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Comcast Tries To Polish Image

Cable giant plays nice on many fronts to avoid FCC penalties

By Martin H. Bosworth
ConsumerAffairs.com

July 24, 2008

It's also been served with a lawsuit from a customer over the content blocking, the outcome of which is on hold pending the FCC's final ruling in its investigation. If that weren't enough, Comcast incurred another black eye by hiring people to fill up seats at an FCC hearing in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the issue, blocking critics of the company from getting in.

It's no wonder that the company has been doing its best to polish its tarnished public image on as many fronts as possible, even in unexpected ways. The cable company recently found itself at odds with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo over blocking access to Usenet newsgroups in order to stop the spread of child pornography.

Cuomo, who had already secured agreements with other major Internet service providers (ISPs) to block or curtail Usenet newsgroups, has threatened Comcast with legal action if it does not comply with his code of conduct. "Time is of the essence here, as every day without these measures is another day that this illegal material is sluicing through the Internet," Cuomo said.

Cuomo's move has been criticized by free speech activists as denying innocent Web users access to a valuable resource which contains information on a wide variety of topics. Comcast has supported a nationwide industry agreement to curtail the spread of child pornography, but has not signed on to Cuomo's agreement, which his office crafted separately.

Comcast has also announced deals with Vonage and BitTorrent to develop "platform-agnostic" network management systems that can enable Internet traffic to flow freely without having to block or delay any user access. The company also announced a partnership with Rock The Vote to use its networks and Internet services to increase turnout and user registration for young voters.

Not off the hook

Supporters of net neutrality and broadband development want stronger action from Comcast on the issue of maintaining equal access to Internet content. Media watchdog group Free Press sent a filing to the FCC urging it to refute Comcast's justifications for blocking access to content. Free Press general counsel Marvin Ammori said that Comcast "should not only have the strict burden of demonstrating why it would engage in discrimination, it should also have the strict burden of demonstrating why it must violate Internet standards, and threaten to balkanize the Internet with non-standard practices."

"Cable companies share the 'last mile' of network access to the customer's home, which can lead to more network congestion and traffic," Ammori told ConsumerAffairs.com. "They should be able to manage it better, and they should be upgrading their networks to improve capacity."

Comcast, for its part, continues to claim that its network management techniques are "reasonable." "We have 9 billion unmanaged P2P flows on our network," said Comcast spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice. "When our P2P sessions meet or exceed a threshold, heavy usage can cause problems for other customers."

"We have increased our customers' speeds, and have pledged to increase our networks' capacity," Fitzmaurice told ConsumerAffairs.com. "The same pipe carries many signals...there are lots of things to do. Network speed isn't the same thing as network capacity," Fitzmaurice said. "You can't just build your way out of the problem."

Ammori challenged those arguments in the FCC filing. "Comcast appears to have increased the speed of its modems -- but not addressed its problem of insufficient shared neighborhood capacity," Ammori said. "Comcast’s response is analogous to a village trying to solve a problem of its well running dry by replacing each family’s bucket with one three times as large, rather than digging more wells. The larger buckets would not solve the water problem; they would worsen it."

Ammori also claimed that Comcast's practice of triggering network management at a certain threshold for technologies like file-sharing means that they can block particular content any time, rather than just at times of peak usage.

The price of fame

Even without the continuing dogfights over net neutrality and broadband buildouts, Comcast's primary struggle is its own success. The company has experienced rapid growth in recent years and has aggressively pursued new customers with offers of "triple play" Internet, phone, and cable service. But its continual expansion has come at a cost of frustrated customers who experience problems such as service cutoffs for using too much bandwith, even if they have no idea how much they've used.

Customers regularly write in to ConsumerAffairs.com to express their frustration with Comcast's customer relations, performance, and networks. Reader "Spencer" from Chicago, Illinois missed two days of work waiting for a technician to fix his service. "Yet another horrible experience with Comcast," he wrote. "To think I pay you guys monthly for this type of service. I feel that maybe I should take your equipment outside and slam it on the porch and order from a company who cares about their consumers."

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