With all the junk mail I get from my cable company about "upgrading" my service to include some crap I don't want, I would think they could find a way to slip in a "hey, your modem's busted" notice.

So they print Important Plan Information on the envelope.

Time-Sensitive, Open Immediately

You know it's actually an important piece of mail when the envelope isn't imploring you to open it.

The most serious snail mail correspondence is utterly and completely plain.

On the from line - Office of Legal Counsel...that’s getting opened.

But you probably wouldn't read it, because lots of people don't read their email (at least partially because of the junk).

Yes, but if you don’t get the speed Comcast promises you, and you paid attention to that, then you’d call them up, and find out that way.

More work, but way less scummy.

regional monopolies have never cared about scummy behavior.

And I'm more likely to read a pop-up?

Maybe in the bill? Or online bill notification?

I don't know what's worse: the straw man attempt at arguing efficacy while focusing on the weaker of two suggested options, or the (presumably) unscalable slippery slope of dispatching personnel to a customer's front door.

In either case, the argument does not address the fact that customers recognize unsolicited packet injection as unacceptable ISP behavior. Without support metrics, we can argue all day about the efficacy of one method of delivery over another, but the fact remains that no sensible user would perceive e-mail and/or post of official notice from their ISP as overtly intrusive. With as much internal advertising as Comcast distributes amongst its existing customers, it blows my mind that official notice generated from boilerplate and delivered via snail mail would fail to achieve the intended goal.

To be sure, your pre-edited comment: > Surely showing up in-person at their door must be an even more effective "reminder" than the browser injection! Is that next?

Time Warner did show up at my door when they updated their speeds. I thought it was strange,and asked him to have Time Warner call and schedule a time, but it worked. He was going door to door.