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Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

arstechnica.com

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Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#61

Post by CaptSpify »

orclev wrote: post #58
CaptSpify wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. If they are contractors working for Comcast, then Comcast should be held 100% liable. Outsourcing has no bearing on who is responsible for the problem.

Technically the way the US legal system works, the expected outcome is that Comcast loses, pays this company, and then sues their independent contractors to recover the damages they had to pay out.

That's how it's supposed to work. How it actually works is that the contractor is probably going to get a new giant contract with Comcast.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#62

Post by tajen »

BearGoesChirp wrote: post #52
jamroom wrote: post #2

Wow - if true I really hope Comcast gets taken to the cleaners over this. We REALLY need more ISP competition in the US- this is just ridiculous.

Behavior like this should end in a multi year ban of the corporation existing. Only with such extreme penalties that far out weigh any possible profit will corporate behavior change.

Buildings could allow competition several operators and impose a no-access ban to operators who mangle cables. The game is for a set of buildings to associate together, so one Comcast error in one results in a ban in the chain of buildings. This is actually very easy to organize.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#65

Post by rrauenza »

justinlink wrote: post #31
kodt wrote: post #4

This does not surprise me, in fact a Comcast technician told me they do this (on a much smaller scale) by disconnecting or cutting competitors' cable runs to buildings they are working on (and also sometimes their own). I lived in a multi-unit apartment building and one day noticed my internet was down (I was a Comcast subscriber). I was suspicious because a Comcast technician was just out earlier in the day installi…

Last year a neighbor had a comcast tech who identified a noisy signal somewhere on our block. He proceeded to disconnect every other house on the block and then left. He never told anyone at Comcast or the other houses. Took hours of battling with phone support and a two day wait to have another tech who came out and identified the problem. He said they do this often to get into houses to find problems but he's suppo…

Yeah, happened to us, too. No note on our account, no notification.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#66

Post by Spivak »

r00fus wrote: post #37
jamroom wrote: post #2

Wow - if true I really hope Comcast gets taken to the cleaners over this. We REALLY need more ISP competition in the US- this is just ridiculous.

Competition will not exist due to natural monopolies for the last-mile wiring issues. What is required is effective regulation. Which the new FCC head just gutted.

Or you need the last mile wires to be owned by some entity that isn't an ISP.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#67

Post by rsj_hn »

kodt wrote: post #4

This does not surprise me, in fact a Comcast technician told me they do this (on a much smaller scale) by disconnecting or cutting competitors' cable runs to buildings they are working on (and also sometimes their own). I lived in a multi-unit apartment building and one day noticed my internet was down (I was a Comcast subscriber). I was suspicious because a Comcast technician was just out earlier in the day installi…

I was in a multi-unit building as a customer of RCN (back when they were in SF) and a Comcast tech cut my wires one day. I was without service for a few days. I deduced it was a comcast tech because the day it was a new neighbor had their comcast service installed, and when I traced the wire, it was clearly cut.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#68

Post by protomyth »

pwerner2 wrote: post #56
raarts wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very hard to believe the company has'ludicrous' quality standards but at the same time works with so many bad contractors without putting controls in place. I don't buy it.

"I don't buy it" Ah, sorry, I forgot I was on the internet, land of experts in everything.

More like people who have had to deal with Comcast. Thankfully, I'm in rural ND where I can get good fiber and not the crap my Dad has had to put up with. The number of splitters in the wall was impressive though.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#69

Post by moriarty-s3a »

pjc50 wrote: post #16
javiramos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this happened to me about a month ago. I switched from Provider_A to Provider_B. Provider_A totally sabotaged the connection hardware when it disconnected the service. Provider_B's technician had a very hard time redoing the connection hardware. It's amazing to me that all these connections are still physicial (as opposed to some software-defined switching between providers). Something akin to software-define…

> Something akin to software-defined networking What you want is "local loop unbundling". It's how this works in Europe where you have artificial non-free markets with real price competition, rather than natural monopolies without price competition as in the US.

This used to be the case in the US after the Telecom Act of 1996. However, the FCC decided on their own to give the ILECs a grace period of a year to implement LLU and then kept extending the grace period. After the dot com bust and the following recession in the early 2000s, most of the CLECs went out of business and Congress gave up and removed that requirement in 2006.

The state PUCs didn't do much enforcement either, but the FCC deciding not to enforce the law killed it.

Re: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

#70

Post by moriarty-s3a »

openmosix wrote: post #28
kodt wrote: post #4

This does not surprise me, in fact a Comcast technician told me they do this (on a much smaller scale) by disconnecting or cutting competitors' cable runs to buildings they are working on (and also sometimes their own). I lived in a multi-unit apartment building and one day noticed my internet was down (I was a Comcast subscriber). I was suspicious because a Comcast technician was just out earlier in the day installi…

If it is true, what is fascinating is that it means Comcast has no way to know who is a legitimate customer and who is not - if they have to rely on the customer to make the call and verify to be a legitimate user. How can they run a business like that?

It isn't that they have no way of knowing, it just isn't worth the tech's time (in their mind) to validate the status of every connection. If they are like most other telecoms, they would have to manually cross reference date from multiple applications.
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