Migration migraines

IF CABLE MODEM customers of AT&T Broadband wonder what the Comcast acquisition will mean for their service, perhaps I can offer a preview. The screams emanating from Comcast’s recently acquired cable modem customers in Michigan suggest it may not be a lot of fun, particularly for anyone using the service to connect to their corporate VPN.

In a deal unrelated to its announced purchase of AT&T’s cable business, Comcast late last year moved to its own servers former MediaOne accounts in Michigan that were using the Road Runner cable modem services. Complaints came cascading into The Gripe Line about software glitches, missing email, service outages, indifferent customer service, incompetent technical support, and higher prices … pretty much your typical service migration, in other words.

As the initial confusion eased, however, it became clear there was something a bit different about the complaints from Comcast’s Michigan customers. Readers there seemed to feel a sense of moral indignation that went beyond the typical reaction to finding yourself with a worse deal than you had before. “Comcast owns us, so they can treat us however they want,” said one Michigan resident.

The new Comcast customers objected to several changes to their service, including a $5-per-month rental fee for their cable modem, discontinuation of access to newsgroups, and a number of performance restrictions, most particularly blocked access to VPNs. Customers who found they could no longer access their corporate VPNs were told that Comcast cable modem service is “for residential use only” and that they should upgrade to the ComcastPro service at $95 a month if they wanted to keep VPN access.

VPN users felt it was unfair for Comcast to discriminate against them if their usage pattern is not abusive. “I use my company’s VPN to keep up with e-mails and to monitor a server program, and I bet I use less bandwidth than the average teen-ager downloading music from the Web,” wrote one reader. “But now Comcast says I have to pay the extra $50 to become a Pro customer and use my VPN. When I told them that I would cancel my service (both cable and cable modem) before paying an extra $50 they said, ‘Good, that’s not our problem.’ I am on my way to DSL unless someone at Comcast can see the light real soon.”

Comcast’s new customers also felt they’d been blindsided by the VPN block as migration information was vague at best. “I am also very disappointed with the abrupt nature of these changes,” wrote another reader who only occasionally uses VPN to access his company’s network. “Sufficient notice of these changes was not provided, nor was sufficient information provided. Myself and several other people at my company who use Comcast have been unable to use the VPN clients we were using before the transition. A co-worker called Comcast, and after six hours of being put on hold, disconnected, and transferred from person to person, a person who seemed to know what going on finally told my friend that we must upgrade to ComcastPro.”

The final outrage in the opinion of some readers was the revelation that the software Comcast supplied them included BroadJump’s Virtual Truck deployment software. Users who discovered this were concerned about that program’s capability, as described on BroadJump’s Web site, of capturing “information on subscriber profiles, system configuration, … performance metrics, and installation statistics,” which can help the broadband provider in “building a database of subscriber demographics and buying behaviors.” This led some to suspect that the software Comcast had provided for the stated purpose of easing the migration was in fact intended to spy on customer systems and report back to Comcast.

A Comcast spokeswoman says the BroadJump software is intended to permit easier diagnosis of customer problems, and support technicians will first ask for permission to look at the data the software collects. The $5 cable modem rental charge is not new but was not previously broken out on the customer’s bill as a separate charge. (As it happened to coincide with a $5-per-month price hike, however, the bottom-line impact is the same.) As for the discontinued newsgroups, the spokeswoman said that Comcast understands it’s an important service for some customers, and the company is in the process of evaluating several options.

On the performance limitation front, however, the spokeswoman had little to say. Some of the issues that disturbed Road Runner customers, such as the limit of 128Kbps upload speeds, will come as no surprise to AT&T@Home customers, since both AT&T and Comcast implemented them years ago at @Home’s behest. But most cable modem services other than Comcast have generally permitted VPN use as long as the customer doesn’t exhibit an overall pattern of bandwidth abuse. (In fact, that’s what Comcast originally said its policy would be when I wrote about the VPN prohibition in Comcast’s terms of service in Sept. 2000.) The spokeswoman would only say that Comcast doesn’t consider VPN an appropriate use of a “residential service” and that it is too early to say what policies the combined Comcast-AT&T entity will adopt in this regard.

Indeed, a lot may happen before that deal is finalized. Comcast’s VPN policy has always struck me as odd — why is the VPN usage they deem an abuse of your neighbor’s bandwidth OK if you pay Comcast $50 more a month? Isn’t your neighbor still just as abused? Let’s hope that Comcast acquires a different perspective along with AT&T Broadband. But if I were an AT&T@Home user, I wouldn’t bet on it.