Comcast’s e-mail service failed for customers across the country this morning, creating a storm of complaints on Comcast’s customer support forum.

The outage appeared to begin at around 10:00 ET this morning and blocked access to customers relying on Comcast for their electronic mail.

Stop the Cap! reader Bob dropped us a line to let us know about the problem, and its impact appears to be near-universal for Comcast/Xfinity customers.

One reader who managed to get through on Comcast’s overwhelmed customer support phone line sent along this news:

“I contacted Comcast and got a recording that their email servers are having technical issues and their techs are aware of the problem and are working to resolve the issue. They did not give a time frame when the servers would be back on line.”

A Comcast employee reported:

Users of other web-based e-mail services like Gmail are unaffected.

Some Comcast Cable customers in Montgomery County, Maryland are due refunds ranging between $19.95-39.95 for “truck trip fees” that came as a complete surprise.

Since 2007, Comcast has been quietly charging customers for service repair calls that the cable company determines are the result of inside wiring defects, customer-instigated equipment failure, or “no-cause” visits that find no problems with the customer’s service.  But after 85 Comcast customers in the county complained about service call fees that were never disclosed to them, Comcast is agreeing to return the money to affected customers.

Montgomery County, Maryland

In an agreement with the Montgomery County Office of Consumer Protection, Comcast must disclose that service call fees may be applicable under certain circumstances.  Customers must be given the option of canceling the service call with no penalty.

Service call fees are not charged when the company finds trouble in its own equipment or wiring.  In many cases, service call fees come at the discretion of the service crew dispatched to customer homes.  Customer attitude towards the cable company employees can make a big difference in getting them to waive fees, even if the problem turns out to be the customer’s responsibility.

Comcast is not alone charging fees for customer-created problems.  Verizon charges up to $110 in Maryland; RCN — a competing cable company — charges up to $49.95.

Under the terms of the settlement, Comcast does not have to admit any wrongdoing.

Time Warner Cable has opened up access to HBO GO and Max GO to all customers who subscribe to the premium movie channels.  A brief beta test for Time Warner’s super-premium Signature Home customers concluded earlier this week and the service is now available to all.

Stop the Cap! tested the HBO GO service earlier today and can report the service is up and running for Time Warner customers.

HBO GO's current movie selection includes a number of older titles.

The most cumbersome part of both services is the authentication process.  Graceful it is not.  Customers have to start their journey at either the HBO or Cinemax “TV Everywhere” portal, select their cable operator, and then get prompted to authenticate their cable TV service.  Time Warner’s authentication process makes this especially confusing by notifying customers not to use their bill payment service account username and password.  Instead, customers are told to use login credentials for the cable company’s customer information and authentication portal — My Services.  It is easy to get confused which username and password to use.  If you do not have a “My Services” account, the registration process is even more tedious, because you have to wait for confirmation e-mail messages and hunt down a current cable bill, if you receive one in the mail at all.

Having registered for other TV Everywhere services from Time Warner Cable before, it was more than a little annoying going through the same process all over again for HBO.  HBO and Max GO also require the subscriber to choose a username and password on those sites as well, which means yet another account and password to remember.  After about 10 minutes of the irritating multi-step process, access was finally granted.

HBO Go currently has 230 movies available for instant viewing, a large number of which are hardly recent.  The 1953 version of Titanic, for example.  Really?  Oh, God with George Burns and John Denver, the 1979 please-edit-me snoozefest Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and all three Back to the Future movies seemed like a lot of dated filler material for a $15 a month premium movie channel.  Better offerings were found under the series, specials, and comedy categories which delivered a full library of a number of HBO productions, as well as current events shows like Real Time with Bill Maher.  (The latter only included a handful of episodes from the current season and some earlier editions.)

Our biggest trouble came when we tried playing from the menu of titles.  This is no Netflix.  We found picture quality often lacking, with plainly visible screen anomalies, and the stream was interrupted several times for buffering.  Either pent-up demand for HBO Go is causing Time Warner customers to pound the service during the business day, or HBO needs to beef up its server capacity. We did several speed tests and found our connection stable at 30/5Mbps, so this was not a Time Warner Cable broadband problem.

The best part about HBO and Cinemax GO is that it comes free with subscriptions to one or both channels.  We’d have a hard time justifying paying extra for the current online viewing experience.  It also remains ironic that Time Warner Cable executives continue to foster a desire to implement Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps and/or consumption billing while encouraging customers to consume more bandwidth with online video services such as these.

Time Warner Cable partner Bright House Networks is anticipated to launch both services themselves shortly.

Motorola cable modem

A California federal judge has thrown out most of a class action lawsuit that charged Comcast with marketing broadband service plans without disclosing extra fees for cable modem equipment.

The head plaintiff, Athanassios Diacakis, claimed Comcast sold Triple Play promotions over the phone and in the media without mentioning customers would also have to pay additional fees to lease a cable modem.  Diacakis accused the cable operator of violating California’s tough false-advertising laws by not fully disclosing all fees and surcharges while explaining the promotion.

U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong disagreed, however, dismissing most of the plaintiffs claims.  The judge didn’t declare Diacakis’ claims untrue, but ruled they were insufficiently documented to proceed to trial.

“The [amended complaint] fails to specify when or where Comcast advertisements were viewed, the content of those advertisements, or which of them in particular Plaintiff relied upon,” Armstrong wrote.

Diacakis is free to submit an amended complaint if he wishes to proceed with his class action case.

Comcast charges customers $7 a month to lease cable modem equipment, but invites customers to purchase their own cable modems to avoid rental fees.  Many customers do just that, choosing from several dozen approved models Comcast will provision for broadband customers.  The cost to purchase cable modem equipment ranges from $50-125 on average, depending on the cable modem selected.  It takes less than two years for purchased cable modems to effectively pay for themselves at Comcast’s current rental rate.

McDowell

Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell is questioning whether Comcast misled the federal agency when the cable company acquired wireless spectrum it now says it had no intention of ever using.

McDowell was reacting to Comcast chief financial officer Michael Angelakis, who admitted this week his company really never had any interest in competing in the wireless space.

“Were they purchased under false pretenses?” McDowell asked.

Comcast has since sold their acquired spectrum to Verizon Wireless, which in Angelakis’ view makes sense.

“We never really intended to build that spectrum, so therefore it’s a really good use of that spectrum,” Angelakis said.

That admission puts Comcast in a difficult position, because FCC rules mandate that companies acquiring scarce wireless spectrum make a good faith effort to use it.  In McDowell’s view, had Comcast never intended to put the frequencies to use, the FCC probably would have disallowed the acquisition.

Verizon Wireless also plans to pick up unused spectrum originally acquired by Time Warner Cable in a deal that would let both companies cross-promote cable and wireless products and avoid head-on competition.

Both Comcast and Time Warner Cable have warehoused unused spectrum for several years.  Neither company appeared serious about building competing wireless networks, and with the spectrum off the market, would-be competitors couldn’t launch service either.

Verizon agreed to pay $3.6 billion to acquire the cable industry-owned spectrum, which it intends to use to bolster its LTE 4G network.

The FCC is now seeking public input on whether it should approve the spectrum sale. The Justice Department is also considering its antitrust implications.