Clinton

Comcast executive vice president David Cohen will host a $2,700-a-plate fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, to be held at his home in Philadelphia.

“Comcast NBCUniversal operates in 39 states and has 130,000 employees across the country,” said Comcast’s Sena Fitzmaurice earlier this spring, defending the company’s high-profile public policy lobbying efforts. “It is important for our customers, our employees and our shareholders that we participate in the political process. The majority of our PAC contributions are to the senators and members who represent our employees and customers.”

Those attending the June 26 event that manage to raise $27,000 from others qualify as co-hosts and win membership in the Clinton campaign’s exclusive “Hillstarters” program. Those donating at least $50,000 at the event get to attend a private reception with Mrs. Clinton and are automatically enrolled in the “Hillraisers” program for money-bundlers. While the ordinary voter will have to rely on newspapers and cable news, Hillstarters and Hillraisers get premium personal briefings from top campaign officials.

Cohen has been deeply ingrained in state and federal politics for years and is usually Comcast’s top point man dealing with Congress and other politicians. Cohen has a particular affinity working with Pennsylvania Democrats. He was chief of staff for former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who now earns a stipend from Comcast-owned MSNBC turning in regular appearances during the news channel’s political coverage.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Comcast donated almost $5 million in political campaign contributions last year, and spent more than $17 million on lobbying.

Comcast initially announced its 2Gbps broadband service would be available in May.

Three Comcast customers have told Stop the Cap! the cable company has informed them their wait to sign up for 2Gbps service will be a bit longer than planned.

“First it was May, then June, and now I’m being told ‘sometime in July,’ at least for Comcast’s central division, and even then they were not sure,” reports our reader Bruce Nuñez in Atlanta. That same answer was also received by Tom Davis who contacted Comcast this morning about the service.

“They still won’t release any information about anticipated installation costs, although the representative was fairly certain there would be a charge, and they won’t tell anyone the monthly price either,” said Davis. “The representative did tell me it was safer to assume the service will premiere in July and not hold out for June.”

A third potential customer in Miami was also given a vague availability date of “sometime in July” after being told there was no longer a scheduled launch date in June because Comcast wanted to simultaneously launch the service in several cities at once, and there were unspecified delays.

Comcast had previously announced the service would launch sometime in May. While not ready to actually provide the service, Comcast has been busy promoting markets where Gigabit Pro will eventually be available:

(Image: DSL Reports)

• California: Chico, Fresno, Marysville/Yuba City, Merced, Modesto, Monterey, Sacramento, Salinas, San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Barbara County, Stockton, Visalia
• Colorado: Colorado Springs, Denver, Fort Collins, Longmont, Loveland
• Florida: Jacksonville, Miami
• Georgia: Atlanta
• Illinois: Chicago
• Indiana: Northwest Indiana suburbs near Chicago
• Minnesota: Minneapolis, St. Paul
• Oregon: Portland
• Tennessee: Chattanooga, Knoxville
• Texas: Houston
• Utah: Salt Lake City
• Washington: Everett, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma

Customers will have to live within one-third of a mile of existing Comcast fiber infrastructure to qualify for the service.

Initially leaked price information seemed to indicate Comcast was planning to sell the service for $300 a month. At that price, Comcast will likely limit customer demand. Comcast’s Metro Internet service, offering 505Mbps, has been priced at around $400 a month. But to sign up, one must agree to pay a $250 installation and $250 activation fee. The service also is provided on contract, with a very steep $1,000 early termination fee.

“Last night, Internet service for a number of our customers in the western part of the country was degraded or unavailable for several hours,” Comcast wrote on its blog this morning. “We had a team on this immediately, and were able to restore full service to most customers by 9pm PT.”

The cause of the failure – a defective piece of hardware – began that morning, which meant it took almost nine hours for Comcast to find the equipment responsible for eventually wiping out Internet service for millions of broadband customers up and down the west coast.

Most backbone networks, including Comcast’s, are designed to heal themselves and route traffic along alternate paths much like a detour would route automobile traffic around a street closed for construction.

One type of traffic that gets automatically rerouted is Domain Name System (DNS) traffic.  Unfortunately, some of that traffic shifted in an unexpected way and overloaded local DNS server capacity causing many customers to experience service interruptions.

The worst of the outage affected most California, Oregon, and Washington customers between 6:30-9:30pm PT, but many reported poor service for at least six hours before that.

