Sure They Are…

This isn’t really a follow-up to yesterday’s post, or to the post on July 23, which detailed the confessions of a former Comcast representative, confirming that the company’s incentive system makes all of their retention employees fight like starving dogs to prevent anyone from disconnecting. It’s really more about a story posted on The Verge website about the sales culture at Comcast, and how this is impacting the company’s entire customer service system. But one of the issues that keeps being raised when anyone attempts to create an alternative service and fight traditional broadband providers like Comcast is that these companies are too powerful, too entrenched, too difficult to push out of any market segments they might want – too big, in fact, to fail. After reading this piece in The Verge, I’m skeptical…

You can read the original story here if you’d like; it’s an informative and well-written piece that reveals a dreary – but hardly unexpected – reality. People have been complaining for some time now that it isn’t possible to interact with anybody at Comcast without having to fend off a variety of sales offers. You would expect that kind of thing from customer service personnel, since they’re usually the ones who would sign you up for new services anyway. It’s a bad idea will billing personnel, since you’d really rather be sure that they are concentrating on getting your bill ironed out, but most people will just put up with it. After all, offering someone a new service at a discounted rate might actually be a way to resolve certain billing issues…

It’s a really bad idea to have your technical support people doing this, however. If someone has called because of a problem with their service they’re probably already in a disgruntled frame of mind, thinking dark thoughts about your company and trying to figure out if there is anyone else who can provide the same services. It’s a bad time to start trying to sell them on something else that could go wrong without warning; in fact, anything that requires additional time to complete the call and resolve the problem is a mistake under those conditions. But what is really disturbing about this story is that the company doesn’t see things that way. Apparently, they are trying to get more and more sales performance out of every employee who deals directly with the public – and firing anyone who can’t meet a sales quota…

Personally, I don’t agree with such a strategy even for sales personnel, let alone customer service people who are supposed to be helping customers and trying to make them feel better about the company. It can be argued that the sales people signed up for these jobs knowing that’s what they would be asked to do, and even that most sales professionals like things that way. People who like performance targets with bonuses for selling things really do tend to migrate into that field. Technical support personnel, on the other hand, tend to have qualifications in electronics and/or computer programming, and did not spend the time and effort to obtain those chops in order to become salespeople. If you insist on working them this way a lot of them are going to quit right along with billing and customer service personnel who don’t enjoy this role – and the technicians aren’t nearly as easy to replace…

So if this story is correct, Comcast is driving away not only their most technologically oriented customers (e.g. the ones most likely to pay for expensive new services) but also their best technical, billing and customer service personnel, all while blithely assuming that they are too big to fail and some little upstart like Google Fiber can’t possibly be a threat. I could suggest that they might want to ask some of the former Google competitors, most of whom are now long out of business, how that’s working out for them, but it seems as though no one at Comcast is listening, any more than Frontier Communications is…

Too big to fail, eh? Sure they are…

You Should Get Out More

One of the common errors I keep ranting about is companies – and particularly senior management teams of companies – who have no idea who their customers, employees, suppliers or other stakeholders actually are. This is what gets you silly statements about employees wanting the “prestige” of a promotion that offers more work and longer hours for effectively less money (exempt jobs that pay less than hourly jobs when you include overtime), and tone-deaf comments about people who should just buy what you’re offering and quit asking for what they want. Most recently, it would appear, it has resulted in the CEO of Frontier Communications stating that her customers in Portland are too dumb to understand why they don’t need a broadband speed 80 to 160 times faster than anything they have now…

I don’t know if you’ve been following the development of Google Fiber, but you can read more about it here if you want to. In many parts of the country, including Central Michigan, the prevailing Internet speeds can run as low as 1bps or lower, and even advanced systems rarely exceed 30 mbps. With a limited number of companies competing in each market there isn’t usually any need to upgrade either the systems or the service provided; after all, if your competition is offering a top speed of 10mbps and you can offer 12, you’re 20% faster. There are satellite-based systems that can do better, but most of them are relatively expensive, and you are still limited in where you can get them…

