Ah, Comcast. No company (not even Sprint) is a better poster child for poor customer service. Ask readers for their experiences with the Philadelphia-based cable giant, and they’ll unload tales of technicians incapable of solving problems, clueless call-center representatives who tell you a different story every time you call and a billing system so ridiculous that Comcast charges customers a $2 “convenience fee” to disconnect service it isn’t even providing properly in the first place. (Chutzpah, thy name is Comcast.)

As I discuss in a Mercury News column today, Comcast’s service problems are deep-seated, from low expectations set for technicians to a fundamental failure to hold anyone accountable for solving a customer’s problems.

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I got a lot of responses, both on the blog and via e-mail, to my Wednesday post asking Comcast customers to share their service (or disservice) experiences. Thanks so much for your responses. (I may contact some of you to see if you want to be interviewed for my column.) 

Comcast’s customer-service czar, Rick Germano, told me this morning that he personally was checking out what you had to say on this blog. And one of his associates just posted a comment on my Wednesday post. 

Germano offered a tip for anyone having persistent problems who wants to get some action — email his office using this special link.

He promises a quick response — let me know if he doesn’t deliver.

And watch this space for more on Comcast next week.

(Followup post on how to fast-track your Comcast complaint.)

I’m going to be interviewing Rick Germano, Comcast’s new head of customer service, on Friday morning as part of a larger piece I’m doing on the company.

I’d love to hear your tales of Comcast service — good and bad — as well as any feedback that you’d like me to pass on to Rick.

I’m especially interested in your experiences with the super-fast 16 Mbps Blast Internet service that Comcast recently launched in the Bay Area. How was the ordering/installation experience? Is your Web experience notably faster? Do you think it’s worth the money?

Post your comments here or email me at vgoel@mercurynews.com. (Be aware that Comcast employees do sometimes read this blog, so anything you DON’T want them to see should be sent by email. On the flip side, if you’re having trouble with the company and post your complaint here, you might get some more attention.)

As long-time readers of this blog know, I’ve been banging the drum for faster Internet service for a while now, and many of you have joined the crusade (see posts on universal broadband, Comcast’s DOCSIS 3.0 technology and AT&T’s naked DSL in particular).

Well, Comcast heard us.

On Monday, the company is officially doubling the top speed of its cable-modem service to 16 megabits per second in most of its Bay Area territory. It’s a welcome upgrade that should satisfy most speed junkies — at least until the company starts rolling out 100 mbps in selected markets later this year.

Here’s an advance look at a special column about the launch appearing in Monday’s local-news section of the Mercury News:

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Maybe Comcast founder and Chairman Ralph Roberts will be peddling Comcast’s Triple Play package to Satan and his minions in the afterlife.

That’s the only explanation I can think of for Comcast to sign a contract that agrees to pay the 87-year-old Roberts his annual salary for five years after he dies. I mean, talk about pay-for-underperformance — this guy won’t have to do a damn thing to collect his check.

Apparently the 9.6 million shares of Comcast Class A stock that Roberts controlled as of the last proxy statement — worth more than $176 million at Friday’s closing price — isn’t enough to keep his family out of the poorhouse. (And we’re not even counting millions more in deferred compensation and stock options his estate would get.)

Well, at least you know where your $2.50-a-month rate increase is going.

Maybe Roberts can arrange to give subscribers something in return before he goes. How about a free feed of EosTV, Germany’s new TV channel dedicated 24/7 to death and dying?

Talk about strange alliances: the telephone companies have joined a bunch of free-speech types to push the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Comcast.

The cable giant, you’ll recall, got caught disrupting BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer sharing services used by its Internet customers to transfer large files, such as video and music. Advocates for “network neutrality” formally complained that the company was discriminating against certain types of traffic and therefore violating the FCC’s principles for network fairness.

The telcos, which compete against Comcast with their DSL Internet services, smell the blood in the water and see a chance to take a bite out of Comcast while it’s already bleeding.

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(Nov. 2 UPDATE: A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars has formally asked the FCC to stop Comcast from interfering with file-sharing programs and pay fines for every affected subscriber, reports the Associated Press.) 

In my Sunday column, I criticized cable giant Comcast’s efforts to interrupt some file transfers made using peer-to-peer file-sharing technology. In my view, Comcast is discriminating against one particular technology, and that violates the principles of “net neutrality” that are important to the Internet’s future.

Comcast’s meddling with P2P appears to be just the tip of the iceberg, judging by reader comments on the column and an earlier blog post, e-mails sent directly to me and blog posts elsewhere on the Web.

