Comcast: Officially evil.

They've put a 250GB/month limit on their cable Internet service, thereby insuring that the United States will never have high speed Internet-provided video-on-demand services like countries like South Korea have (but then, their high-speed Internet is 10 times faster than what Comcast provides in the first place, for less money, so you get what you pay for err.... wha?!). Of course, for Comcast, that's a feature, not a flaw -- after all, they have their own "Comcast On Demand" product, why would they want to enable their Internet service to compete with themselves? Which just goes to show that allowing the same company to provide both television and Internet service (or both phone and Internet service) is nuts -- there is an inherent conflict of interest there which will forever make AT&T try to filter out Voice over IP on their Internet service, and which will forever make Comcast try to filter out Video-on-demand over IP on their Internet service. Which is why the United States is 15th in the world in high-speed Internet penetration, and why every single one of the nations competing against the United States in the technology sweepstakes has better Internet service than the United States.

So Comcast is evil. Okay. Fine and dandy. But here's the deal: they're *stupid* evil. They give you a broadband limit... then give you no way of knowing you're approaching it! Let me quote for you, exactly, the Comcast web site:

Q: How does Comcast help its customers track their usage so they can avoid exceeding the limit?

There are many online tools customers can download and use to measure their consumption. Customers can find such tools by simply doing a Web search - for example, a search for "bandwidth meter" will provide some options. Customers using multiple PCs should just be aware that they will need to measure and combine their total monthly usage in order to identify the data usage for their entire account.

Uhm... they don't, in other words. They measure your usage, but you're just going to have to fucking guess, they won't help you, they won't provide you with any tools for doing it, they're just gonna wave their hands and say "you're on your own, you stupid motherfucker" and sit back and measure your bandwidth but WILL NOT PUBLISH THAT INFO ON YOUR COMCAST.NET HOME PAGE WHEN YOU LOG IN TO TELL YOU HOW MUCH BANDWIDTH YOU ARE USING!

Furthermore, their advice is, to put it bluntly, not only evil, but evil stupid. I use an Apple Airport Extreme WIFI router. I use my Apple MacBook laptop computer as my main way of communicating with the Internet. My laptop computer goes to work with me every day and comes back with me every day. The network usage counters on my Macbook get reset every time I close the lid and put it to sleep, and besides, sometimes I come over to my desk and the big-screen monitor and plug in to wired connection, sometimes I'm operating wireless. I looked for a setting on my Airport for "how many bytes have passed through the broadband port", and it has *nothing*. In other words, the only way I could follow their "advice" would be to switch to a competitor. Oh wait, that's right, Comcast has a fucking *MONOPOLY* on high speed Internet service in my neighborhood, so I can't do that. I have to take Comcast "service" (a.k.a. what a stallion does to a mare). Some "free market", huh?

Anyhow, this isn't going to particularly affect me. I monitor my web site usage (gee, when I log into my web host's UI it tells me how much network usage my web host has used this month, and my web host has one -- *1* -- full-time employee, so it's not as if Comcast doesn't have the resources to do the same thing, they just don't *want* to), and even when I was slammed by traffic from an Andrew Sullivan drive-by combined with an idiot ripping off the title of one of my songs I used only 30GB of bandwidth for that month. Because I don't use any sort of video-on-demand (because Comcast's lame-ass network is just too fucking *slow* to use Netflix's video-on-demand system, the results stagger like Tipsy McDrunky chewing a pretzel in the Oval Office), it is quite unlikely that I'll ever approach the 250GB limit. It just rankles me that this pathetic "service" not only is 10 times slower than every other technologically advanced nation, but is so incompetent that they can't even put a single fucking number on your comcast.net home page -- even though every lame half-ass ISP run by one guy in their back room in the evenings after their day job is finished manages to do it. Yeah, what "service", Compost. You can fuck off and die as far as I'm concerned, if you did not have your goddamned federally-imposed MONOPOLY in my neighborhood I'd go with a real ISP and tell ya to stick your lame-ass "high speed" ("high" as in "smokes marijuana", maybe, it sure the fuck ain't "high speed" by any world-class definition of the world) Internet up your collective fucking asses.

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin