I work for a telco and we recently upgraded our cable infrastructure to handle 100Mbit (previously 50Mbit was the fastest). All the customer needs is a DOCSIS 3.0 modem, we re-provision in our system and they'll get 100Mbit. They come into our store, swap modems, and they're done.
As for the hilarious/stupid/disappointing things OP was told by sales/tech support/whoever, I can also confirm that. Every day I have conversations with people all over the business who don't know the basics of our business like the difference between Megabit Megabyte, etc. etc.
Our company has also started ripping people off in similar ways (like a $50 fee to downgrade internet speed) and they'll even use the same lies and stupid answers when we as staff question this move. It's a money grab, plan and simple.
Large ISPs like Comcast are offering services over a variety of different systems -- some may not be upgraded or otherwise do not have the capacity available to support the 105Mbit/sec package. This $250 fee is probably to cover the instances where they do need to make backend changes to support faster speeds for the customer. They charge every customer the fee to spread the costs associated with that out.
"Our company has also started ripping people off in similar ways (like a $50 fee to downgrade internet speed) "
Explain why you feel that is a "rip off".
More specifically if this company came to you as an employee (I assume you are an employee) and they said "hey we aren't making money and we need to reduce your salary" how would that fly with you?
Anyway I'm asking a serious question. I'd like to know the exact metrics of how you have come to determine that the company charging $50 to downgrade internet speed is ripping people off. Is it because nobody else does that? Is it because it doesn't cost them anything but a button click to downgrade?
One is, as you mention, because it's nothing more than a button click to downgrade. Less than a 1 minute call with a CSR. How they can justify $50 for that is anyone's guess.
The second is they're saying things like "it's to cover the cost of having CSRs, printing bills, etc." But actually, the $110/mo charge covers that, and always has.
Third is because the company is making plenty of profit, but the parent company wants more, so they're pushing it to do stupid stuff like this.
A large percentage of employees are looking for work elsewhere, it's just unfortunate there are not many options where we live (quite remote)
They don't need to justify. The only reason they would even think about this is if the detriment didn't outweigh the benefit. If perhaps x% of people think that it's a ripoff and 90% don't or don't even know or think everything is a ripoff anyway then why not get the extra revenue?
My guess is that the amount of people that even have any understanding of what is involved is quite small.
"But actually, the $110/mo charge covers that, and always has."
What do you mean "and always has"? Are you saying because they consistently turn a profit then you have decided they have enough to cover their fixed expenses and they shouldn't try to add to the bottom line? Not to mention that off the top with a billion dollar corporation you really don't know what is going on there anyway.
"Third is because the company is making plenty of profit, but the parent company wants more, so they're pushing it to do stupid stuff like this"
In a capitalist system there is really no such thing as "plenty of profit". The mere fact that you feel like it's up to you (or anyone else who makes comments) to decide "ok that's enough" really does not make any sense. I mean you've never seen profitable companies go out of business or bankrupt that at any point in time someone would have said "they make plenty of profit". (We can start with General Motors, Chrysler etc.)
"A large percentage of employees are looking for work elsewhere, it's just unfortunate there are not many options"
I'm unclear what the amount of employees looking for work matters with respect to what they charge. Are you implying that things like this make employees want to leave? I somehow doubt that.
> The mere fact that you feel like it's up to you (or anyone else who makes comments) to decide "ok that's enough" really does not make any sense.
Actually it does. Consumers are allowed to make decisions about purchases on any grounds they choose, including whether they feel that a company is taking too much profit, or that the company is violating some ethical standard.
Consumers are also free to call for boycotts or otherwise persuade others to not purchase products. If we think that a company should be transparent and justify their pricing so that it's proportional to costs, then that's what we think. If we think that companies shouldn't exploit the technical ignorance of consumers, then that's what we think.
In a capitalist system, we're free to debate these questions, make purchasing decisions based on them and start competing companies to serve dissatisfied consumers. If we have more technical knowledge, preventing non-technical consumers from being exploited by sharing information with them is an ethical good. Most advocates of free markets argue that these capacities make the system work.
