Comcast Hates Everything Fun About America
What the shit, Comcast? Why you up all in our bizness like this? First you decide to intentionally slow down customers who try to download BitTorrents. Now, you are intentionally slowing down customers’ connection speeds which download large files, even if the file was legitimately purchased from a source like iTunes. What, we’re gonna have to wait even longer for our Daily Show episodes to download? Fuck that! More insidious and troubling is that fact that they won’t disclose how big of a file you can attempt to download before they jack your connection up. And, this is a service that people pay for?
Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manger of its Internet service, said the system will look at the bandwidth used over a period of minutes. That means that someone who downloads a single song won’t go into the slow late [sic?], but someone that downloaded a whole movie might, regardless of whether the movie is from iTunes or over BitTorrent.
Most significantly, Comcast won’t even tell its customers if or when they are having their connections throttled. Mr. Bowling said that customers certainly would notice a slowdown.
What is this guy? The Hall Monitor of the Internet?
Source: [NYT]
June 9th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
What a way to retain customers. Now if we could just figure out why Verizon won’t hook us up with FIOS, we would have a valid alternative. Back to DSL?
June 10th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Cavalier DSL is where it’s at. You don’t even need a voice line (who has those anymore). I routinely get 8-9 mb/s downloads and I’ve never had an outage.
June 10th, 2008 at 9:41 am
We went back to DSL (and the FIOS waiting list). Aside from one beat modem that gave us problems in the beginning (and was later replaced on Verizon’s dime), DSL IS WAY FASTER AND WAY MORE RELIABLE THAN COMCAST CABLE INTERNET ever was for us.
Just tell those shady bastards at Verizon to make sure that they don’t activate the account until you have received the modem. They activated our account a full 10 days before they provided us with the modem required to harness the raw power of their intarweb beams. [lazer gun noise!]