Be sure to read the kafkaesque tale,"Get a Cable Modem ... Go to Jail," on page one of this issue. It's a real doozy and a must-read for any operator planning on offering @Home.

At first, you might think that the plight of Judith Sammel, a Comcast@Home user who lives in a suburb outside of Baltimore, is just one of those quirky situations that occurs when new technology is deployed by partnering companies -- in this case, Comcast and @Home.

In a nutshell, Sammel -- who was not a Comcast cable subscriber, nor did she intend to become one -- heard about the @Home cable-modem offer and signed up for it. She was assured that she did not have to be a cable-TV subscriber to get it.

And indeed, that was true. But when her cable operator hooked her up for @Home, the technician failed to install a filter that would block out the video signals. Months later, her @Home service stopped working.

Sammel called both Comcast and @Home and got the royal runaround. "Each claimed that it was the responsibility of the other to determine what the problem was and fix it," she wrote in her eight-page e-mail to us, entitled, "Get a Cable Modem ... Go to Jail."

You're all welcome to read the entire text of her missive on the Web at http://members.home.net/sammel/cablemodem.htm [now here] and to draw your own conclusions.

It's well worth the read, because this is a real customer painstakingly documenting her bizarre dealings with her cable company and with @Home.

But back to the Cliffs Notes version of Sammel's plight. Shortly after being cut off, a technician came out to reinstall @Home. And again, he did not bring a video trap -- the very reason why she was unceremoniously jettisoned from the Web -- with him on that visit.

Now here's the kicker: an out-of-the-blue knock at the door months later from a uniformed member of the Baltimore Police Department with a summons for her to appear in court. As senior editor Mike Farrell reports in his page-one article, the charge: four counts of cable fraud. The penalty: up to two years in prison.

Then Murphy's Law really went into overdrive, and the wheels of justice fell off their axles.

After convincing her Comcast system that she was not stealing cable service, and that she did not even want it -- which took some doing -- a Comcast representative tried to get the charges dropped.

But because of an arcane Maryland law, it was pretty much decided that the horse was already out of the barn and unstoppable.

Another two months elapsed. On Jan. 12, the state finally accepted Comcast's request not to prosecute the case, and Sammel could finally put this stupid business behind her.

Given her experiences with @Home, it's not surprising to hear Sammel say last week that when ADSL service comes to her neck of the woods, she's going to look into it.

And here's why she won't be the only one: With the rapid deployment of @Home this past quarter, the right hand doesn't seem to know or care what the left hand is doing, as Multichannel News has reported about widespread problems in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

In Sammel's case, an @Home spokesman says it was not his company's problem. "The local system is dealing with that -- our company has nothing to do with video."

On the Comcast side, the operator calls Sammel's ordeal "an unfortunate outcome" of having two distinct billing systems that don't talk to each other.

As Farrell reports, Richard Rasmus, Comcast's vice president of online communications, says the Sammel case was a "chink in the armor," and the problem has now been fixed.

Well that's all fine and dandy, but it's no way to treat the customer, who is always supposed to be right, and who -- as in this case -- isn't supposed to be treated like a criminal.

And unfortunately, unless cable operators and @Home start realizing that they are true partners in providing a fabulous service -- and not the finger-pointers they have become, blaming each other -- these kinds of bizarre incidents will skyrocket.

And that would be truly criminal, because cable still has the edge in the high-speed-data arena, and it needs to further hone it, rather than blowing it.

© 1999 Multichannel News. Reprinted with permission.