The only thing that wouldn't be permitted in a pure capitalist system is if these ethical claims translated into a demand for government intervention, which no one has done so far. Even so, it's easy to argue that these arbitrary fees are a market failure caused by information asymmetry between Comcast and consumers and could require government intervention. The issue is not the price. It's that Comcast is misrepresenting the charge as technically necessary, which could be seen as discouraging consumers from evaluating competitors (assuming they exist) by implying that there are technical rather than business decisions behind the charge.
I guess it just bothers me that the crowd of people who try and influence others (and yes you are correct that this is fully their right) either have no skin in the game (in other words they only have one interest in mind) and additionally may not really fully understand how business operates.
I guess I just react very viscerally to things being worded "ripoff" because it's so easy for people to throw that around and pass judgement.
To me "ripoff" means take advantage and you could argue that in business there is a fine line between what is acceptable in terms of "taking advantage" and what is not. And you know what each of us has a different line. (It's just like religion and cheating on your taxes. Anyone who does more is "really religious" anyone who steals more is "a big crook").
Everyone draws the line at a different place. There are many people who believe that YC takes advantage of young people. You know all those "should I go to Harvard or to YC" would be seen by many people as totally taking advantage of someone (and may or may not be depending on the circumstances of the particular individual and what the particular person with the opinion really knows about YC).
> In a capitalist system there is really no such thing as "plenty of profit"
The telecommunications industry in the U.S. is anything but capitalist. Furthermore, people don't really have a choice regarding their internet service, so ripping them off for another $50 is pretty low.
Are you trolling? In an industry that is not regulated as a utility due to monopoly issues, profit margins are irrelevant. But in an industry that activity stiffles local competition with monopoly powers, this is all the info I need:
The serious answer to your question is that the price a consumer pays should reflect the value of the service they are receiving and should be proportional to the cost of providing this product/service. If the business is subsidizing loses in one area by overcharging in other areas, then the model is broken... especially if you are punishing your customers that are looking for better value and have no other options because you lack competition. That is the very reason that we have protections from price-fixing schemes. It's the same issue as the Banks' overdraft charges. They are making huge profit off the most vulnerable of their customers.
>should be proportional to the cost of providing this product/service.
I'm sorry, but I can't agree with that as a general principle. In this specific instance, with Comcast et al who benefit from monopolies, sure. But as a general principle, the 'value' of a product or service is whatever people are willing to pay for it. If I buy widgets in Asia for $1 each, and Americans are willing to buy them for $1,000,000 each, than that's their value.
In a functioning competitive market, though, prices should trend towards some function of risk-adjusted costs, unless there is a barrier to competition like a patent, legal cap on supply, or other monopoly-type situation. That's supposed to be the whole advantage of capitalism, the invisible hand reallocating resources optimally to meet demand and everything. A large profit margin is just a market inefficiency, and should be rare and fleeting.
Well nothing in my statement says 'as a general principle.' In fact, I specifically said that in a genuinely free market, profit margin is irrelevant (it could be 2% or 100%). I agree, but they aren't working in a free market.
Threads like this always bring out people on HN and elsewhere that simply don't think like business people.
You can choose "value" as your strategy and sometimes that can work in your favor. But many times the public is easily duped by your competition and what they have advertised as "value" and it's not that simple.
Laughing at 'don't think like business people.' If you believe that the primary goal of business is supposed to be 'make profit at any cost,' then yes, I don't think like those people and you should take some time to re-evaluate the purpose of business. If you believe that the primary goal of business is supposd to be, 'make a product or provide a service that is valuable,' then I think our humane values are in-line with our work.
Cases in point: Ponzi schemes, monopolies and cartels, price-fixing schemes, 'pump and dump' securities fraud, insider trading... need I go on? All of these things are illegal in the US--the supposed mecca of free market capitalism. Do you think these should be legal? Or you are simply arguing that everything that is legal is ethical? If you believe that, then I think you put too much faith in our legislature.
> More specifically if this company came to you as an employee (I assume you are an employee) and they said "hey we aren't making money and we need to reduce your salary" how would that fly with you?
This does happen. And at that point, you get another job. Unfortunately, the analogy doesn't hold up with ISPs because there are many areas where there isn't another ISP.
The only real answer is that a company should seek to charge the price that maximizes their long term profitability. If that's $50 to click a button, that's $50 to click a button.