Google is building its own fiber-optic delivery systems and offering to provide speeds in excess of 1,000 mbps in an increasing number of medium-sized cities around the US, which does sound like it would be an advantage over a system operating at 1% or less of that speed. Moreover, Frontier Communications currently has a monopoly on broadband service in Portland, and has therefore never had to worry about the competition in terms of download speed or anything else. But as much as it sounds like Frontier is trying to confuse the issue while running scared, they do have a point: Currently, there is no service or system in general use that requires a speed of 1,000 mbps. In fact, there’s some question as to whether anyone has hardware that could make use of such access even if it existed. And it is also true that Frontier is offering basic service at less than half of what Google Fiber will cost. Unfortunately, both of those contentions are rather missing the point…

First of all, consider that anyone whose broadband use is limited to small and occasional downloads isn’t going to care about a higher access speed in the first place, and they’re certainly not going to go to the trouble of changing providers. But the key demographic for Google Fiber is people who do make use of larger downloads or streaming audio/visual services, and not only do they want the fastest access speeds possible, but they’re not going to take kindly to being told that they are too stupid or too technologically inept to understand how fast Internet connections work. In fact, a lot of power users will probably change providers just because they’re been insulted in such a tone-deaf fashion – but that isn’t even the worst of it…

While it might be true that no one could possibly make full use of a 1,000 mbps Internet connection as of today, I won’t take any bets about that being true for long – especially if such download speeds become widely available. Somebody will find something to do with them, and technology-oriented users are likely to want that capability even before they find out what such new services can do. If technology has taught us anything in the last three decades, it’s that the curve is rising faster than we can keep up with it, and the technology that seemed like science fiction only a few years ago will be available in every big-box retailer by Black Friday if not before…

All of these things would be obvious to anyone who was paying attention to the customer demographics involved, the development of the Technology sector over the past few years, the rise of services like Dish Network, Netflix and Hulu, the appearance of the “Cord-Cutter” movement, or the increasing use of home WIFI systems. In fact, all of this should be obvious to anyone who is actually in touch with the world around them, and not just sitting in their Executive Suite and listening to an echo chamber of yes-people telling them what they wanted to hear. If that is the case, I can only suggest that Ms. Wilderotter of Frontier Communications needs to get out more…

The Ethics of Boycotts

There was an opinion piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer this past week urging all male readers to boycott the upcoming season of the Lingerie Football League because it promotes violence against women (and ultimately rape), even when the watchers are fully committed to the idea of gender equality and disgusted by crimes of this type. The theory goes that since this type of violent crime is the ultimate expression of lack of respect for another person, any behavior (however trivial) that supports or fosters disrespect for anyone is simply a point on that spectrum, and once you have taken the first step all of the subsequent ones become easier. Like all “slippery slope” arguments, this one suffers from several logical fallacies, but it does raise several important points about boycotts of business operations. So let’s consider the ethics of the situation…

First off, I want to make it very clear that I have no information regarding the influence television events like the Lingerie Football League games have on human behavior; I’m not a specialist on gender equality issues, and while I am a behavioral scientist I only study behaviors relating to business. That said, there exists in any slippery slope argument the difficulty that the progression the person making the argument sees may not appear that way to others viewing the same facts – and that what appears to be an escalation to one person may not be. Certainly, without a great deal of highly consistent data to support the contention that exposure to images of women playing football in their underwear leads to an elevated rate of violence against women, we can’t accept any one individual’s opinion that this is so, no matter how expert that individual might be. If we wish to be scientific – or even merely professional – we cannot justify such a boycott simply on the grounds of outrage. But can we support it on purely commercial grounds?

