Comcast, Changing the Rules of Bandwidth

Comcast, a cable company with around 4,900,000 customers within the United States, is the top choice for a lot of people in the country. Not everyone qualifies for DSL for one reason or another, and dial-up is just plain slow. Several people have been receiving "the letter" lately, which is a warning of suspension or termination due to downloading too much in a given time period. Comcast used to advertise their cable internet as "unlimited", but it seems they've re-written the rule right under the noses of their customers without even letting them know.

If that isn't enough, the information given out by comcast regarding this issue is very limited; they refuse to tell us what the bandwidth limit is, they refuse to tell us why they implemented this without telling us. For all you big downloaders out there; you won't know when you've hit the cap. Comcast is pretty much drawing a line in the street with sidewalk chalk and saying "If you cross this, you can find yourself without service for 12 months, or even permanently." I called comcast regarding this issue and got the cold shoulder. How can Comcast constantly boost the speed of our internet, encouraging us to download more, but then cap our internet without even telling us what it is? That's like putting a buffet in front of someone for free and saying "If you eat too much, we're doing to kick you in the kidney".

Comcast does indeed have the right to restrict or monitor what users do with their service, but it isn't really fair when such revisions to policies fall on deaf ears. It would be like driving down a street with a 60mph speed limit street sign, but then being pulled over and given a ticket because they changed the speed limit on that street and never changed it on the sign. In a way, it's very deceitful, and you would figure a company such as comcast could afford to send an e-mail, or a letter, or even a phone call to it's subscribers saying; "Dear Comcast Customer, due to unusually high bandwidth usage we've decided to place a limit on the usage of comcast high-speed internet. The amount of allowed bandwidth per month is blah blah blah", but it appears they may be too lazy, or maybe they're just too busy counting the subscription fees to let their users know of a drastic revision to the policy.

The letter pretty much states "You've had some heavy bandwidth this month, back off or we're going to own you." But if you receive the letter and call in to see how much you used the past month, they refuse to tell you. One of the big perks to cable internet over DSL is it's faster, but DSL providers don't put an invisible wall on their service, nor do they charge nearly as much as Comcast does. Paying 50$ a month when most DSL providers are getting as low as 20, you'd figure you'd at least get the service to know when you step in the red zone, but it seems with comcast the over-priced service doesn't include the right to know when you're breaking a rule.