Comcast’s plans for 2008

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts did an interview with Fortune mostly focused on shareholder concerns over the company’s poor performance on all fronts. No mention was made about traffic shaping or spoofing. I have to assume that the interview was conditional on not posing any questions on this subject.
Robert’s remarks regarding poor customer service:

We do 250 million phone calls a year between orders and services, and, inevitably, with that many calls, you are going to have failures. We have added 11,000 technical and customer-care employees just in the past 18 months. And we are beginning to call customers before and after service appointments to make sure we did the work properly. It is a major goal to continue to improve.

As for network performance:

At the national cable convention this year I demonstrated a technology called DOCSIS 3.0. We’ll start rolling this out in 2008. It provides up to 160 megabits or more of speed per second — that should give more than enough bandwidth to do multiplayer online gaming.

We’ve heard repeated references to improving customer service capabilities and network performance from Comcast often with little action thereafter. We’ll keep tabs on these quotes. Comcast has been very good a talking the talk, but will they walk the walk? We’ll let you know.