
Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business - coloneltcb
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/lawsuit-comcast-sabotaged-small-isps-network-then-took-its-customers/
======
kodt
This does not surprise me, in fact a Comcast technician told me they do this
(on a much smaller scale) by disconnecting or cutting competitors' cable runs
to buildings they are working on (and also sometimes their own).

I lived in a multi-unit apartment building and one day noticed my internet was
down (I was a Comcast subscriber). I was suspicious because a Comcast
technician was just out earlier in the day installing internet for a new
tenant in the building. After going through the phone support steps they
scheduled a technician to come out and check the line.

A couple days later, when the technician arrives, he checks the line only to
confirm no signal. Then he goes out back to the cable box outside. I was
unable to check this myself since it was mounted high on the building and
required a ladder to access. Within a few minutes it was working again.

The Comcast technician then told me my line was just disconnected. I asked him
if the previous technician made a mistake during the install. He said
something along the lines of: "No, often in these multi-unit buildings we will
disconnect people at random in case they are trying to steal cable. If they
are a paying customer they will call and get it turned back on". He then went
on about how they would have fun disconnecting competitors, and that
competitors did it back to them etc.. all very nonchalantly and candidly.

I then called Comcast and got a 3 day credit for the outage they created
"intentionally" to prove I am a customer.

~~~
openmosix
If it is true, what is fascinating is that it means Comcast has no way to know
who is a legitimate customer and who is not - if they have to rely on the
customer to make the call and verify to be a legitimate user. How can they run
a business like that?

~~~
theandrewbailey
What baffles me is that communications companies routinely complain that
rolling a van and tech to anywhere is "expensive". They are willfully wasting
money if what you say is true. I doubt that this is worth finding out who is
their customer and who isn't.

~~~
londons_explore
Could it be the techs do it because they know there's a good chance they
personally will be called out to fix it. Probably called out late at night,
and collecting lots of overtime money?

------
noonespecial
Even if this was accidental and overblown (as lawsuits often are: one side of
the story etc...), Comcast has a steep hill to climb because of their terrible
reputation.

I think they're going to get completely hosed in court over this. Being
assholes to everyone you deal with can have surprising hidden costs.

~~~
londons_explore
Doubt they have enough evidence...

Knowing if something was accidental or deliberate is super hard.

~~~
noonespecial
I would bet that if it ever gets to a jury phase the very first thing Comcast
defense will do is try to use the jury selection process to dismiss jurors
that _have ever had Comcast service_.

That will tell you everything you need to know about what's about to go down.

------
distantsounds
In a shared-housing unit, a Comcast tech once cut the coax wires going to my
FiOS box when installing internet for new tenants. Why he felt the need to
touch my wiring is beyond me. The tech had to come back (albeit hours later)
to undo the damage he did. A minor annoyance, but just adds onto the anecdotes
of stories about the techs not knowing what they are doing.

~~~
0x00000000
I was surprised the other day when someone told me the fios technician
intentionally clipped the comcast line at their house during an install

Probably an extremely common practice by any big company in areas where people
have a choice.

------
DamnInteresting
When we purchased a house a few years back, Comcast was our only broadband
option, so we reluctantly called them. The previous owners had a Dish Network
receiver on the roof, and the when the Comcast technician arrived he
enthusiastically offered to remove it and haul it away for us at no charge,
even though it was in no way interfering with Comcast's cabling.

I doubt I will ever have interest in subscribing to Dish Network, but I
declined, not wanting to be party to such anti-competitive behavior. I can't
imagine the tech would offer to remove it unless such is standard practice.
He'd be doing extra work for no extra pay (unless Comcast offers a head
hunting bounty).

~~~
throwanem
I've known small IT contractors to act similarly, in order to obtain free
hardware which they could then resell on the used market or repurpose for
their own use. Dish Network dishes apparently [1] having something of a used
market as well, it wouldn't surprise me if your technician were simply an
enterprising fellow with an eBay seller account.

[1] [http://www.ebay.com/bhp/dish-network-satellite-
dish](http://www.ebay.com/bhp/dish-network-satellite-dish)

~~~
DamnInteresting
Fair point, that is possible. If that were his motive and he had stated it
outright, I would have agreed. It felt shady at the time, but intuition is an
imperfect instrument.

~~~
throwanem
I wouldn't state that intention either, because then you'd be liable to try to
sell it to me. Presenting it as a courtesy service rarely elicits such a
result.

------
jamroom
Wow - if true I really hope Comcast gets taken to the cleaners over this. We
REALLY need more ISP competition in the US- this is just ridiculous.

~~~
r00fus
Competition will not exist due to natural monopolies for the last-mile wiring
issues.

What is required is effective regulation. Which the new FCC head just gutted.

~~~
SwellJoe
"Which the new FCC head just gutted."

This implies the previous FCC head was effectively regulating the telco and
cable companies before, which is not accurate. It's gotten _worse_ , but it's
never been _good_. The telco/cable industry is basically a crime syndicate
that operates in their own world of murky legality. Somehow, they keep getting
away with atrocious behavior that hurts consumers and keeps competitors out.

So many things they do as standard practice ought to be illegal, but they're
really good at lobbying. They may not be good at providing customer service or
competent at providing internet but they're very good at manipulating the law
to suit their interests. And, even given the incredibly favorable legal
climate they exist in, they push past the law and do shit like this.

And, that's why the US is so far down the list in terms of internet speed and
quality. The operators aren't in the business of providing good service,
they're in the business of making it impossible for anyone to effectively
compete with them via any means available (regardless of legality or
ethicality).

------
5ilv3r
Mom and pop shops have so little recourse against this kind of abuse. I grew
up in one that was killed by verizon, and this stuff still stings.

------
bitlax
I've had Comcast employees call me posing as my current cable provider in
order to verify my monthly payment.

------
dangjc
The regulators need to crack down on this. If Comcast controls the regulators,
they need to be broken up. No one company should have that much political
power.

