Comcast Policy Change Increasing Rates for Seattle Customers

My open letter to the Seattle City Council about Comcast's 50% price hikes on broadband Internet access:

Dear Councilmembers,

In the fall of 2010, I wrote of my concerns with Comcast's billing policies in TechFlash. At the time, I expressed frustration that in order to get the market rate with Comcast, I had to call every six months, threaten to cancel and only then would they offer the market price for broadband.

This week, I learned that Comcast has discontinued its $42 rate for 15 mbps broadband. They now insist on charging me $62.95 for this same level of service. They tell me that I can receive a much lower performance of 3 mbps at the old $42 rate if I wish. Or, they tell me that I can bundle services such as cable television to receive the best pricing.

Comcast is a monopoly cable technology broadband provider to my home ... so it's quite frustrating to have to call the company every six months for the market rate and now to have a 50% price increase in what I've been paying for many years.

Qwest/CenturyLink can only provide 7 mbps DSL to my home. I plan to sign up with them and terminate my Comcast account. However, the 7mbps performance does not allow for the same level of performance that cable provides e.g. higher quality streaming video, uploading large files, etc.

I know that there are a myriad of federal regulations governing what the council can do to control rates and private companies such as Comcast and Qwest. However, I do believe the council has failed Seattle customers in not flexing its muscle more aggressively in our long term agreements that grant these companies rights of way to our neighborhoods and homes. And, now, I and many other Seattleites are forced to pay more or get less.

I thought it would be useful to give you an update on one Seattle resident's experience - which I expect is about to become more commonplace for other customers.

I hope that you will reconsider more aggressively regulating these companies. Affordable broadband internet access is a keystone of Seattle's future.

Sincerely,

Jeff Reifman

Another Lesson for Corporations to Respond to Their Twitter Accounts

Update: In addition to BoingBoing, the story has made it to NBC Miami, Business Insider and two popular frequent flyer forums (Milepoint, FlyerTalk). Two Seattle radio stations also called for interviews.

On Tuesday at 2:40 pm, I tweeted about this gaffe by an Alaska Airlines stewardess threatening passengers that they wouldn't be allowed off the plane if a missing digiplayer wasn't returned:

 

Alaska didn't respond to the tweet. About 18 hours later, BoingBoing published the post for its hundreds of thousands of readers. Alaska still hasn't responded.

 

How to embed an audio mp3 player on your blog or a web page

For this post on Microsoft's hypocritical tax dodging, I used the Yahoo! Media Player which does a nice job of providing play icons for all your mp3 links.

 

Basically, you just add html like <script type="text/javascript" src="http://webplayer.yahooapis.com/player.js"></script> to your page, then any links to mp3 files that you include are automatically given play icons so that they play in place.

When it comes to education in Washington State, Microsoft is the problem...

Here's my penultimate summary of how Governor Gregoire, the legislature, the courts and The Seattle Times have enabled Microsoft's hypocritical stance on education and tax dodging to damage our budget and our educational system ... new updates including audio clip of Microsoft's Brad Smith acknowledging the Nevada tax dodge:

Full story at Microsoft Tax Dodge