Comcast internet canceled due to extremely bad behavior

When we first moved into this house in West Jordan, Utah, we were only able to get slow DSL, which prompted me to sign up for Comcast Internet. We had it for about 1.5 years. It usually was pretty decent for games and downloading, and even was pretty good for peer-to-peer file sharing using Bit Torrent. Then around August, all of that changed and suddenly Bit Torrent no longer functioned properly. Many other people reported the same problem. It turns out that Comcast has begun to actively sabotage Bit Torrent traffic on its network, and this fiasco is receiving a great amount of attention. Here is an article I read today on the subject.

To make matters worse, Comcast's PR department blatantly lied about sabotaging Bit Torrent.

This outraged me as a customer, especially since I love to share legal files with other people and BitTorrent is an excellent way to do this without using a lot of bandwidth. I also noticed that many of my neighbors had faster DSL than I currently thought I could get. So Heather called the phone company and found out that we now qualify for the faster DSL. This pleased me greatly, so we signed up for DSL again and are back with our beloved ISP, XMission.

Yesterday, I walked into Comcast's local office, turned in my cable modem, and officially canceled my subscription with them. When asked why I was canceling, I told the representative that it was because of their BitTorrent policy. He said that Comcast felt that BitTorrent was "network abuse". I told him that it didn't really matter what their reasons for blocking it were, because if they wanted me as a customer, they'd need to be friendly toward BitTorrent.

The two things about Comcast's antics that annoy me the most is a) they didn't notify me about their BitTorrent policy and b) their PR department denied involvement in BitTorrent blocking (which is either a lie of really bad internal communication).