Weekend Recap

Comcast took a hit this weekend from the Associated Press in Sunday's Cleveland Plain Dealer. One incident involved the company's customer service and the other was on the topic of net neutrality.

It seems a 75-year-old woman in Bristow, Va., was dissatisfied with her triple play service -- or lack thereof. The woman, Mona Shaw, identified as a "churchgoing secretary of the local AARP branch," was fined and received a suspended jail sentence for smashing a keyboard and computer monitor with a hammer. It seems she went to hit the phone, but the article is unclear about whether she connected.

"I figured, 'Hey, my phone is screwed up. So is yours,'" Shaw said. The AP reports that Shaw became angry after a technician failed to show up for an appointment, then a technician didn't finish the installation and finally waited for two hours at an office appointment before being told the manager had left for the day. That's when she came back with the hammer.

In the other story, the AP conducted a study that the news service claims proves that Comcast interferes with file sharing. An AP reporter attempted to download the King James Bible (no copyright issues), using the file sharing program BitTorrent. In two out of the three tries, the transfer was actively blocked accompanied by a message that originated from Comcast, according to the article. On the third try, the download started after a 10-minute delay. All uploading attempts failed.

The AP article blasts Comcast for not adhering to its policy of the treating all Internet traffic equally, the principle also known as net neutrality.

It will be interesting to see if Comcast reacts to these articles and whether other customers will claim similar findings.