But this rule completely breaks down when you're dealing with regional monopolies like Comcast. In that case, you do have to introduce the concept of pricing fairness to avoid someone abusing their monopoly - as Comcast appears to be doing in this case.
I had a related experience: Had 105 Mbps but called to try and lower our bill with Comcast. Were told we'd keep the same service, but bill would be roughly $50 cheaper. Next day when doing a speed test, turns out that our 105 Mbps service had been downgraded to 30 Mbps.
Called to complain / change it to 105 Mbps and had multiple customer service people try and tell me that we'd have to pay a $250 fee to have someone come out and make sure that we could handle 105 Mbps service, even though 36 hours earlier we had the faster service.
Finally managed to convince a service rep that we had it the day before so we obviously were equipped to handle it - only wasted ~3 hours of my life.
I worked at TCI prior to the certification of Docsis 1.0. Back then if you wanted to go from 512k to 1M we would "roll a truck" because we needed to check that your signal was good enough that you would not only get service, but that we wouldn't go broke every time it rained and the signal would degrade.
Basically you needed to have 20% better signal than was needed for the service so that you wouldn't fall off-line when something created a small amount of interference.
I suspect Comcast is doing something similar. Not really charging to do the "install" but charging to certify that you have enough signal for the service.
It can also be that they want to check if they need to pull a new cable to the edge of your house, or upgrade the Amplifier at the "block".
You probably can convince them to not do all of these things, but your service may suffer in the long run.
Back in the day we would do "no SLA" installs and if your cable went out it was yours to deal with. When your choice was that or a modem, lots of time you took that rather than having a 33.6k connection.
I thought that can be done remotely? On one of my old ISPs I could change every setting on the modem on the company's website. It was quite scary, actually, how little privacy I had in this regard. They could easily check the signal strength to the modem that way...
It absolutely can be done remotely.
Every one of these modems does SNMP, exports everything it has in the way of statistics, and they can read it remotely
The modems are nowadays configured to only allow requests from certain ip space with certain passwords because you could actually accomplish a lot in the docsis 1.0 days by messing around with SNMP.
Depending on the modem manufacturer, you can still poison them with your own locally-loaded TFTP configuration file to override the speed configured from your cable provider.
Disclaimer: The FBI was cracking down on people who were doing this.
You could do a signal check remotely. You couldn't certify the line. How would you pull a new coax, or check that the end user didn't have a splitter between the modem and the tap?
If you call tech support they lose a lot of money, and people at the bleeding edge tend to be the ones who call the most and take the longest to trouble shoot.
The examples you're giving are mostly about stored data. We're able to foresee why you may need more, photos, videos, etc. On bandwidth, it's harder to imagine. With 50, you can stream multiple HD videos. What would 105 would give me? I don't know. May be Google Fiber subscribers can provide some insight since they have access to much more.
You answered your own question. How does the data get on those high capacity disks? The faster your pipe, the more content you can fill quickly / easily.
In my case it does not provide a compelling case. With 50mb, it is plenty fast and do not feel need for faster. backup of my content does not seem to require more bandwidth either for PCs. I use both Backblaze and Dropbox, and they both work in the background etc, again 50mb is plenty.
Thinking more about this, I think I may need more bandwidth if I were consuming more real-time high volume data. May be the upcoming virtual reality apps (Occulus, etc.) will be the next jump in bandwidth requirements.
In the UK it is typical to have an ad with huge font saying. "50 MBPS!!!" and a tiny footnote disclaiming "upto that speed, on a good day if you're close".
It's sad that things like speed or megapixels are a single easy to quote number because many people think more is better.
That seems to contradict the article. If they really do need to wire your cable to some other piece of equipment then perhaps the field tech is there for a good reason.
I have 6 mbps for $51/mo with AT&T. I quoted them 50 mbps for the same price with a local cable company.
I wanted higher speeds. They couldn't get me close to the other deal, so I told them they had to compete on price. They offered $35 with a year contract.
I told them I was going to get service with the cable company and call back to cancel and they dropped my price to %50 off for six months with no strings attached.
