March 12, 2007

Today the Boston Globe published an article on Comcast terminating HSI services. It was good to see other's are coming forward about this. I guess the company has changed their policy of not terminating customers who exceed their undisclosed limits. FYI, Comcast will always have a top .01% :-)

BTW, this issue isn't going away anytime soon. As much as I don't care for Bill Gates, he does make some insightful comments about the Internet and what we can expect from the future. From the article:

The Internet is set to revolutionize television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said recently;

{snip}

At the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Gates said, "I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had," he told business leaders and politicians The rise of high-speed Internet and the popularity of video sites has already led to a worldwide decline in the number hours spent by young people in front of a TV set.


I've recently learned another resident just a few doors down has been disconnected by Comcast for "using the internet too much". She received the call from Comcast's abuse department threatening to disconnect her broadband service if usage wasn't drastically reduced. Comcast however was (again) unwilling to say exactly what acceptable use is.

Rather than guess what was acceptable, she decided that if it was such a problem that Comcast needed to threaten termination, she decided to cancel her broadband on the spot. She mentioned that her kids did use the Internet heavily. The funny thing about this is the abuse rep began to backpeddle saying they didn't need to terminate HSI, only use it less. So now they are without HSI however she began asking for details about DSL. Personally after a week I'm surprised to see very little difference in performance. I'm making a point of telling everyone about Qwest DSL.

Came across this article recently. A fellow blogger determined if you use only 7% of your connection you can be terminated.

Here is a very interesting article on public ownership of a fiber infrastructure. A pdf copy of their report is available.

This is where we are going as a society. Public Libraries are getting into these services and companies are bringing TV from all over the world steaming to your home.

Finally, from the Boston Globe article:

"Legitimately, everybody's going to be a bandwidth hog sooner or later, because that's what the Internet is, going forward," said Linda Sherry of Consumer Action.

Seems this is how .01% got into trouble with Comcast. We simply got there first :D


Update
Seems slashdot is now running with the Boston Globe story . I'm pleased to see the word is seriously getting out as people have the right to know they didn't purchase "Unlimited Use for a flat monthly fee".