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?
Comcast knows who is on its network based upon the MAC address of the modem that is registered with your account when you sign up. It's not that simple to steal cable nowadays.
The problem is that the departments that handle infrastructure and contracts are probably divided, maybe even separate subsidiaries / companies. So the infrastructure subsidiary may not have enough information about who the actual customer is. All they see is equipment and maybe an assigned contract number, but no names. It gets worse, when infrastructure is done by contractors, just labeled as insert big telco here.
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…
This happened to me in the Bay Area (Walnut Creek) about three months ago. I thought it was an isolated event. Fuck them.
Comcast knows who is on its network based upon the MAC address of the modem that is registered with your account when you sign up. It's not that simple to steal cable nowadays.
It's so easy to change a MAC address though. Also in the past (different cable provider) they had it MAC authorised so I couldn't use my new modem. But then I set the new modem to use the MAC of the old one and it worked. So same
It's not as easy as it sounds. We're talking about the MAC address of the modem itself. In any current DOCSIS network you're going to need to use BPI+ which encrypts everything between the modem and the CMTS as well as authenticates the modem itself. Basically there's a cert on the modem that's signed by the manufacturer and the manufacturers cert is added to the CMTS. In short you can't just impersonate a modem and even just rooting a modem and getting at that certificate is difficult enough, not to mention once you do that you can only impersonate the modem that you've already rooted.
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?
Infrastructure is probably handled by a different department, maybe even a different subsidiary or company. I bet, the infrastructure people get to see as less information as possible about the contract / actual customer and no information about other lines / contracts.
I worked on workforce management software for utilities companies. The field crews often only see information about their current task for various reasons (data size of standing data, privacy protection, field crew is a contractor).
Even if this was accidental and overblown (as lawsuits often are: one side of the story etc...), Comcast has a steep hill to climb because of their terrible reputation. I think they're going to get completely hosed in court over this. Being assholes to everyone you deal with can have surprising hidden costs.
> being assholes to everyone you deal with can have surprising [effects] Becoming a US president.
"You can't achieve anything without getting in someone's way."
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 used to live in an apartment building and park next to one of the cable distribution boxes. One day, while was sitting in my car, I saw a Comcast technician walk up to the box, open it, clip one of the wires with wirecutters , close it up, and move on, all in less than a minute. I assume he was acting against a cable pirate, but it was so fast I have no idea if he actually got the right unit.
Cable pirates generally don't know how to terminate coax. There's terminators that require a special tool to remove intended to deter cable theft but the design of those terminators means that just about anyone who's determined can open it with something like a fork. If they can't open it, they can always just disconnect one of the neighbors and use that or try to remove one of the terminators via brute force and break the tap. Cutting the drop cable would be very obvious to a cable thief and they wouldn't be able to do anything without being able to terminate coax.
None of the big European countries (Germany, the U.K., Spain, France, and Italy) require unbundling cable lines: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf . Unbundling of POTS in the US was not much of a boon, because DSL was a dead-end technology even then. What Europe does isn't really a good benchmark for how to structure a telecom market, because all the big European countries have slower broadband than in the US…
If this is true why is my Virgin Media fibre pretty damn fast and reliable and every American seems to constantly whinge about their cable provider?
What do you mean, "if this is true?" I linked my sources (Akamai and OECD)--you can see for yourself.
As far as that perception goes, my suspicion is that it has to do with the tech press/readership skewing young and urban. The U.S. is highly unusual in making the actual building of wires largely a state/local issue, and also in treating cities as ghettos instead of national priorities. Maryland, where I live, is a microcosm: if it were a country, it'd be just below Finland for broadband speeds. But it's only major city (Baltimore) is impoverished, and doesn't have fiber even though all the counties around it do. My neck of the state is pretty rural--large parts of it don't even have public water/sewer. But it's had fiber for a decade. Meanwhile, New York and Boston are just now getting fiber, and San Francisco still mostly doesn't have it.
This is why I "happily" pay extra for Comcast Business Internet. Completely separate call center and 100% in-house techs. It also probably helps that a Comcast field supervisor lives in my building (now if he'd just stop blocking the %$#@ driveway with his van...)
I don't think "100% in-house techs" is right. I have Comcast Business and my line was recently cut (probably an accident by apartment maintenance). The tech who came out and put in a temporary line was from Comcast, but he said a contractor would come out at some point in the future to put in a permanent one (hence, he could not guarantee that I could get a notification when it would happen).
That's because they have a different team to do burials.
Former Comcast cable technician here. I was an in-house tech, and corporate has ludicrous quality standards and nitpicky, white-glove QC's after an in-house tech leaves a job. However, the company obviously employs a TON of _independent contractors_. Some of these contractors are excellent at their jobs, but a lot of them aren't, and as they're not subject to any real oversight by the corporation, you really don't kn…
I am astonished. This is not a complicated issue. This is sensationalism. Before any of you "vote" on anything, consider exactly what it is that you're criticising. As it is, I'll bet almost all of you have never turned a wrench, let alone crawled into some ungrateful asshole's filthy attic or appalling, sewage filled crawlspace to replace a corroded cable fitting so said customer could spank his monkey at 3am to shitty cable porn, or worse, play farmville, and made We are talking about a very delicate electrical system that cannot function effectively outside of a specific radio bandwidth before being completely overtaken by the numerous sources of RF which exist in the world. Remember radios? Well, they got their name because they were the receivers of "radiated" "waves" in the air. As were TV's. Guess what? That coax line in your house? That's the modern version of an antenna. CATV literally means "community antenna television". It's an antenna that you share with everyone on the same "node" of your cable system. It's shielded so the RF no longer has to go through the air. In effect, if there is a breach in the shielding around that cable (a long antenna), you're going to get noise, and crappy service. Additionally, your precious internet rides on the highest frequencies carried by this sole, frail copper wire. Those high frequencies, as any EE student can tell you, are especially highly susceptible to interference. A single dB can make all the difference for your highly calibrated, sensitive cable modem that you don't fully appreciate. Some of these networks are huge. If one of your neighbors got high and plugged a blender in, anywhere in his home, and he has frayed cable jacketing, anywhere in his home, or a bad fitting, anywhere in his home, it can easily take an entire block down. There are hubs, of course, but don't count on one being nearby, if you're tasked with repairing someone's internet. I get it, "fuck Comcast, they're the devil because I have to give them money", but let's be adults here. Comcast is people. Every company is people.
In a shared-housing unit, a Comcast tech once cut the coax wires going to my FiOS box when installing internet for new tenants. Why he felt the need to touch my wiring is beyond me. The tech had to come back (albeit hours later) to undo the damage he did. A minor annoyance, but just adds onto the anecdotes of stories about the techs not knowing what they are doing.
I was surprised the other day when someone told me the fios technician intentionally clipped the comcast line at their house during an install
Probably an extremely common practice by any big company in areas where people have a choice.