“Our condolences on the death of your Internet,” wrote Upgrade Seattle, an advocacy group trying to convince the city to run its own public gigabit Internet service to compete with Comcast. “This is why we need a strong, accountable municipal Internet service throughout Seattle.”

Comcast has offered to placate angry customers with a $5 service credit for the outage, but offered conflicting information about how customers will get it.

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury claimed the company will “proactively send the credit to affected customers.”

“Down Detector” shows the extent of Comcast’s latest service outage, which largely covers its entire service area in the states of Washington, Oregon, and the Bay Area region of California.

But other Comcast representatives, and the company’s own blog post, suggest otherwise.

Comcast’s policy states customer outage credits are not automatic, and callers to Comcast report customers must still ask for an outage credit to receive one.

“Comcast does not issue blanket service credits for outages,” reflects the policy of Comcast’s west coast divisions. The reason for that policy, according to Comcast spokesman Steve Kipp, is that Comcast prefers to work one-on-one with customers.

“You may have had somebody that may not have been home and did not even notice there was an outage,” Kipp offered. “Another customer may have lost valuable work time.”

But some people might be getting credits, if they got through to Comcast to complain about the outage as it happened.

“We are directly reaching out to those who reported problems last night to offer our apologies and a credit for lost service,” Comcast wrote on its blog this morning.

For everyone else:

“We are also building a Web site that impacted customers can visit to receive their credit. We will update this post with a link to that site as soon as it is available and will share the link on Twitter through our customer support handle @comcastcares.”

“Yeah, after we forget about it in a few days,” says Stop the Cap! reader Sarah Bowler who this morning asked us about the conflicting information coming out of Comcast. “You can’t live your life with Comcast without being ready to let go of their usual screw-ups after they are fixed or else you will become obsessed. They can’t get their billing right on a good day so I don’t believe for a second they will follow through with automatic credits. Go on record asking for that credit or you probably will never see it.”

Bowler tried calling 1-800-XFINITY (1-800-934-6489) but the lines were jammed, presumably with other callers looking for outage credits or information. She eventually got her credit using Comcast’s online support website. Customers can use live chat or try calling again later.

Seattle residents are particularly infuriated because this represents the second major outage since April, when a fiber optic cable cut wiped out service for 30,000 customers for nine hours, forcing some businesses to close for the day and 911 service to be disrupted for thousands because Comcast’s redundancy plan failed.

Customers there were also told they could receive credit, but it later turned out they received it only if they asked, and even then some claim they never got it.

“Comcast spends more time alienating their customers than they work on their service,” Bowler said.

Comcast’s sweeping disclaimers of responsibility for failures or confusion over its home security system made it next to impossible for a Washington state judge to find the cable company or its contractor liable for an alleged system failure that allowed two men to break into a Kirkland home undetected and torture the family’s teenage son.

Washington Superior Court Judge William Downing sympathized with the Rawat family over the intuitiveness of XFINITY’s Home Security system that required the family to arm it by selecting “away” mode before going to sleep, in turn activating motion detectors that would have alerted the family to the break-in.

“In the world of made-up words like XFINITY and meaningless slogans like ‘The Future of Awesome,’ this is not startling,” the judge said. “It is Microsoft that has trained us to shut down our computers by going to the ‘Start’ menu. More to the point, it is equally counterintuitive to believe that an indoor motion detector would be armed when a system was being set for a family and pets intending to stay inside the house.”

Comcast’s security contract lets the company walk away from responsibility for virtually everything.

Despite that, the Rawat family attorney had a high hurdle to overcome – Comcast’s contract with its customers that disavowed responsibility for almost any and all failures of the system and goes as far as to require victims to protect Comcast if a matter reaches the courts.

“Comcast complied with the terms of its written contract and did not breach any of its contractual duties,” the judge said. “No claims can lie for breaches of any expressed or implied warranties that were effectively disclaimed in the written contract.”

The judge added the plaintiffs may have exposed imperfections in Comcast’s installer training, the information conveyed on its lighted home security system control panels, and the nomenclature used to designate different system modes. But none of those acts overcame Comcast’s contractual disclaimers and failed to reach the legal definition of negligence.

