Comcast’s customer relations team apparently is better at ferreting out contacts at their customers’ employers than fixing problems with their service, despite being given multiple chances to make things right. When one customer made a seventh attempt to resolve his problems, Comcast called his boss and got him fired.

The Consumerist details the latest Comcast Customer Service Horror Show. On one side, Conal, who signed up for Comcast after being sold on a 9-month new customer promotion. On the other, Comcast’s billing and customer service department. Almost from the beginning, the two were locked in combat over service and billing issues:

• Comcast misspelled his last name in their records, which meant some of his bills were allegedly returned to Comcast by the post office;
• Comcast charged him for set-top boxes that were never activated on his account;
• After multiple complaints, Comcast reduced his promotional discount, raising his bill $20 while adding new charges for a second cable modem he didn’t have and continuing charges for set-top boxes he never used;
• Conal tried to cancel his service in October 2013 because of the mishaps, but a representative convinced him to stay after promising to fix his account. Instead, Comcast sent him a dozen pieces of equipment he never ordered and billed his account $1,820 for the unwanted equipment.

Conal returned the unrequested DVRs, cable modems, and everything else Comcast sent, and brought along a spreadsheet detailing his ongoing dispute, including every overcharge he incurred. He’s a professional accountant used to dealing with companies that understand numbers, and was convinced putting everything on paper would finally get through to the cable company.

Not a chance.

Comcast was unmoved and unconvinced by Conal’s spreadsheet, denied there was ever a problem with his account, and upon learning he intended to continue contesting the equipment charges, turned his account over to collections despite the fact it was not past due.

On Feb. 6 Conal dared to escalate his concerns to Comcast’s Office of the Controller. A subsequent callback from a testy representative began with, “how can I help you.” There was no greeting or mention she worked for Comcast, but there was plenty of attitude. The mysterious rep disputed Conal’s claim that a Comcast technician never showed up for an appointment, but could not tell him which appointment she was referring to. After that debate ended, the only remaining question on her mind was the color of Conal’s house.

Realizing a short time later that call was a waste of time, Conal called back the Controller’s office to let them know Comcast’s latest ambassador of goodwill was unhelpful. At this point, he casually mentioned the unresolved accounting issues with his bill should probably be brought before the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a private-sector, nonprofit corporation created by the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 to end the accounting tricks and executive-ordered embargoes on bad news that fleeced investors in the 1990s. A professional accountant would be familiar with the PCAOB and how to appeal for an independent review, ordinary consumers would be unlikely to know the Board even existed.

That Conal would raise the matter of the PCAOB to the Controller’s Office apparently piqued the interest of someone at Comcast, who launched a small research project to determine who Conal was and where he worked. When they discovered his employer did work for Comcast, the cable company struck gold in the leverage department.

Comcast called Conal’s employer and spoke with a partner at the firm, who also received e-mail containing a summary of conversations Comcast evidently recorded between Conal and its various representatives. Comcast complained Conal was using the name of his employer to seek an unfair advantage with customer service. Conal told the Consumerist he never mentioned his employer by name, but once the Controller’s Office learned he was an accountant willing to escalate his complaints outside of the company, it would be a simple matter to look him up online and learn where he worked.

Conal’s employer in fact does consulting work for Comcast, so the outcome of a brief ethics investigation predictably led to Conal’s termination. Conal was never allowed to see the transcripts of conversations with the cable company, nor given access to any recordings of those calls. Conal said before he tangled with Comcast, he had received only positive feedback and reviews for his work.

Conal’s lawyer has been in contact with Comcast over the matter and received a pithy reply from Comcast’s senior deputy general counsel, who likely fears a forthcoming lawsuit, admitting Comcast did call Conal’s employer but said Conal “is not in a position to complain that the firm came to learn” about his dispute with Comcast.

“Our customers deserve the best experience every time they interact with us,” reads a statement from Comcast. The company says it has previously apologized to Conal, but adds “we will review his lawyer’s letter and respond as quickly as possible.”

Comcast had no comment about whether the company considers it proper to identify and contact customers’ employers and push its weight around when it feels the need to do some complaining of its own.

The many stages of denial

It took Google Fiber to change the paradigm that you only need enough broadband speed to run the basics — anything extra is extravagant and unnecessary. At least that is the argument broadband providers continue to make when asked about speed upgrades.

“When Google announced it was offering a gigabit, everybody was (like), ‘Huh? What are you going do with that?'” said Heather Burnett Gold, president of the Fiber to the Home Council Americas.