Suppose for a moment that sponsorship of this programming generates additional sales for the companies paying for advertising time on those channels – which we can safely assume, considering that the “league” is continuing operations for another year and companies are still buying the ad time. Let us further suppose that those sales contribute wealth to the stockholders of those companies, allow for the creation of new jobs and raises for those currently employed, and increase the tax base of the communities where those companies (and their employees) live. We have no information to suggest that the people producing the Lingerie Football content are also prospering, but it is reasonable to assume that they must also be paying their employees, suppliers and stockholders (if they are publicly held), as well as giving work and media exposure to the young women who constitute their “players.” Can we assume, then, that any of these actions are unethical?

At the same time, it does not seem unreasonable that some elements of our society might confuse the members of the Lingerie Football league with real female athletes, or that such an association might make it more difficult for real women’s sports (those conducted for the purpose of athletic competition, rather than mere titillation) to gain and hold credibility in a media-dominated era. It is possible, in fact, that viewing such programming really will contribute to unrealistic views of women, disrespect for female athletes and/or women who are willing to perform on national television in their underwear, or even the gradual deterioration of behavior suggested by the opinion columnist in the Plain Dealer. However, I feel we are justified in questioning whether the Lingerie Football programs are the only source of such influences, or whether the vague possibility of bad behavior at some unspecified future point outweighs the positive benefit of jobs, standards of living, profits, and other forms of economic prosperity in the present…

Or, to put it directly, do we as viewers have an ethical responsibility to boycott programming that might, possibly, have bad social consequences at some point in the future? Do we, as citizens of a free-market economy, have an ethical responsibility to allow any business enterprise that does not present any clear and present danger to anything to conduct business in compliance with the laws of our country? Or do we, as members of a society possessing both the right to free expression and the right to the pursuit of happiness, have an ethical responsibility to let people make up their own minds about what they want to watch, what they want to believe, and what they choose to do as a consequence of those behaviors and beliefs, even if we know that a non-zero number of them will choose to do things we find repugnant as a consequence?

It’s worth thinking about…

Vote Early, Vote Often

Every year around this time, The Consumerist website holds a mock competition, based on the college basketball tournaments, which are allegedly to determine the identity of the “Worst Company in America.” I’m not sure how they came up with the idea, although I suspect that since what they deal with is consumer complaints they probably just got to thinking about which company was the absolute worst one day and one thing led to another. But regardless of its origin, the contest is a series of pairings where anyone who wants to can vote for one company over another; the one getting the most votes advances (or should that be “descends”?) to the next level, until only the worst contender remains. You could see it as sort of a grass-roots opposite of the real consumers’ choice awards that come out every year, except that most companies do not take it all that seriously. After all, it’s an Internet slam-fest, intended to draw exaggeration for humorous effect, not a scientific study. It appears, however, that the contest’s defending champion doesn’t see it that way…

According to a note that popped up on the site this evening, Comcast has been urging all of its personnel to go onto the Consumerist site and vote for the other company in their bracket - that is, to make sure that the other firm gets the honors for worst company instead of Comcast. Needless to say, perhaps, this initiative was leaked to the Consumerist people within hours (possibly within minutes) of being sent out, and the website is now gleefully displaying communication, complete with authentic Comcast logos and graphics. Consequently, Comcast is now leading the voting by somewhere over four to one, and appears to be a shoe-in to take the title again this year. What, exactly, the company expected to gain through these actions remains a mystery, to me as well as to the people at The Consumerist…

Now, whether Comcast is actually the worst company in their industry, let alone all of the sectors of American commerce, remains open for debate. I’ve spent some time in that industry, and unless things have changed dramatically there are other companies just as widely reviled as Comcast, some of which actually deserve it. The thing is, every company in the cable business has legions of disgruntled fans, any of whom would probably swear under oath that their particular cable provider is the worst of its kind. What makes the company’s appearance in this year’s contest truly spectacular is that they’ve addressed the situation, not by apologizing to their legions of detractors or by reaching out to The Consumerist people and pledging to do better in the next year, but by rallying their personnel in an effort to smear the “competition” and make themselves look better. Well, that and the fact that they did so using media platforms that even a small child could have told them would be intercepted by the people at The Consumerist and held up to mockery and ridicule by millions of scruffy bloggers just like me…

