Comcast Customer Sets Up Bot To Tweet Whenever Internet Speeds Drop

Internet speeds fluctuate. Sometimes it can get bad enough where your net slows down to an unusable crawl, and usually ringing in to the customer service center doesn’t really do much, since all they’ll do is log your complaint and promise to look into it. However it seems that one Reddit user has gotten sick of having to call in to complain all the time, and has since set up a bot to do it for him.

Redditor AlekseyP wrote, “I pay for 150mbps down and 10mbps up. The raspberry pi runs a series of speedtests every hour and stores the data. Whenever the downspeed is below 50mbps the Pi uses a twitter API to send an automatic tweet to Comcast listing the speeds.” He also points out that while some might think he shouldn’t be complaining, he believes that he should at least get something near what he’s paying for.

So what he did was create a bot using Raspberry Pi to constantly tweet at Comcast’s Twitter account whenever the bot detects that internet speeds have dropped below 50mbps. However like we said, internet speeds do fluctuate and that there could be a dozen reasons why, so at least by having his bot tweet for him, it will constantly keep Comcast on their toes, and we suppose to a certain extent even helps the company keep track of where and when it happens.

For those who are interested in maybe creating their own bot, AlekseyP has provided the source code to his creation which you can find here.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Web
Tags: comcast