Time Warner Cable and AT&T are in the process of finding out in both Kansas City and (soon) in Austin, Tex. But when you don’t have what the other guy is offering, providers predictably switch to the cheaper-than-upgrades-argument, ‘you don’t need it.’

Before Google Fiber began a serious advance into Time Warner Cable territories and the cable company’s top speed of 50/5Mbps became an embarrassing outlier, then chief financial officer Irene Esteves poo-poohed the notion that people need anything faster than what Time Warner was already delivering. Esteves told an investment-phobic crowd of Wall Street analysts at a Morgan Stanley Tech Conference everyone was happy with what they already had.

“We just don’t see the need of delivering that [gigabit speed] to consumers,” Esteves said back in 2013.

Comcast didn’t think much of speed upgrades either… until it did in its regulatory filings to acquire Time Warner Cable, where Comcast championed the fact it offers more speed upgrades than Time Warner Cable ever did. But who can forget Comcast repeatedly telling customers their speeds were fast enough, and with their then-ubiquitous 250GB usage cap, you couldn’t use faster speeds for that much anyway.

“For some, the discussion about the broadband Internet seems to begin and end on the issue of “gigabit” access,” David L. Cohen, Comcast’s executive vice president, wrote in an editorial in the summer of 2013. “The issue with such speed is really more about demand than supply. Our business customers can already order 10-gig connections. Most websites can’t deliver content as fast as current networks move, and most U.S. homes have routers that can’t support the speed already available to the home.”

(Today, Comcast touts it has new routers that will support the fastest speeds on offer from cable companies and promises Time Warner Cable customers long overdue speed upgrades.)

Other providers that cannot possibly compete with Google Fiber’s speed also like to change the subject.

The Wireless Cowboys blog, run by a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP), believes the real issue isn’t about speed at all.

“All of the discussions about ‘Gigabit Internet’ and coming up with uses for it focuses too much on the American obsession with ‘bigger, faster, moar!’ while obscuring what I feel are the more important issues of accessibility, affordability, choice of provider, freedom from data exploitation and dependency on the cloud,” wrote the editor.

Unfortunately for him, it isn’t the American obsession with ‘bigger, faster, moar’ that is the issue. It is just about everywhere else where nations are treating major broadband upgrades as a national priority, while we depend almost entirely on a barely competitive private sector to deliver upgrades most of them don’t believe we need in the first place.

Dan Tesch wrote in InformationWeek earlier this year he wants the United States to sit this one out.

“Even if Latvians enjoy faster connections than Texans (2.5 x faster), I’m really curious how broadband speeds of more than a few Mbps for average households can have a material impact on the economy,” he writes. “A 6Mbps connection could easily support several home users simultaneously shopping on multiple e-commerce sites, downloading iTunes, streaming Spotify, and so on. Do Americans really need gigabit to the home?”

Back in the early 1990s, dial-up was plenty for the online applications of the day and faxing managed just fine at 9600bps over landlines, so why do we need more? Perhaps because dial-up is effectively dead to us and faxing has become quaint, like carrying cassettes in your car. Technology marches forward, and providers must follow (or preferably lead).

It is inevitable that faster broadband will drive development of new applications designed to take advantage of gigabit speeds as they become more common. That isn’t likely to happen for years in the United States and Canada, but those speeds are already becoming common in Europe and Asia. Where superfast broadband predominates, so shall high-tech app developers and other digital economy businesses. North America will be left behind until we finally catch up to Romania, Bulgaria, and South Korea.

The evidence is already there.

“I just returned from Stockholm where fiber connections are cheap and as available as running water,” said Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and author of “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry & Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.” As a result, she said, developers there have “a digital sandbox to play in,” which means they are more likely to develop the next generation of software and hardware.

“Most people don’t really get it yet,” Synthia Payne, who moved from Denver to Kansas City, Kan., for a $70-a-month Google Fiber connection told the New York Times. She needed superfast broadband to develop an app called Cyberjammer that allows musicians around the world to jam online and in real-time. “People just haven’t conceived of what fiber will mean and how it will change the way we live and work.”

Brad Kalinoski and Tinatsu Wallace fled Time Warner Cable country in Los Angeles and moved to Wilson, N.C. They co-own Exodus FX, a company that provides special effects for commercials, television and feature films like “The Black Swan” and “Captain America.”

“We were doing so much business that we had to have increased bandwidth, so we started looking around and found Wilson,” said Kalinoski.

If they stayed in Hollywood, gigabit fiber broadband requires an extremely expensive commercial account with a substantial buildout/installation fee to reach the building and monthly charges starting at $1,500-3,000. Today, he pays Greenlight, Wilson’s publicly owned fiber to the building provider, $150 a month for gigabit access.

