Maybe they are being just a little too aggressive.

At the same time, I have always been amazed by the number of persons who would rather complain about a problem to third parties, rather than complain to the people who might be able to help them.

I even heard Bob Garfield say, in an interview, that he thought they were actually trying to improve.

Full disclosure: I use Comcast and I have received only good customer service from them.

When they bought the local cable company so long ago I can’t remember the name of the company they bought, they promised to upgrade the system. We used to have frequent outages and blips; since Comcast completed the upgrade, the only outage we have had was when someone ran into a lightpole at the end of the street or the power went out–and they aren’t responsible for the power..

When I got cable internet, I couldn’t get it to work; they had someone here the next day who tracked down the problem (a bunch of antidelivian couplers which couldn’t handle the bandwidth) and fixed it in less than an hour.

Then, again, I’m close to Philadelphia and this was when Comcast had just started to buy up everything in sight. I suspect their customer service problems had more to do with getting too big too fast then with an active desire to irritate their customer base–kind of like when AOL first offered flat-rate unlimited connectivity with an included internet gateway and were overwhelmed by a response that ten times what they expected or prepared for.

And, yes, I’m against Comcast’s packet sniffing.