I am writing this entry with the hope that one of Comcast's lawyers will find it.

I just got home from work, with the intention of watching last night's episode of "Lost" on the ABC website. They offer an HD stream of the show, and it has worked perfectly for me in the past. This all changed when Comcast took over the Insight network in this area.

Last week, when I attempted to watch the show, I found that I could not view it in the full HD stream. Rather, my connection was being limited to 256Kbps, so I watched the show in very poor quality. I didn't think much of it, as I figured it was just going to be a single instance of issue: I was wrong.

Tonight, I am barely breaking the 256Kbps mark with the streaming player and the connection keeps getting reset, resulting in very choppy video. I ran a traceroute on a couple different domains, and found that about 4 hops outside of my local connection, the trace times out or has a very high ping. I attempted to visit Comcast's support site to submit my traceroute results, but I couldn't even get to their support site! When I tried to traceroute to their support domain, it timed out several places along the connection.

Frustrated, I eliminated my router from my network configuration, and attempted to resume my video watching: Still a 256Kbps limit. More traceroutes showed the same result, and showed that it was an issue with Comcast.

I still can't reach the Comcast support portal, and I'm rather pissed. I really wish they would get their act together and return the local service to the quality it formerly was. I really think the Insight/Comcast merger was a bad idea, and it has left so many people - including myself - disgruntled with their internet provider.

Update I: I was finally able to submit a ticket. Now let's see how long it takes them to respond.