Any digital economy business dependent on fast Internet can see the economics, and often relocate.

“In New York, I pay four times as much as someone in Stockholm would pay for a connection that is 17 times as slow on the download and 167 times as slow on upload,” Crawford noted. “Most of us are paying enormous rents for second-class service.”

It’s the same in Seattle, where Eric Blank moved his 20-employee IT security firm from Seattle to Mount Vernon, Wash., which has its own fiber network. Blank could have kept paying CenturyLink or Comcast around $985 a month for vastly slower service or pay Mount Vernon for access to its public broadband service, which costs $250 a month. Blank told the New York Times he gets better service for his $250 in Mount Vernon than what he got at a higher price in Seattle.

Remarkably, for all the talk about why Americans don’t need faster Internet service, the moment a competitor starts selling it, the cheap talk turns into service upgrades (or at least press releases promising upgrades).

In Kansas City, speeds are rising not just because of Google Fiber. Akamai has found AT&T and Time Warner Cable are upgrading to deliver faster speeds as well.

We’re seeing faster speeds everywhere,” said David Belson, who authors the State of the Internet Report for Akamai. “Part of that is that the technology is improving to get better speeds out of existing networks, part of it is consumer demand, and part is the pressure that Google Fiber’s existence creates on everybody else.”

Today Time Warner Cable delivers 50Mbps for what it used to charge for 15Mbps service in Kansas City. AT&T has also boosted speeds of its U-verse service in many Kansas City neighborhoods, with promises to deliver gigabit speeds in Overland Park in the not-too-distant future.

Odorous House Ants in splice tray (Image: Rainbow Tech)

Ants going about their daily routine have grown increasingly frustrated with the presence of underground optical cables and other telecommunications equipment including lawn pedestals and terminating boxes and have become a growing problem for telecom companies that can blame local outages on their activities.

In the last month, Frontier, Windstream, AT&T, and Verizon all suffered outages directly attributed to insect activity. In most cases, the damage is unintentional — the insects use enclosed spaces like lawn pedestals and equipment cabinets as a handy home. Material brought into the colony can overheat equipment when it blocks air vents, increased moisture from the insects can corrode or compromise sensitive electronics, and insect attempts to push wiring out of the way can ruin optical cables.

Stop the Cap! reader Geoff Fielder found his entire neighborhood missing U-verse service last month and learned ants had infested the neighborhood’s fiber-copper junction box and corroded some of the equipment contained inside.

“When the technician opened the box, half the neighborhood could hear him screaming,” Fletcher said. “He made it quite plain he didn’t like ants. His partner arrived with a spray can in hand and knocked down most of them and encouraged the others to retreat. The damage was significant and they were surprised it happened so quickly because AT&T technicians tend to visit equipment boxes regularly when they connect new customers.”

It took most of the afternoon to repair the damage and bring the neighborhood back online.

Earlier this summer, Verizon FiOS user Paul McNamara, news editor of Network World, reported ants had destroyed the fiber optic cable bringing him service. Five years earlier, ants caused havoc when they colonized a utility junction box on a pole across the street. In both cases, they brought Verizon’s fiber network to its knees for McNamara.

“When the Verizon technician opened the box it was filled with hundreds of ants (I had actually forgotten about the earlier ant episode, but he clearly expected them to be there),” McNamara wrote in a blog post. “And when he shooed away enough of the critters to get a look inside, the red glow of a stripped fiber optic cable was clearly visible.”

The technician believed the ants were attracted to a liquid jelly used inside the cable’s casing.

Ant damage to an optical fiber cable (Image: Draka)

Draka, an optical fiber supplier dealing with complaints about insect damage, reports the ants it encounters are not seeking out optical cables. They just don’t appreciate when those cables get in their way.

The company ran test ant farms where they intentionally placed optical fiber cables in proximity to the colonizing ants. They were relieved to discover the ants didn’t target their brand of cable specifically — they attacked them all equally. This problem may require expert assistance; contact Marietta OH pest control companies to help you.

“Fibers from all four suppliers were found to be damaged by the activities of the ants in the farms,” Draka wrote in its study. “The ants did not preferentially attack Draka fiber in the competitor fiber farms, but rather they did damage to fibers from all vendors.”

Some ant species are less tolerant of cables than others. Among the nastiest are the Red, Western, and California Harvester Ants, found mostly west of the Mississippi. They dig ant galleries as deep as nine feet and have little tolerance for any underground cables they meet.