I suppose it’s possible that the whole thing is a self-referential joke by Comcast at their own expense that I’m just too stodgy to appreciate; it’s probably also possible that this get-out-the-vote effort is a hoax, put onto the Internet specifically for the purpose of making Comcast look like idiots. But I’ve seen enough ill-considered management maneuvers over the years that I can easily believe that this one is real, and that all that is happening is that someone at Comcast doesn’t quite grasp the whole “Internet community” concept yet. Whereas even a few years ago no one would have noticed these sorts of shenanigans, today an attempt to influence an Internet fan vote will be interpreted as cheating (and as an insult to their intelligence) by most of the denizens of the Web, all of whom will cheerfully join in on the Comcast-bashing and try to make the company look even worse…

I’m not sure if Comcast can improve their service enough to be excluded from next year’s list, or if they’re doomed to be “honored” as the Worst Company in America for years to come. But I do know that if they really want off of that list, they’re going to have to try harder than this…

Have a Heart

It has been almost 17 years since I left the cable television industry, during which time the technology involved has changed beyond recognition not just once, but several times. In the early 1990s broadband service was still under development, but we knew it was coming; 18-inch microwave dishes and the satellites to supply them were being tested by Hughes Satellite Systems and cable companies were upgrading their systems to fiber optic equipment that would allow them to carry high-speed Internet connections in addition to a vastly increased number of cable channels. The company I worked for used 18Mhz microwave signals to provide service to large apartment complexes within line-of-sight from our download site, and then distributed the signal to any residents who wanted to pay for it using an encrypted signal and decoder boxes – the much-maligned “cable boxes” to limit unauthorized use. Of course, these methods were always of limited utility; some people managed to steal the signal anyway, and a surprising number of people also tried to steal the cable boxes…

The thing to keep in mind here is that despite what most cable customers (and apparently nearly all thieves) at the time believed, most cable decoder systems weren’t actually decryption computers stuffed full of secret codes that would resolve a collection of distorted snow into a clear picture. What they were was an electronic switchbox that would descramble those signals when instructed to do so by the master computer in our control room – no control instructions, no pictures; not even broadcast channels would be visible. To get these instructions, the box needed to be authorized to do so by a member of the company with the correct security codes – quite frequently me, as it happens. Stealing the box, hooking it up in a location not authorized to have it, or worse still hooking it up to another cable system would be completely useless – but that didn’t keep people from trying it several hundred times each year…

Now, in fairness, a lot of those people weren’t actually trying to steal our decoder boxes; a lot of them just absent-mindedly packed up the boxes when they moved, and didn’t bother to return them until I sent their account to collections for the amount of the cable box (and generally their unpaid bills). It’s just that there would have been no way for me to tell the difference from our offices, and no contractual reason for me to care. But when there were extenuating circumstances I would always do my best to help. Customers who had been robbed, for example, I would usually excuse (assuming they could produce an actual police report about the theft), and I let the man who was bringing his cable box in to the office to return it when his car was hit by a drunk driver and destroyed off the hook, although it helped that he brought in the police report, insurance report, and the remains of the decoder box with him. Thus I was very disappointed in the cable company in this story from the Morning Call site , who appear to have completely dropped the ball following a tragic fire and gas explosion…

In this particular case, RCN Cable was attempting to charge a family that had just lost their home in a gas explosion for their missing cable boxes. The customers were offering to document the loss, and the event had been all over the local news anyway, but the zombies running the call center wouldn’t budge off of regular procedures or let them speak to anyone of higher authority. In this case I don’t have to extrapolate (or guess) what the right thing to do was; I’ve done that exact job, and I know what the right thing to do was: document everything, let the accountants write off the equipment loss on the corporation’s tax returns, and let the customer off the hook with our blessings and best wishes. Instead we’ve all be treated to a teachable moment about how the ability to think – or at least escalate a call to someone who can – is more important than blind adherence to general rules. Unless you want your company slammed on the local television news, yelled at by the mayor of your city, and mocked by millions of scruffy bloggers all over the Internet, have a heart – or at least have someone on call who has one during business hours…

