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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

#161

Post by toast0 »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #45

When we purchased a house a few years back, Comcast was our only broadband option, so we reluctantly called them. The previous owners had a Dish Network receiver on the roof, and the when the Comcast technician arrived he enthusiastically offered to remove it and haul it away for us at no charge, even though it was in no way interfering with Comcast's cabling. I doubt I will ever have interest in subscribing to Dish…

To be fair, many homeowners who don't intend to have satellite tv find the dishes unsightly. One of the first things I did when we bought our house was take down the two easily reached dishes that we weren't going to use ever; the one that was way up there got to stay, but I did remove the cable that was running outside all over the place.

From what I understand, it's pretty common for the next satellite installer to want to install a completely new dish and LNB when service is requested, unless the dish is very recent.

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

#162

Post by cakedoggie »

distantsounds wrote: post #18

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.

He gets money for each callout.

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

#163

Post by mjevans »

ghostly_s wrote: post #46
dragonwriter wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite easy to believe a company has much higher quality standards for things it can blame on some other actor that it nominally doesn't control. Outsourcing blame is fairly common.

I've literally never heard of anyone impressed with the quality standard on a single service Comcast provides soooo...gonna call bullshit on this, too.

I can believe that they have some small 'gold standard' team like this that they reserve for... say the houses that their lobbyists visit.

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

#164

Post by abofh »

rayiner wrote: post #130
TillE wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VDSL is certainly not a "dead end". 50Mbit is available in most of Germany, with 100Mbit slowly rolling out. A lot of people will opt for the cheaper standard DSL though (<16Mbit), which I suspect is what brings down the average. In the US you have little choice but to pay obscene prices for a very fast cable line, usually with a monthly cap.

In the US, 100 Mbps availability hit 60% in 2014, and the next milestone is gigabit.

In the US, if you don't have symmetric streams, the average high-speed stream is 6mbps/100mbps up/down. The next milestone is still going to discriminate against content producers, IT workers, and software engineers.

Compounding that, the latency comcast deliberately introduces into their network (I've got many ISP's to judge on here) makes the internet ugly, but only if you don't pay for their services.

What we need is not a target for faster downstream, but higher competition - I could give a shit about network neutrality if the providers offered network honesty: a 500 GB monthly limit is a 1.5mB stream - full stop.

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

#165

Post by pitaa »

throwanem wrote: post #76
DamnInteresting wrote: post #45

When we purchased a house a few years back, Comcast was our only broadband option, so we reluctantly called them. The previous owners had a Dish Network receiver on the roof, and the when the Comcast technician arrived he enthusiastically offered to remove it and haul it away for us at no charge, even though it was in no way interfering with Comcast's cabling. I doubt I will ever have interest in subscribing to Dish…

I've known small IT contractors to act similarly, in order to obtain free hardware which they could then resell on the used market or repurpose for their own use. Dish Network dishes apparently [1] having something of a used market as well, it wouldn't surprise me if your technician were simply an enterprising fellow with an eBay seller account. [1] http://www.ebay.com/bhp/dish-network-satellite-dish

I agree; this offer doesn't seem malicious. At the very least the guy could have been scrapping them for beer money.

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

#166

Post by pjc50 »

rayiner wrote: post #107
andy_ppp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> treating cities as ghettos instead of national priorities

This sounds completely backwards, until you realise all persistent problems in the US can be traced to racism.

(I'm still unconvinced as to the idea that broadband is statistically "better" in the US but the customers complain far more. I suspect that a huge chunk of people prefer slow/cheap/reliable to fast/expensive, certainly once you get beyond about 10mbit.)

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

#167

Post by logicchains »

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.

>Citation needed. Eastern Europe has demonstrated that absent restrictions it's possible for the market to develop last-mile wiring superior to that in the US:

https://medium.com/juice-romanian-vitamins/10-years-later-di...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/jp5aa3/why-romani...

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

#168

Post by rprospero »

Larrikin wrote: post #78
chadgeidel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can run a business like that by making the barrier to switch providers very high, and the ease to collect bills very low. This is pretty much standard experience in the US. Even if one lives in a region where there are competitors, it's annoyingly difficult to switch providers so most just don't.

What is difficult about switching when theres actually competitors. I finally live in an area with multiple competitors and it was fairly painless. Comcast tripled my bill for internet after one year and was also charging me for occasionally going over their data limit they set after I had been a customer for a couple months. I called Comcast and specified the day I wanted my service to end and had it coincide with t…

Part of the problem is that getting Comcast to close your account can be a craps shoot. For you, it worked just fine, like it does most of the time. For my mother, it was a nightmare.

My father passed away a few years back and my mother was trying to cut back on expenses, so she went to cancel the Comcast. The account was in my father's name, so she expected there to be some trouble. Comcast required that she bring in my father's death certificate. Also, they would be keeping the death certificate for their own records and a photocopy wouldn't do, so she'd need to go down to the county corner and get a second copy of the death certificate printed and hand signed. While this all seemed fairly onerous, I can at least appreciate the formality from an security standpoint.

After jumping through all of the hoops set forth by the Comcast, my mother drove out to the local branch office and presented the paperwork. The case worker brought didn't know how to handle the situation where someone had actually done everything that Comcast had asked and brought in the branch manager. He then told my mother that they needed my father to personally deliver his own death certificate before they would close the account.

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

#170

Post by icelancer »

packetslave wrote: post #9
pwerner2 wrote: post #7

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…

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 have three Comcast Business Installs. The phone support service is superior but the techs are outsourced. We had one good one do two installs and one horrible once completely botch an install just today.
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