Some people complain that Comcast is blocking direct file transfers between two people. Others say that online games are being slowed down. (In an interview with me last week, Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manager for online services, steadfastly denied that the company interrrupts any traffic other than P2P transfers.)

Quite a few people say it’s not just Comcast that blocks or slow down certain Internet traffic — other access providers, such as AT&T and Earthlink, seem to be doing it, too.

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Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, has hit a new low in its already lousy customer service: it has now admitted that some Internet data transfers are more equal than others.

In a great expose published last week, Peter Svensson of the Associated Press found that Comcast is deliberately interfering with customers who are using peer-to-peer file-sharing programs like BitTorrent and Gnutella to exchange large files. Peer-to-peer programs establish direct connections between individual computers and are typically used to share video and audio files, both legal and illegal.

The AP found that when network traffic is high, Comcast breaks peer-to-peer connections by sending false messages to each computer:

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer—it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: “Sorry, I have to hang up. Good-bye.”

Is this why people pay Comcast double or triple the price of competitors’ DSL offerings? So their activity will be interrupted whenever Comcast feels like it?

Comcast says such disconnect messages only slow down, not block, file transfers and are intended to protect the network from abuse by heavy file swappers. But testing by the AP and the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that the interference is more extensive than Comcast claims. Certain other programs, such as Lotus Notes, have also been hindered by Comcast.

I’m working on a column for the newspaper about the company’s behavior and what, if anything, we can do about it. If you’ve had any personal experiences with Comcast mysteriously interfering with large data transfers, I’d love to hear from you. (If you’d like to be interviewed, please e-mail me at vgoel@mercurynews.com with your contact information.)

We’ve all had those moments with the cable company, or the phone company, or the power company, when their customer service is SO godawful that we wish we could do something with more impact than screaming into the phone.

Mona Shaw, a 75-year-old Comcast customer in Virginia, lived the fantasy. After the cable giant failed to properly install its “Triple Play” phone-modem-TV service in her home despite three appointments in one week, Shaw went down to her local Comcast office with her husband. The first time, the customer-disservice staff made her wait two hours on a bench to talk to a manager, then perkily informed her that the manager had gone home for the day.

After mulling the company’s outrageous behavior for a few days, the retired Air Force nurse returned to the office — with a claw hammer. She marched in and whacked a keyboard. She bashed a monitor. She smashed a phone. “After I hit the keyboard, I turned to this blonde who had been there the previous Friday, the one who told me to wait for the manager, and I said, ‘Now do I have your attention?’ ” recalled Shaw, who recounted the whole tale to the Washington Post.

The cops came to arrest her. The ambulance came to treat her heart palpitations. Eventually, a judge gave her a three-month suspended sentence for disorderly conduct, ordered her to pay $345 in fines and restitution and issued a year-long restraining order barring her from the Comcast office.

And Shaw switched to Verizon.

On the heels of our editorial challenging Comcast and AT&T to offer Silicon Valley higher broadband speeds like it does back east, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts dazzled industry observers Tuesday by showing off a modem that can download data at 150 Mbps, the Associated Press reports:

In the presentation, ARRIS Group Inc. chief executive Robert Stanzione downloaded a 30-second, 300-megabyte television commercial in a few seconds and watched it long before a standard modem worked through an estimated download time of 16 minutes.

Stanzione also downloaded the 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica 2007 and Merriam-Webster’s visual dictionary in under four minutes, when it would have taken a standard modem three hours and 12 minutes.

“If you look at what just happened, 55 million words, 100,000 articles, more than 22,000 pictures, maps and more than 400 video clips,” Roberts said. “The same download on dial-up would have taken two weeks.”

That’s 25 times the 6 Mbps speed that the Philadelphia-based cable giant offers here. (And even that conks out a dozen times a day at my place.)

Roberts, who was at a cable trade show in Las Vegas, told the AP that the faster technology, known as DOCSIS 3.0, would be rolled out in a couple of years — somewhere. (How much you wanna bet it will be in areas where Comcast competes with Verizon’s 50 Mbps FiOS service, i.e., not out here?)

Commenters at Slashdot point out that Comcast’s current modem technology, DOCSIS 2.0, is capable of delivering 40 Mbps.

But the cable provider, which has no competition in most parts of the country, just doesn’t want to offer that kind of speed at any price — except in FiOS territory, where it actually has competition.

Makes you wish the feds never deregulated cable….