The Horror, The Horror…

I was very amused to read the story online this week about the new Oprah Winfrey network, and the minor storm of protest brewing about it because a number of cable systems are planning to carry it as part of their premium package – which is to say, viewers who want it will have to pay more than the cost of their basic cable package. It’s always hard to say how many of the people spewing about this sort of topic are really that upset, and how many are trolls having a good time at the expense of people who don’t really understand economics or cable television operations, but as I was enjoying a quiet chuckle over the issue it occurred to me that MOST people don’t really understand how cable works, and we should probably take a closer look…

To begin with, it’s important to understand that most cable systems have a hardware limit on the number of channels they can bring you, whether it’s the amount of copper wire they have buried under your street or the amount of fiber-optic cable they’ve been able to install or the bandwidth their satellites can beam down to your DSS dish. Back when your only cable option was the local cable company this didn’t matter so much, but most major population centers now offer at least two or three options for getting your television content, and that means that every channel a given provider is offering is a selling point that they can use to attract your business. On the other hand, your cable provider also has to pay a certain amount (it ranges anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars) for each customer who receives each channel. These factors combine to make the provider want to bring you any channels that they think might make you more likely to engage their services, but want to avoid any channels that most people wouldn’t care about…

Tiers of cable channels work like any other bundled product – you are offered a group of products for a single price, partly because the product you actually want is going to vary a bit from one customer to the next, and partly because that way you’re paying extra for products you don’t really want and will never use in order to get the one you do want. So putting the new OWN network on a higher tier means that, in theory, the people who want it can pay a small additional monthly charge to get it, while the people who don’t want it do not have to pay a higher cable bill. Cable companies often claim that they can’t add or delete a single channel from your cable service because of hardware limitations – and a decade or so ago this was frequently true – but these days it’s more often because the effort of keeping track of millions of individual cable bills, all for differing amounts, would require a lot more effort (and drive their costs up)…

In the case of the OWN network, the channel they’re taking over in most cable systems was previously held by the Discovery Health Network, which was generally a premium service already. The real problem would appear to be that Oprah’s show was broadcast over the air for twenty-five years, and even people who have been paying to receive it (on basic cable) seem to be convinced that it was free the whole time. Asking that your cable company provide you with something they have to pay for at no additional cost to you is just as asinine as asking any other business to give you products or services for free, and even asking that they create a new tier (the “Oprah” tier, presumably) which will drive up their expenses and raise everyone’s cable bill isn’t much better. The bottom line is that your cable company is in business to make a living, and if you want to watch the OWN network programming you should expect to pay for it…

Although I can’t help adding that, to paraphrase the late Sam Kinnison, if this is the biggest issue that is disturbing you, you, my friend, do not yet have a problem…

Cable Story, Continued

Yesterday I began telling you the old story of the time our cable company saw its West Los Angeles system go down on Super Bowl Sunday, and the Senior Officer Present was me – because everyone senior to me was playing ostrich that day. After getting Trevor and his crew on the way out to deal with the system I cleared out our voicemail, got the incoming phone lines working, and started fielding the constant streams of irate calls that were still coming in at a rate of about 2 a minute. There were a lot of people out there looking at static, and all of them wanted somebody to yell at. At times like this, there’s really no substitute for a live voice on the line telling them that our best people are on their way to fix the system right now, and we will keep you posted…