Comcast’s attorneys argued the undetected break-in was the fault of the Rawat family because they failed to use the XFINITY Home Security system properly. To activate protection, the family had to arm the system in “away” mode before going to sleep, despite the fact the system’s motion detectors could trigger a false alarm if anyone moved inside of the home.

Downing

Ultimately, the judge found Comcast’s argument compelling.

“The malicious attack by the two criminals was motivated by pure evil and warrants every last second of punishment that they receive,” the Comcast attorney said. “However, what happened to Deep Rawat is not the result of anything that Comcast or Pioneer [the contractor] did or did not do.”

In short, the family should hold Blessing Gainey and Vincent Sisounong, who pled guilty to the attack last year, responsible, not Comcast or its contractor.

While acknowledging the severity of the plaintiffs’ son’s injuries and the emotional impact of the crime, the judge could not find Comcast responsible under the terms of the contract the family willingly signed.

But the case may offer some insight for other Comcast customers who either have or are evaluating an XFINITY Home Security system. A careful review of the contract Comcast makes customers sign may prove important as a customer considers their options for home security and personal protection.

It’s an acute case of broadband envy.

Residents of Fort Collins, Colo., that have an excuse to take an hour’s drive south on U.S. Route 87 to visit Longmont and experience the Internet over the community’s public broadband service can’t believe their eyes. It’s so fast… and cheap. Back home it is a choice between Comcast and CenturyLink, and neither will win any popularity contests. While large parts of Colorado have gotten some upgrades out of Comcast, Fort Collins is one of the communities that typically gets the cable company’s attention last.

The city of Longmont took control of its digital destiny after years of anemic and expensive service from Comcast and CenturyLink. Longmont Power & Communications’ NextLight Internet service delivers gigabit fiber to the home service to the community of 90,000. The service was funded with a $40.3 million bond the city issued in 2014, to be paid back by NextLight customers, not taxpayers, over time. It remains a work in progress, but is expected to start construction to reach the last parts of Longmont by next spring.

NextLight delivers a mortal blow to competitors by charging a fair price for fast service. Instead of spending to upgrade their networks to compete, the incumbents demagogued the public project and Comcast spent $300,000 of its subscribers’ money in a campaign to kill the service before it even got started. Perhaps they had a right to be worried considering NextLight customers pay $49.95 a month for unlimited 1,000/1,000Mbps service. NextLight offers 20 times the download speed and 100 times the upload speed of Comcast’s Blast! package for nearly $30 less a month.

After NextLight was rated America’s fastest performing Internet service by Ookla in May, residents in Fort Collins began to wonder why they were still putting up with poor service from Comcast and lousy DSL from CenturyLink.

Fort Collins is about a one hour, fifteen minute drive north of Denver.

At the same time, city officials were doing their best to leverage some modest improvements from Comcast in return for a renewed franchise agreement. All they got was a vague commitment permitting the city to monitor Comcast’s notorious customer service and two HD channels set aside for Public, Educational, and Government use, along with a $20,000 grant to help the public access channel with online streaming.

The Coloradoan urged Fort Collins officials to think big and establish public fiber optic broadband in the city.

To manage this, they will have to overcome a 2005 state law backed by Comcast and Qwest (now CenturyLink) that bans municipal telecommunications services. A local vote or federal waiver can sidestep a law that was always designed to restrict competition and make life easier for the two telecom giants.

The newspaper opines that Fort Collins is in no way ready for the digital economy of the 21st century relying on Comcast and CenturyLink.

The cable company’s attention is focused on bigger cities in the state and CenturyLink remains hobbled by its copper legacy infrastructure. While some upgrades have been forthcoming, both Comcast and CenturyLink are also testing usage caps or usage-based billing — just another way to raise the price of the service. And speaking of service, neither Comcast or CenturyLink are answerable to the communities they serve – a community owned broadband alternative would be.

As the Coloradoan writes:

We’ve got to lay the groundwork now. Society took huge steps forward when automobiles replaced the horse and carriage. And no, installing municipal broadband isn’t adopting a new mode of transportation, but it is symbolic of laying an entirely new road.

Look at it another way. The city provides needed services such as water and electricity. Internet access is a needed service.

One thing Fort Collins doesn’t absolutely need Comcast or CenturyLink. But nobody is asking them to leave. They have a choice to use their massive buying power and resources to upgrade their networks to compete. But Fort Collins residents should not have to wait for that day to come when there is a better alternative in their grasp today: public broadband.