and your ability to determine exactly how long your outage is and who is at fault comes from .... ?

More often than not, the issues I've seen with cable are intermittent. When you're dealing with things like a signal pushed through coax the resistance of the wire is different from a hot day to a cold day (and even micro-fractures due to expansion/contraction), meaning you can have outages when just the right stresses align or signal strength bordering on the edge that can suddenly fix themselves in a stiff, cold breeze. Also, Comcast would take every opportunity to tell you that the modem you bought so you don't pay $8/mo for a $40 device (or your wifi router) is the culprit.

And here's ChefJoe, coming to Comcast's obviously much needed rescue. It's not perfect, and shit happens, so why should we bother? We should just be happy the giant corporations deign to give us service.

Stay classy man.

Pridge, nice informative post there. Tell us about the last time you had a 12 hour comcast outage and how you determined it was constant and due to comcast.

@1,2,3 I don't see this as a defense of Comcast (though there may be history between you two I don't know about) just a realpolitik assessment that fault is hard to pin down by the consumer and easy to shift by the better informed corporation.
Having said that, I've never had a problem getting Comcast to give a prorated credit for problems (no problem other than the pain of having to talk to them, which is always a drag...)

@1, or Comcast keeps "forgetting" you returned their modem and continues to charge you the rental fee. Then when you call their customer service line they always say "Oh, we see that, well let's issue you a credit" and that credit never seems to appear. I'm on month 5 now without the credit but a promise that it's going to show up any time now!!

This bill is a good idea, but ChefJoe is correct that enforcement is going to be hellish, if at all possible. The law will have to be insanely stringent and essentially give the consumer more power to force the issue than Comcast will have (good luck with that considering Comcast's lobbying powers).

If you threaten Comcast with canceling their service, I have found that they will prorate/credit almost anything. They know it is better to give away ten bucks than risk losing $70+ a month. This would be my advice to anyone.

But the best route is to cancel Comcast TV and get a halfway decent HDTV antenna. If you live near a city and are willing to make a one time purchase 40 bucks or more, you will receive all local and broadcast HD channels with great clarity. If you NEED cable channels, you will still have to rely on Comcast, however.

I get a lot of outages, none of which last twelve hours. Far more useful to me would be some recompense when the achieved download speed is 1/5 of what I'm supposedly paying for (and 1/10 or less is common).

The best way to get around this problem is public, municipal Internet. Seattle City Internet. Competition. Remove ALL exclusive licensing agreement. Let's get a municipal option city wide and let anyone that wants to come and in sell Internet and cable here--with the only requirement that they cannot cherry pick neighborhoods that would be more profitable.

@1 Knows what they're talking about. Your average consumer of broadband internet couldn't "prove" their connection was down and determine why to save their life. Unless this bill forces Comcast et al to set up public-facing circuit monitoring that's directly tied to their billing system and requires no customer intervention to issue a credit, the only people getting reimbursed for outages will be the same people who can detect it, prove it and have the time and patience to call and complain under the current system.

@7 It's 12 hours total in a billing cycle, not in one outage. Also you might want to check your service agreement; most likely you were sold "up to x speed", so as long as you have a connection that's transmitting data, you're getting what you are paying for. If you want a speed/uptime guarantee you'll probably need to switch to a business-class service (which Comcast does offer to residences last I checked) or to an ISP that hasn't oversubscribed their residential circuits in your neighborhood.

@3: "Tell us about the last time you had a 12 hour comcast outage and how you determined it was constant and due to comcast."

A few weeks to a month ago. Because everyone in my building had the same problem. Comcast knows when they've fucked up on their end (regardless if they publicly state it on their website) so you're just babbling at this point.

@10 A building-wide outage could also have been caused by physical damage to the building's internal/external wiring or junction boxes from animals, moisture, extreme temperature variations, vandalism or someone driving their car into a telephone pole, to name but a few. RF interference or excessive voltage fed into the cable lines from a neighbor's old tube television, faulty transformer on a pole or arcing from a neighboring cable could also cause it. None of these are Comcast's fault nor preventable to a certain degree, and the only one the average person is really capable of ruling out is the car into a pole scenario.

Comcast actually did credit me every time I told them my service was interrupted and I wanted credit back for it. So I give them that, although not having service interruptions in the first place would be preferable.

I finally cancelled my cable TV service with them. I had been threatening to cancel and getting great promos (as @6 mentioned) for years, but they finally decided not to give me anything last time I threatened, so I dumped it. Still have internet with them, which is spotty, but they have a monopoly on high speed internet in my area so it's them or nothing.

Regulating ridiculously rare failures won't do anything for the majority of customers. This isn't progress: it's just PR.

@12: It wasn't. We confirmed it through constant contacts with Comcast until we spoke to someone who wasn't a mouthbreathing liar.

@13: Yeah, that used to work, but they've been hiring more and more nasty people for their disconnection line so even threatening to cancel often is presented with "and what?" because they know you don't have a lot of other options.

Yeah, technically they've been modifying their retention policy and the agents reflect this, but I still hate talking to them.

@10 - Thank you.