“It was concluded that the harvester ants often attempt to push aside any optical fiber they encounter if the fiber is in the way of their work,” Draka reported. “It was observed that they sometimes moved the fibers when they were in the way, but they were not seen trying to eat the coating or attacking the fiber.”

They needn’t do either to cause damage. The body parts they use to shove cables aside are capable of creating significant damage, starting with stripping the color off the cable and eventually destroying insulation straight down to the glass fiber itself.

Other ant species are also capable of causing indirect damage by their presence. Ant waste is often corrosive and a long-established colony can do significant damage to equipment cabinets.

The neighborhood bad boy, ready to chew.

Technicians assigned to dealing with insect-related outages encounter more than just ants, however. These insects often set up home inside little-accessed boxes:

• Black Widow Spiders
• Brown Recluse Spiders
• Crickets
• Fleas
• Millipedes
• Roaches
• Scorpions
• Silverfish
• Sowbugs
• Ticks
• Waterbugs

Rainbow Technology, a major supplier of insect and rodent control measures to utility companies, says a fast response can make a real difference. Rainbow said the worst offenders are five types of ants that have a bad reputation with utility companies: harvester ants, odorous house ants, Argentine ants, carpenter ants and fire ants. They have been implicated in service outages in California, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Texas.

Rodents, especially squirrels, also remain constant hazards everywhere – especially to overhead wiring. They need to wear down constantly growing teeth and utility cables are a perennial favorite. They typically stop gnawing after the insulation has been stripped off cable television or telephone wiring. They will stop gnawing for a different reason if they chew on electrical cables. So for those who want to banish them in their vicinity, they can now do so thanks to services like animal control.

Verizon Wireless, facing scrutiny from FCC chairman Thomas Wheeler, today announced it has canceled plans to introduce a new “network optimization” policy that would have significantly throttled down speeds for heavy users still on grandfathered, unlimited use data plans.

Stop the Cap! received a statement from Verizon Wireless this afternoon announcing a sudden change of heart:

Verizon is committed to providing its customers with an unparalleled mobile network experience.  At a time of ever-increasing mobile broadband data usage, we not only take pride in the way we manage our network resources, but also take seriously our responsibility to deliver exceptional mobile service to every customer.  We’ve greatly valued the ongoing dialogue over the past several months concerning network optimization and we’ve decided not to move forward with the planned implementation of network optimization for 4G LTE customers on unlimited plans.  Exceptional network service will always be our priority and we remain committed to working closely with industry stakeholders to manage broadband issues so that American consumers get the world-class mobile service they expect and value.

Chairman Wheeler questioned Verizon’s strategy almost immediately after the company announced its “network optimization” strategy in July.

Wheeler

“‘Reasonable network management’ concerns the technical management of your network; it is not a loophole designed to enhance your revenue streams,” Wheeler wrote in a July 30 letter to Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead. “It is disturbing to me that Verizon Wireless would base its ‘network management’ on distinctions among its customers’ data plans, rather than on network architecture or technology.”

Wheeler reminded Mead the FCC defined network management practices to be reasonable “if it is appropriate and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology of the broadband Internet access service.”

Wheeler told Mead Verizon’s plans didn’t qualify.

“I know of no past FCC statement that would treat as ‘reasonable network management’ a decision to slow traffic to a user who has paid, after all, for ‘unlimited” service,'” Wheeler wrote.

Wheeler also questioned how Verizon could justify its planned speed throttling under the conditions it agreed to after winning the 700MHz “C Block.” That spectrum was accompanied by a special FCC mandate – open platform rules which prohibits Verizon Wireless from denying, limiting, or restricting the ability of end users to download and use applications of their choosing on the C Block networks. A speed throttle would make using some applications impossible.

In August, Wheeler hammered home his opposition to Verizon’s plans at a news conference.

“My concern in this instance–and it’s not just with Verizon, by the way, we’ve written to all the carriers–is that [network management] is moving from a technology and engineering issue to a business issue, such as choosing between different subscribers based on your economic relationship with them.”

Wheeler has expressed irritation that Verizon’s justification for congestion management only applied to its unlimited customers, while those paying on a per-gigabyte basis could use (and spend) as much as they like.

Verizon responded that other providers — notably AT&T — already have a similar network management policy in place, throttling speeds of grandfathered unlimited customers who consume more than 3GB of wireless traffic on its 3G network or 5GB on its 4G network a month.

“‘All the kids do it’ was never something that worked with me when I was growing up and didn’t work with my kids,” Wheeler responded, noting Verizon was trying to reframe the issue instead of justifying the need for speed throttles for some customers, while giving others unlimited access as long as they pay.