About an hour later I got a call from Trevor, who had reached the microwave transmitter for our West L.A. system and discovered the source of the problem. As it turned out, someone had cut through the cable linking the transmitter with the Earth Station that collected the signals from the satellites in orbit and converted them back into television with a fire axe. They could tell it was a fire axe because the guy who did it was still wandering around on the roof of the building that housed the transmitter and the Earth Station control room (it was another apartment building, to which we also provided cable service) waving the axe around…

When the police were summoned and had managed to subdue the axe man, they asked him why he had cut the cable. The man replied that he was concerned that the signals from our satellite dishes would attract Flying Saucers, which would then land on top of the building and collapse the roof, killing him. If that sounds insane to you, you should know that the man with the axe didn’t even live in the building; he claimed his ex-girlfriend did, and he was worried about being crushed by UFOs at some future point after they reconciled, but no one was ever able to identify who his girlfriend was supposed to be. The policemen on the scene conceded that he might have been making that part up…

Back at headquarters, my life had dramatically improved on receiving this call. The people calling to demand updates on their cable were generally mollified when I told them that the system would be back up in time for the game, and when I explained about the lunatic with the axe a lot of them actually went from angry to sympathetic. In the cases where anyone was still peeved, I generally told them “Look, we can build you a system that’s proof against weather, equipment failure, sunspots, human error, even power outages – but there’s only so much anyone can do about idiots with axes.” Even our most irate customers generally had to agree that this was the case…

When Monday morning arrived I explained the situation to the management team of the company, and told them what I’d done about it. I couldn’t tell if the senior managers wanted to fire me for promising Trevor the $400 an hour (it wound up being about 2.5 hours total, counting travel time – the broken cable wasn’t that hard to replace), or commend me for not only handling the situation but getting a private contracting firm to show up on a Sunday. In the event, no one said anything to me about the events of the day before; they just told me to go ahead and pay the bill that had arrived for this emergency service, and went off to do whatever it was they did on weekdays…

I know; it’s not a situation that any of you are ever likely to encounter. Except for one key point: when you leave someone in charge of the company (especially when you leave them hanging like that) you are creating a policy maker, whether you want to or not. Unless you want the junior member of your management team to make decisions that could cost you a lot more than you really want to pay, answer your freaking telephone!

Flying Saucers and Basic Cable

I saw a story online yesterday about one of the cable television companies that provides service to New York City losing their feed during the Super Bowl, leaving all of their residents without any way of watching the game. You can read about the details here if you want to, but the story reminded me of one of the more outrageous stories to come out of my time in cable television…

It was Super Bowl Sunday 1993, and I was working for a small private cable company in Los Angeles, California. This entire industry is extinct in the United States, now; unable to compete with broadband and DSS systems, most of the companies that did this have gone under or evolved into something else. But back in the early 1990s there were a number of companies using alternative technologies to compete with the entrenched cable companies, and I worked for one that provided service to several large residential properties using a microwave system. On the morning of the Super Bowl 1993 I had gone to the warehouse store to pick up some munchies for the party later, when my pager went off about fifty times in less than ten minutes. A quick call to our answering service confirmed that our entire West Los Angeles system was down…

Now, you have to remember that I was not the president of the cable company; I wasn’t even one of the senior managers. In fact, whether or not I actually classed as a manager at all depended on whether the people who ran the outfit wanted me to be in charge of something – but that’s a rant for another day. For the purposes of this story, all that matters is that there were four people senior to me in the company, and not one of them was answering their home phone OR responding to their pager (this was before cell phones). Like it or not, I had just inherited the worst technical problem in the history of our company; a situation so bad that it really couldn’t be described without using the word “cluster” somewhere…

I aborted the warehouse run and scrambled for my office, where I discovered that at least 300 of our customers had called demanding to know when their cable would be repaired, at which point our voice mail had overloaded and crashed as well. I was also unable to reach any of the managers senior to me OR any of our in-house repair people, all of whom should have had their pagers on, Sunday or not. With no other choice, I called the contractor we used for heavy construction projects and repairs our in-house people didn’t have time (or the expertise) to do. Fortunately, I had their Chief Engineer’s home number…

Trevor (that was his name) didn’t really want to roll out from Diamond Bar to West L.A. on Super Bowl Sunday, and grumbled that he was going to bill us double time and a half ($100 an hour instead of the usual $40 – remember, this was 16 years ago) for the call. I reminded him that all of the people who outranked me were incommunicado, and asked if he knew what that made me. “No; what does that make you?” he replied.

