A new Star Wars movie is hitting theaters this month, but the most evil entity in the universe is still going to be Comcast. The megacorporation pissed off a ton of subscribers earlier this year by adding bandwidth data caps and charging for overages, meaning Netflix binge-watch sessions would have to be strategized rather than stumbled upon. And the people have spoken, as the FCC has been slammed with complaints from Comcast customers to the tune of over 13,000. I guess that’s less of a tune and more of a harmonized groaning.
In the scheme of things, I guess 13,000 isn’t an extraordinarily high number, given millions of people pay for Comcast’s service in the U.S. But then again, people are usually more inclined to complain to other people or on the Internet rather than writing and sending in an official complaint. And at least some of these anger-laden messages have legitimate points behind them, and they don’t resort to belligerence and obscenities.
In the first place, Comcast isn’t doing this because of any technical issues, and the goal is basically just milking people’s wallets for something they used to get for free, seemingly punishing cord-cutters for putting more focus on streaming and surfing than watching cable. And it’s not even clear if Comcast is being legally honest about the data they’re collecting and reporting back to customers, which is about as heinous as it gets.
According to Cut Cable Today, one complaint lays out just how shady Comcast’s information is.
They offer a ‘data usage meter’ online that simply tells you how much data you have used every month with no detailed statement as to the accuracy of it with no way to view where the data every month is being allocated, an example would be how much data is being used on Netflix or other streaming services. At the moment it simply says you’ve gone over without any real feedback to tell you exactly where the data was used and could potentially be used to fraud people into paying more for services as there is no way to dispute the data usage.
Other comments listed shared that opinion, with someone stating their own self-monitoring came up with far less total data used than the report issued by Comcast. Obviously the amount of data used is going to differ between someone with long commutes to long work shifts and an unemployed college student vegging out while watching Daredevil and Transparent for the second time. And if both of those customers are being charged for similar overages, then Comcast clearly isn’t doing the best job of measuring things.
I honestly can’t wait to see what happens with this, as enough people complaining about muddled charges should definitely get the FCC’s attention, so someone should be looking into what Comcast is doing behind the scenes. Besides swimming in your money, that is.
