Comcast Customer Tweets His Displeasure With Raspberry Pi-bot

Internet speed can be the pits, and it’s no secret that what you choose at the time of purchase may not always be what you get.

But how slow is too slow, and what would you do to fix it?

One Comcast customer, “AlekseyP,” finally had enough after his internet crashed for what seemed like the zillionth time. He created a Raspberry Pi-based bot to send Comcast a notification every time his internet went down.

If you think slow internet drove him nuts, I would love to see the face of the Comcast worker getting all of his bot notifications.

When AP’s internet speed drops below 50 Mbps (megabits per second) the bot sends Comcast a little note:

Hey @Comcast why is my internet speed 31down9up when I pay for 150down10up in Washington DC? @ComcastCares @xfinity #comcast #speedtest

— AComcast User (@A_Comcast_User) February 1, 2016

Even though we all understand his pain (slow internet is the bane of most of our existences, if we have it) AP took to Reddit to explain his Pi-bot:

“I know some people might say I should not be complaining about 50 Mbps down, but when they advertise 150 and I get 10-30 I am unsatisfied,” AlekseyP wrote, adding that Comcast customer service spokespersons respond to his tweets. However, he added that he’s merely trying to prove a point.

“I do not want to singled out as a customer; all their customers deserve the speeds they advertise, not just the ones who are able to call them out on their BS.”

“We do not torrent in our house; we use the network to mainly stream TV services and play PC and Xbox live games. I set the speedtest and graph portion of this up (without the tweeting part) earlier last year when the service was so constatly bad that Netflix wouldn’t go above 480p and I would have >500ms latencies in CSGO. Service was constantly below 10mbps down. I only added the Twitter portion of it recently and yes, admittedly the service has been better.”

Even though most of the drops in AP’s internet speed happen during times of inactivity (when the house is either asleep or empty of residents) the difference is noticeable. The Raspberry Pi-bot has sent 16 notifications to Comcast since Oct. 30 as of February 1st.