“Senior Officer Present,” I told him. “The only people who can countermand this order are refusing to obey their own regulations, and have stated in writing that under these conditions I am in charge of the cable company. And I don’t care WHAT you bill us for as long as the West L.A. system is up before game time! Any questions?”

You could hear Trevor grinning. “No sir,” he replied. “We’ll get right out there, and I’ll call you when we’re onsite. All four of us, that is.”

That meant it would be $400 an hour instead of the usual $40 – and there was nothing my superiors could do about it. They could fire me (and might) but they’d lose any legal efforts to avoid paying him (that whole “customary practice” thing). I really liked working with Trevor and his boys. And what they found when they got on site convinced me that I’d made the right call…

But that’s going to have to wait for tomorrow’s post…

The Ethics of Bandwidth

Here’s an interesting question that came up last week about cable modems and Internet access – and exactly what each customer is entitled to under a supposedly “unlimited” service agreement. According to the news reports, Comcast Cable has decided to cap their customers’ Internet downloads at 250 gigabytes per residential account per month, calling this amount excessive for a residential customer. A quick check will tell you that this will come out to over 50 million average emails, or 124 full-length movies downloaded at standard resolution, which does seem a bit excessive for only 30 days, but the real issue here is what “unlimited” actually means in practice – and if the company has an ethical responsibility to the rest of its customers to protect them from having their cable modems jammed by a single user who is downloading 4 or five movies a day (or the equivalent). It seemed like it might be worth a closer look…

The first question that comes to mind is what a customer can reasonably expect from a service that is described (and sold) as being effectively infinite. In practice, most “unlimited” service contracts for whatever form of media delivery (cell phone, text message, Internet, etc.) have only meant that the customer does not pay any additional fees for service, regardless of the actual volume of data they use. These service plans would more correctly be called “flat rate” services, and in fact are usually called just that in the contracts, along with a deeply-buried clause about cancellation for excessive use. Thus, the debate on deceptive marketing and misleading advertising goes back to before the customer ever signs up. It is quite possible that some of the people who saw the term “unlimited” in print ads or on television actually had an expectation of unlimited usage, and failed to read the fine print that said otherwise…

In most states, however, not reading (or claiming that you didn’t read) a contract will not protect you from the consequences of signing it. California, in particular, is sometimes called the “Anybody can contract to do anything” State, because you are assumed to have read, understood and agreed to anything you actually sign. If you signed a contract that specified that you could be billed extra (or disconnected) for “excessive use” you can go to court and argue whether 250 gigabytes is actually excessive, but you can’t expect to get an infinite amount of downloads just because you thought you could. And as long as Comcast isn’t actually charging you more for your monthly service than their usual flat rate, you can’t contend that they are in violation of your contract…

A much more interesting point is how the “rights” of these extreme high-end users impact the rest of the customers on the system. Modern fiber-optic systems can carry a lot of data in a relatively small physical space, but there are still hard limits to how much volume can be transmitted over a specific cable line – and cable modems are already infamous for slowing down if a lot of people are attempting to use the same line. So if there’s a power user on your block, downloading over 250 gigabytes each month, and this usage is making your Internet service run slower, does the company have a responsibility to restrict the power user and free up bandwidth for you? Or should the company just let the download speeds fall where they may? Should Comcast be legally required to expand its capacity to give everyone all of the downloads they want? What if the cost of expanding their capacity bankrupts the company, putting thousands of people out of work and destroying the fortunes of their shareholders?

It’s worth thinking about…