~~~
doctorshady
Have you not been paying attention to what the FCC has been up to recently?

~~~
djrogers
Recently? How about the last 20+ years?

~~~
ozaark
At least they would listen to the public and revert rather than continue on
sidelining stolen identity en masse for ISP support.

Today it's people vs corporate lobbyist paid accounts/bots and the ability to
spam conversation.

~~~
doctorshady
The more I think about it, the more a legal solution like the ones these guys
are advocating more makes sense:
[http://irregulators.org/](http://irregulators.org/) .

------
Paul-ish
The cable operator should have been able to seek an injunction after they cut
his cable the second time. Clearly Comcast didn't know what they were doing,
and were just barreling forward. That behavior should not be rewarded.

------
lfnoise
The Comcast installer ripped out the AT&T lines and the lines to my aerial
antenna along the side of my house when he installed cable. At a previous
house I rented, the Comcast guy cut the AT&T line from the pole and left it
hanging two feet off the ground from a branch in a tree. Comcast didn't want
to come out to fix it because it wasn't their wire.

------
pwerner2
Former Comcast cable technician here. I was an in-house tech, and corporate
has _ludicrous_ quality standards and nitpicky, white-glove QC's after an in-
house tech leaves a job. However, the company obviously employs a TON of
_independent contractors_. Some of these contractors are excellent at their
jobs, but a lot of them aren't, and as they're not subject to any real
oversight by the corporation, you really don't know what you're going to get.
At least, this was the case at the office I worked out of. Based on my
experience (and I worked at the company for a while), this is almost
definitely 100% true, but it's probably a contractor or an individual
corporate tech being lazy, instead of malicious action on the part of Comcast.

~~~
CaptSpify
It doesn't matter. If they are contractors working for Comcast, then Comcast
should be held 100% liable.

Outsourcing has no bearing on who is responsible for the problem.

~~~
orclev
Technically the way the US legal system works, the expected outcome is that
Comcast loses, pays this company, and then sues their independent contractors
to recover the damages they had to pay out.

~~~
CaptSpify
That's how it's _supposed_ to work. How it actually works is that the
contractor is probably going to get a new giant contract with Comcast.

------
ndespres
I don't doubt that the linked story is true, but I know that individually this
can happen all the time inadvertently. I worked for an ISP which provided "dry
loop DSL" (DSL without dialtone service on the phone line) in the mid-2000s
and as a consequence of having internet service from a 3rd party over telco
pairs with no phone numbers attached, the local phone companies would
regularly re-use our customers' lines for new phone installations. Since they
were not tagged with phone numbers in the exchange building, and had no
dialtone, the phone company techs had no way to tell the lines were in use.

~~~
ubernostrum
Old joke: an interview program has a standard question they ask everyone, "If
you were going to be stranded on a desert island and could only bring one
thing with you, what would it be?"

One day they're interviewing a network engineer, who says "I'd bring a piece
of fiber optic cable. I'll bury it in the sand, wait a bit, and then when the
bulldozer comes along and breaks it, I'll ask the man in the bulldozer how to
get off the island."

------
omdeezy
Same thing happened to our apartment last summer. Technician came in to
install a neighbor's internet and disconnected ours during the process. Shit
is unbelievable.

------
paul7986
Comcast customer service is terrible and will always remain terrible until
they bring ALL of their customer service and technicians in house and pay them
handsomely.

Until then they will always remain at the bottom of the barrel and as the most
hated company in the country due to horrid customer service.

I worked at Comcast for too many years answering their phones and getting
yelled out because 80% of the time due to the contracted technicians and the
companies they work for.

~~~
Karunamon
I can vouch for this. Not only are the contracted techs horrible, the internal
billing system is this byzantine fuckfest of terse codes and multiple, poorly-
documented applications.

I spent 6 months putting up with angry phone calls from a small ISP that
Comcast absorbed before I had to quit for my own mental health.

------
kevin_thibedeau
The Verizon FiOS installer did this in my apartment when I wanted to get cable
IP service set up. What should have been a simple self install required a
service call to have a tech come out and crawl through the attic to splice the
cable back together.

------
madcaptenor
Comcast once cut the wire that led to my apartment because someone else in my
building didn't pay their bill, and their records were poor enough (I blame
this on the fact that they had grown by acquisition of a company that I know
didn't have it together) that they didn't know which wire went where. And then
it took multiple technicians coming out to get it set back up. I work for a
competitor now and I tell this story to illustrate How Things Can Go Wrong.

------
tolien
Similar things have happened in the UK, with BT contractors plugging phones in
and calling the speaking clock [1] to work out if a copper pair is free for
them to use for a new customer, or just unplugging them and hoping for the
best.

[1] [http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/11/phantom-
calls-t...](http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/11/phantom-calls-to-
the-123-speaking-clock-on-bt-openreach-phone-lines.html)

------
eriknstr
Cutting competitor's wires feels like mafia tactics.

------
dabber
I've never heard a good thing said about Comcast. It's a shame they are the
only option in so many places.

------
CKMo
Not surprised Comcast did this.

Also wouldn't be surprised if Comcast got off scott-free.

------
equalarrow
Oh we can dream..

------
LoonyBalloony
Competitors? tisk tisk Comcast... you've been slacking.

------
pishpash
So is this more or less evil than Uber's various unethical actions? Comcast
CEO sure won't be stepping down. Corporations gonna corp.

------
droopybuns
Have to wonder if this is union related & that tiny ISP hired non-union
workers.

