Ooooooooh Comcast. If there’s one person whose service you probably shouldn’t terminate without cause and who you shouldn’t made idle threats against, it’s probably Dave Winer. You know, the guy who invented blogging? Yesterday, Winer posted at length with regards to a recent ordeal with Comcast. To paraphrase, Comcast identified Winer as a customer using excessive bandwidth. They attempted to call him one time at an old number that had been disconnected and were unable to reach him. They subsequently shut his internet service down. No additional attempts to contact him, no letters and no formal warnings of any kind. Terminated. Apparently Winer had violated a secret rule of some kind and when he finally did get in touch with Comcast to inquire as to why he lost connectivity… Let’s just say it didn’t go well:

I was quickly connected to a man who told me I had been deliberately disconnected because they had tried to call me and I didn’t pick up… Then he threatened me. He told me I was in the top 1/10th of 1 percent of all their Internet users and that if I didn’t immediately stop using so much bandwidth they would suspend my service for 12 months. I asked if I could get this in writing, he said no. I asked how much bandwidth would be acceptable, he wouldn’t say. I told him this wasn’t much of a threat if they weren’t willing to put it in writing, and I wasn’t intimidated. I also told him I was a blogger and would be writing it up. He didn’t care.

Fantastic. In related news, Comcast doesn’t just hate its customers, it hates their privacy as well. This morning Dave Zatz wrote about an interesting episode he recently had with Comcast. About a week ago Dave contacted Comcast in an attempt to recover his comcast.net credentials. Despite providing the Comcast representative with his account number, phone number and partial social security number, the result of a lengthy online chat was not a retrieval of the information he was looking for. Instead, the Comcast rep reset the account password of someone who had been at his address prior to his moving in, and gave Dave the new password. Again, fantastic. A word of warning to Comcast customers: Your service can be terminated at any time without warning or a proper explanation, and your private information is not secure. It might be time to explore other options…

[Via Zatz Not Funny!]

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