Beyond Opinion

Something needs to be done about Comcast. They are now messing with my web pages.

Although I am a Comcast high-speed Internet user, I get my email and initially had all my web pages on Mindspring, which still exists as a domain name and was an ISP until Earthlink bought it out just before the turn of the millennium. However, I exceeded Mindspring's 10 MB limit and so had to spill over into Comcast, with 25 MB, for four of my seven blogs.

Recently I was told that there were going to be some upgrades, and that my limit of 25 MB would go to 1,000 MB. That I would like. Then I could use that to transfer huge pictures to people. But when they converted to 1,000 MB, for several days, I could not post anything to my Comcast web pages, including this Beyond Opinion. They assured me I now have a gigabyte of web space. Great. But first I must have a web site that people can access, and that I can upload to. During this period, the web pages were readily accessible.

Not so this morning (2007 November 4). When I tried to open up Beyond Opinion, I got instead "Sitebuilder is undergoing maintenance", whatever Sitebuilder is. I called Comcast to ask what was going on. While this was going on, the pages' behavior changed to "This page cannot be displayed". The Comcast agent said that my web page was changing its URL. I severely objected to this, saying that it would upset all my Google references and it would require that I change all the references I have to the Comcast pages. The Comcast agent asked me to access instead www.beta.comcast.net , and all I got was a list of results from sea.search.com . It also seems that this man could not understand that I meant my web pages, and not www.comcast.net . Finally he transferred me to someone else, but then all I got was a set of computerized messages as though I had just started this call. Further, these message made an incorrect guess as to what my phone number was. Then they gave me an infinite wait. So I hung up and tried again.

This time I got a woman who also insisted that I go to these beta pages, and to something called indexold.html . I don't have such a file. I have an index.htm , but that's a duplicate of the index.htm on my Mindspring web page. While this was going on, I noticed that the page came up OK. Then it didn't, giving me an infinite hourglass. She told me that they were still working on it, that there were some more upgrades that they were doing to the system.

No, Comcast. These are not upgrades. They are downgrades. They mean intermittent outages, putting a padlock on access to my web pages. This is not the first time that Comcast has been unreliable. In 1999, when I first got the service, I was greeted with about a dozen half-day outages, so that I kept my Mindspring email address rather than switch to Comcast and have the gremlins at Comcast put a padlock on my email. To me they got the definition of "comcastic" wrong. To me "comcastic" means "slow and unreliable". Outages like these on my web pages this morning have never occurred to my Mindspring web pages. If these happen again, I may very well convert my blogs to Blogspot blogs and spread negative information about Comcast. In the meantime, if you want negative information about Comcast, go to Comcast Must Die! .