Since I rarely use Bittorrent and have experienced just a few issues with using Skype (and none with Vonage) services over my Comcast High Speed Internet connection, the confirmed accusations of Comcast’s packet shaping have been troubling but haven’t yet personally affected me and — like most of us with so-called "broadband" (which others outside the US laugh at in terms of speed) — we have no choice in high speed providers unless we want to go dog slow with some flavor of DSL or go back to using a modem.

In a bizarre twist, what has affected me is a quite useful product (iChat) and I’m growing madder by the day: Using Apple’s iChatAV in a session with video or screen sharing starts off just fine but within minutes deteriorates and becomes unusable (pixelated video, audio dropouts, slow response with screensharing).

iChatAV is incredibly useful since my 81 year old Dad, my sister and other family members have it and I can easily perform remote management of their machines through simple chat. It’s so laughingly easy that it has taken me minutes to teach someone how to use audio and video chat or to share my screen — or ask to share theirs so I can troubleshoot some difficulty they’re having — and thus I can sprinkle my knowledge around as needed and help my loved ones out (without getting in the car and driving over or flying).

I’m not the only one that is having this issue as evidenced by this Macintouch thread here (look at October 2007 comments on) as well as this long one in the iChat AV forum at Apple’s site. There are numerous fixes people have tried (throttling iChat’s bandwidth; rebooting the modem; opening a window and shouting) which sometimes works and mostly doesn’t.

After the jump, you’ll see the note I just wrote to Rick Germano, the SVP of Comcast Customer Service and a link to a page you can use to also send Mr. Germano a nice note…although he and his executive cronies at Comcast probably sit around at cocktail parties guffawing over people having issues with their service, "Oh yeah….so what are they gonna do….switch!?!" (Insert a bunch of lit-up guys howling with laughter here).

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