Anybody have any experience with this???

Man your PCs. The bandwidth hogs are revolting and Comcast is the recipient of their virtual torches and pitchforks.

Customers across the country have been contacted by the telecom giant with a warning to curb excessive bandwidth consumption or risk a one-year service termination. Comcast, however, is refusing to reveal how much bandwidth use is allowed, making it impossible for customers to know if they are in danger of violating Comcast's limit.

The move has driven customers to sign up with other service providers.

"Comcast and I are not on speaking terms," said Frank Carreiro, a West Jordan, Utah resident who had his Internet service terminated by Comcast in January.


Carreiro said he received a message from a Comcast Security Assurance representative in December, who warned him that he was hogging too much of the company's bandwidth and needed to cut down. When Carreiro contacted customer service about the call, they had no idea what he was talking about and suggested it was a prank phone call. Unconvinced, Carreiro contacted Comcast several more times, but was again told there was no problem.

A month later, he woke up to a dead Internet connection. Customer service directed him to the Security Assurance division, which Carreiro said informed him he would now be without service for one year.

Carreiro said he told Security Assurance that customer service had cleared him of any wrongdoing, but Security Assurance reportedly told him that customer service is not kept abreast of bandwidth issues for security purposes. Comcast also refused to tell Carreiro how much bandwidth he would have been allowed to use to avoid service termination.

"It was a very frustrating experience," he said.

Carreiro has since switched to DSL service from Qwest, which became available in his neighborhood in late February. Again connected to the Web, he has taken his fight to the blogosphere with an online journal (http://comcastissue.blogspot.com) detailing his troubles.

Admitted "Internet junkie" and Chattanooga resident Cameron Smith also had his service cut off in January for one year. "They said there wasn't a limit [for downloading] but that I was downloading too much, about 550 gigs. I backed off to about 450 gigs, but they still suspended us."

Smith has since switched to DSL service from BellSouth AT&T. "I don't like it," he said, but it is the only other high-speed option available in Chattanooga and he refuses to ever return to Comcast again.

Smith also pondered the possibility of a class-action lawsuit against Comcast, but has been delayed by funding issues. "If I could afford it, then I would do it in a heartbeat because it's a bait-and-switch with their customer service," he said.

As of press time, repeated calls to Comcast were not returned, nor were messages left for Comcast Security Assurance or e-mails sent to that department's manager, Jay Opperman.

[Update: Comcast sent a response since this story was published, which we've included at the end of this report.]

In a February statement regarding Carreiro's case, Comcast said that "customers who are notified of excessive usage typically consume more than 100 times the average national Comcast bandwidth usage" and apologized for "for any miscommunication that this customer may have received about this process."

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