Comcast Followup

Our Internet (and cable, but meh) fixed itself around 4pm. It seems a bit faster, which is nice. I was downloading Ubuntu updates at around 650KB/s. I don’t know if it was just because less people were using the network as they hadn’t realized it was back up, or if there was wear and tear that was fixed along with the damage. I’m looking forward to Google’s ISP throttling detection tools. Given enough users complaining who are suddenly easily able to point to results of their own experiences, Comcast may be able to be nagged into investing some of its hefty profits into expanding its network capacity instead of just sitting on its user base. Looks like they’ve been having these insane (compare to BP and Exxon Mobil for perspective) profit margins for a while. Nope… I don’t think they’re willing to use their profit to improve their services. Given the presumably significant investment they’ve made into Sandvine hardware to molest BitTorrent seeding and other traffic, I doubt even with their terrifyingly healthy profit margins they’d be willing to stop unless required by regulation. I think the whole reason they’re doing this is so they can continue to oversell their network capacity by forcibly cutting down bandwidth use. Part of me wonders just how expensive it would be to upgrade their bandwidth abilities, and if it would really be that much more expensive than installing Sandvine stuff all over the place.

I’m also kinda creeped out because someone working for Comcast found and commented on my previous post less than three hours after it was posted, and assured me that Comcast cares. I have mixed feelings about this. It’s creepy to some extent, but I understand that although the corporation Comcast is acting like a jackass, there are people working for it who really care. It’s to this corporation, not these people, that I extend my anger.