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Comment by mikecrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comcast cut me off last year, after 7 years of service. I got a lil "greedy" and broke the 250g cap (300g+) - never even knew there was a bandwidth meter at their site.

By the time they warned me, it was already halfway through the next month. I slowed my usage down, but still broke 260g at the end of the month (I work from home, use it for everything).

They shut me off, banned me from service for 1 year, and absolutely no one at customer service or their "security department" would even talk to me. Zero tolerance, no options.

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That doesn't sound like their policy. They usually ban you from the residential serivce

They probably offered you commercial level service during that year (which is more expensive, however has a much higher service level and bandwidth cap)

http://business.comcast.com/smb/services/Internet/plans

If they didn't offer it, I'm pretty sure they'll sell it to you if you want it.

They did not offer me commercial service. When they shut me off, I asked about it specifically, and they said I couldn't have Internet service in my name, period. It's quite possible I had a crappy rep on the phone, but it seemed like a dead end.

YMMV, but after I was contacted about breaking the 250g limit a second time (was not disconnected since it was >1yr between overages) I played dumb* and told them that I had recently bought "a server off craigslist" and that maybe it was related to old software leftover on that. Ever since, if I have an overage I receive an email suggesting I download their security tools because I may have a bot operating on one of my machines.

I have no idea if this is simply coincidence or if they in fact have a flag for "less knowledgable users"/"malware affected users". Could just be luck on my part, but I would say give that technique a try if you find yourself in that situation.

*This part was entertaining. After countless times trying to provide customer service reps with complete details and explain things only to be met with confusion on their end, it was fun to use my knowledge to intentionally sound like I had no idea how computers/internet worked.

Oh, right, we were talking about options.

I had two options here in Seattle. Clearwire? 4g, with a modem positioned at my window, hoping it got better reception than my phone? Nah.

Or Qwest (now Century Link) DSL. The DSL has been fine. Not quite as fast, or stable (recent storms and flooding forced a lot of reconnects) but is just fine.

I'm not too happy with the situation in Seattle myself. Currently I've got $60/mo 1.5/384 DSL service from MegaPath (formerly Speakeasy). Business line to my home, very reliable. It's just not fast enough for some of the things I want to do.

I can't get FiOS from Frontier at my apartment, even though there is service about two blocks down the street. And I have no desire to do business with Comcast.

Clear is out of the question since I want to start doing video broadcasting.

Not sure what to do here. Move to a new apartment? I might end up doing that for unrelated reasons, and just make FiOS a requirement for the new place.

Frontier FIOS exists in some areas, and CondoInternet is slowly rolling out to places near downtown and is apparently going to start deploying in Bellevue soon as well.

It's not great but it's slowly getting a little better over time.

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