Same goes for business owners too. We had a 20Mbit fiber from our cable company where the multi year contract was expiring. We contacted a bandwidth broker to find us a better deal. He came back with a much better deal on fiber from the local telco. We submitted the telco contract to the cable company and they price matched us. We went from 20Mbit to 50Mbit and dropped the price by half. The broker cost somewhere around $300, and was the best money we ever spent.
Go back and watch a VHS tape recording of an over-the-air broadcast TV show. You will be amazed at how colossally crappy the quality of it is because you're now used to various levels of high-def TV. The quality we get used to is only going to go up from here.
Beyond that, look at Netflix's recommendations today:
To get 1080p streaming, you need 7 Mbps. To get 3D you need 12 Mbps. Now imagine you are streaming one 1080p show from Netflix, your wife is streaming another on a different device, your son's Minecraft server has 19 kids from school attached to it, your daughter is watching HD YouTube videos and your main computer is downloading Windows 8.1 updates.
That's why I have 75 M/bps downstream and 35 M/bps upstream through Verizon FIOS anyway. That and it was $74.99 per month including their Prime TV lineup and unlimited landline phone service.
Go back and watch a VHS tape recording of an over-the-air broadcast TV show. You will be amazed at how colossally crappy the quality of it is because you're now used to various levels of high-def TV. The quality we get used to is only going to go up from here.
I agree with your conclusion, but not necessarily your reasoning. By contrast, when I watch an actual DVD, it makes me wonder why we put up with the awful compression artifacts of most streaming video. Instead, I might argue that we need higher bandwidth just to get back to where we were, and then will need even more to get to the point where transmission speed is not the limiting factor.
and unlimited landline phone service
Again, the wonders of modern compression technology. It's amazing that "landline phone" is still considered a step up from VOIP, and yet it is!
Don't cellular providers now support wideband audio calls with certain handsets? For example, the Nexus 5 and iPhone 5(c|s) on T-mobile. How does wideband audio compare to a land line?
Traditional digital voice telephony is astonishingly good compared to anything we now use on mobiles. The problem with mobile has never been with the bandwidth, it's the packet loss. You can have as wide a band as you want but if you are dropping half the frames or they arrive at random times then it still sounds like shit. Isochronous circuit switching basically works perfectly, as long as the path can be established (busy signal is the failure mode here).
On VoIP with a good low loss path you can get amazing quality too. Skype for example sounds even better than digital circuit switched telephony.
Don't you find that it should be at least somewhat commensurate with the work required though? $250 to set the value for speed rating from 50 to 105Mbps on the backend service menu and then reboot the router; doesn't that seem a little bit like they might be playing on peoples lac of knowledge of the systems involved?
"Don't you find that it should be at least somewhat commensurate with the work required though?"
Business doesn't work that way. You make hay when the sun shines.
And there are cases when you can't charge. Because of things your competitors are doing.
In a restaurant they don't charge you for napkins and water although they could. (Actually they do charge for premium water but that's a fairly recent invention).
The idea of business is to make money.
It's not up to anyone to decide how much profit is "enough" for comcast to make. If they could simply charge more per month without games they would.
Sometimes it's easy sometimes it's hard.
Take airlines. They would like to charge you more for a ticket but if they do you might not book the ticket. Better to be able to advertise a cheap price plus extras than an all inclusive price without extras. Why? Because people are not rational buyers (generally) who can figure in all the things and the "total cost of ownership" as they say with cars.
"doesn't that seem a little bit like they might be playing on peoples lac of knowledge of the systems involved?"
Well of course they are. But so what?
There are many times when companies take features out of a product just so they can make different tiers and charge premiums.
Take web hosting. Take companies who sell people extra disk space that they will never use and don't know they don't even need at all. There are many examples of this in business.
...and this is why the last mile needs to become a regulated utility. Whose place is it to say Comcast is making too much profit? Mine, as their former customer.
Seems like it works just fine for my natural gas, electric, and water/sewer utilities. The last mile is well on its way to being the next one to be regulated.
Exactly! This is how I feel about companies too. I am charging them. They are trading their services for my money. If I can get their stuff cheaper without dealing with them, why would I trade with them?
