline

It was bound to happen.   I said something nice about Comcast last week (their customer service person being on Twitter), and they go an do something evil, reminiscent of the reasons that drove me to Fios and DirecTV.

On the surface, it’s a move that will impact few users.  According to SlashDot:

“Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. ‘This is the same system we have in place today,’ Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. ‘The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.’ The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is “an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. … As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,’ Comcast said Thursday. ‘If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,’ according to the AUP.”

This is, even with a fairly sizable limit on bandwidth, a sample of a bait and switch.  Comcast advertises “blazing download speeds” left and right to try to lure customers from other providers and enter into one of those iron-clad and idiotic “bundling” agreements (”INTERNET!! CABLE!! TELEPHONE!!!), whose rates creep up after the initial period — and have you every tried “unbundling?”  It’s a pain in the arse.

Comcast simultaneously advertises Internet download speeds while putting up bandwidth limits.  This might just be an isolated incident or simple stupidity, but to me, it’s a really slippery slope for any ISP to do this.  You advertise “blazing” downloads, so let me get my music, movies, run my business, whatever - and get the hell out of my way.

To do otherwise is either disingenuous or just plain stupid.

Mark

David Armano of the excellent Logic+Emotion blog recently wrote about one of the most universally frustrating experiences:  dealing with an ISP when you have an outage.  My own ISP, Verizon (Fios) provides excellent service when it is running, but when it goes down, Verizon actually asks you to run a diagnostic tools THAT IS THEN SENT TO THEM OVER THE INTERNET.  That’s hard to do when your freaking connection is out.

I won’t even get into the fact that I once seached the Verizon site for 30 minutes looking for a tech support number and then finally Googled it and found it posted by some other equally frustrated person who posted the right number on his/blog.

But enough about me.  David has a good story to tell because when he returned home from vacation, the service from his ISP, Comcast, was out.   So after trying the traditional routes David discovered that Comcast has a Twitter account — and a real guy, Frank, behind it.

David wrote:

Within a few minutes on a Sunday evening, Frank responded to my complaint letting me know that it was most likely not an outage in my area, but a problem at my house. He also guided me through a process that would have fixed it (if I had a amplifier vs. a splitter), but it was still nice to get the education on the difference, not to mention the personal touch delivered through what is supposed to be an impersonal medium.”

Amen.  Does Comcast still get a bazillion complaints?  Probably.  But this again validates the fact that increasingly, and at a very low cost, companies can provide services to their customers in the manner in which the customers want to receive it. I, for one, would get on a plane to Bangalore before I have to call Verizon again.  Twitter can be a highly personal experience.

And David even did a screen capture of the conversation  Very cool:

Great post, David.

Mark