Saturday, July 07, 2007

ComCast: Hire a Network Engineer

Monopolies never work out best for the customer. Some argue that monopolies enable useful services that couldn't be achieved without scale, I find that argument to be nonsense.

This weekend my internet became incredibly slow and I started to look around to figure out why. This was important to me as I have a ton of work to do from home this weekend on our online travel/expenses system and waiting for the little hourglass was driving me insane.

I have run networks before (Flare was a sizable network) and understand how challenging they can be. I also know how easy it is to fix small problems and how often the choice of fixing a small problem is less a question of innovative technology being put to work and more a question of how to increase profit margins.

When I started looking around this weekend and discovered that Comcast was itself running slow (see their 13 hop roundtrip from Level 3's Denver facility to my home in LoDo) I was appalled.

I became even more concerned when I realized that Comcast was my only practical cable choice in downtown Denver.

A monopoly should be forced to act in the best interests of customers if they are going to be allowed a de facto monopoly. Given how much monopolies suck at servicing their customers (i.e. Comcast) and how anti-competitive practices end up creating less innovative products.  
I would hope that someone at Comcast reads this and makes the phone call to setup that simple peering relationship required with Level 3. 

Keep in mind that monopolies almost always break down. Customers, governments and markets generally break down monopolies either as a slow and gradual movement or with the fury of a court. 

While I am praying  a network engineer at Comcast reads this post (yes, I am mailing to them) I more hope that a business manager at Comcast reads this and realizes they are embarking on a slippery slope with at least one customer.

While my choices are limited the frontier is wide open for their competitors in non-traditional spaces to come in and take my almighty dollar. For this we have to look no farther than the current batch of wireless operators (ATT, Verizon, Sprint-Nextel) who all bring solutions to the table. 

While the pricing for these alternatives may not make them a viable alternative now, prices shall drop and technology shall mature. Whose to say that we even need cable with a good combination of cell-phone/wireless for connectivity and iTunes as a content delivery source.