I am a Comcast subscriber. Where I live, I get great speeds. Streaming content from Hulu (standard def) works just fine, downloading a Linux ISO image is fairly quick, web surfing is great, and so on. I have not always been pleased with the service, though. There are long periods where I lose connection to the internet intermittently. Worse, about once a year Comcast’s service (at least in my area) goes down for several days at a time. In other words, my experience with Comcast has been mixed. Sometimes it is fast and great, sometimes it is completely unreliable. Comcast’s recent move, though, just takes it too far.

Comcast has just announced that they are going to be metering bandwidth and putting on a monthly cap of 250GB. Fine. I don’t have a problem with that. I would have a problem with a 15GB cap, but 250GB is OK. What I do have a problem with, though, is how they are informing customers if they exceed the cap. Comcast provides absolutely no way of knowing where you are, until you go over. That is crazy! They actually suggest that I should go search for a utility to install on each of my computers and then add them all up! OK. I have at least 6 computers in my house accessing the internet on a daily basis. So I now need to collect everyone’s computers once a week and check what the numbers say? Thanks a lot.

Just to add to all of this, the first time you go over, you just get a call. If you go over again in the next 6 months, they terminate your service for a year? What? How about slowing me down or charging me more? Just terminating my service is going to make me furious and lose them revenue. It makes no sense. Plus, they don’t even let you pay for more bandwidth.

So where do I go? That is the real problem here. Comcast has an absolute monopoly on decent speeds where I live. I can go to DSL from Embarq, which is slow, even for DSL, or I can go to dial-up. Believe me, if anyone else where here offering fast speeds, I would have switched long ago. I guess there is just nothing I can do. Hey Comcast, why don’t you just double our fees and only let us use 1GB of bandwidth. It’s not like you have any competition.

Sorry for the off topic rant. Back to the Linux news on Friday – unless Comcast takes my suggestion.