Shrink-wrapped software, for instance, has no value proposition from the original proprietor. Photoshop? Why should I trade with Adobe for a few hundred dollars when I can get the same from another user for no charge from him?
Someone like you opened my eyes to the false dichotomy. Businesses and consumers are not different. Each wants something that the other has. They want my money. I want their product. If they can get more money without changing the product, they will. If I can get more product without changing the money spent, I will.
> Business doesn't work that way. You make hay when the sun shines.
The idea of a "fair deal" IS part of business, if customers decide it's part of business. Once you factor in our basic sense of ethics and fair dealing, it's clear that Comcast has none.
The problem here isn't that ethics aren't part of business, but rather, there is no competition. Customers have no choice, therefor, there's no reason for Comcast to behave in a way that better serves their customers.
Aren't you a domain squatter? That would explain a lot about your way of thinking.
>In a restaurant they don't charge you for napkins and water although they could. //
Yes they do. They don't itemise the charge, but they charge for [ie taking account of the cost of] these items too.
If I went to a restaurant and they said "your meal is extra because you wore a brown shirt" then I'd know they were ripping me off and I'd declare it; of course they are within their right to do that if they notify the customer sufficiently of the charges. That wouldn't change the fact they're ripping people off.
I am not a fan of Comcast for many reasons. This fee isn't very consumer-friendly and it should be described more honestly as an "upgrade fee" or similar. But no, there's no reason it has to have anything to do with the "work" required to do the upgrade.
Is Adobe obligated to make the price of Photoshop commensurate to the cost of burning a DVD or downloading a file?
"Is Adobe obligated to make the price of Photoshop commensurate to the cost of burning a DVD or downloading a file?"
Of course people who have never run a business and don't understand the total cost of running a business will always relate "cost" to one thing what you pay for a particular item which when factoring a host of other things is either not relevant or not easily determined.
I just read where Tesla (an HN favorite) gets tax credits of something like $35k (tradeable to other mfgs) for each car they sell. Forgetting whether that number is right or not (maybe it's less/more who knows) does that mean that they should somehow in ratio reduce the price of their car? Of course not (unless they want to). Even though one could make an argument that it isn't fair that they don't. To me all this is nonsense. But fully understandable if someone has never operated a working business.
> I just read where Tesla (an HN favorite) gets tax credits of something like $35k (tradeable to other mfgs) for each car they sell. Forgetting whether that number is right or not (maybe it's less/more who knows) does that mean that they should somehow in ratio reduce the price of their car? Of course not (unless they want to). Even though one could make an argument that it isn't fair that they don't. To me all this is nonsense. But fully understandable if someone has never operated a working business.
To be fair, how you run your business depends greatly on this. Other companies would distribute the profit from this tax credit to shareholders or executives; Tesla is using it to continue with R&D and to fund expansion.
> Of course people who have never run a business and don't understand the total cost of running a business...
Can you please stop with the flamebait? It's not conducive to productive discussion.
To address your point, not everything should (ethical judgment) be priced based on value. Do you not see the difference between a Tesla and internet service? What about electricity - should PG&E charge based on how much value they provide? Have you ever tried living without power? Because it's certainly worth more than the $50 a month I currently pay. What about medical treatment? What if the ER charged 10% of your lifetime future income for lifesaving treatment? That seems commensurate with the value provided, doesn't it?
Point taken. I guess things like this piss me off so I flew off the handle in that way. So I apologize.
"Do you not see the difference between a Tesla and internet service?"
Ok well with respect to that we are not talking about Internet service but a faster type of Internet service that is by no means essential in any way (such as your other examples electricity and medical treatment). You don't need 100meg service and for that matter you really don't even need to stream video. Essential internet (wouldn't you agree) is really basic things and the bandwidth to support email, going to the government website, shopping for a car, etc. I don't consider enough bandwidth so several members of one family can all stream Netflix at one time essential. And that is what I had in my mind as I was making my comment.
In that respect the faster internet service might be more like elective surgery (say plastic surgery but not reconstructive surgery) which is not the same as medical treatment in an ER.
Of course not, your attempt to analogise the situation with Adobe is ridiculous. A better analogy would be if Adobe had a file-size restricted version and charged $300 to "upgrade" to the unrestricted version - the upgrade of course would be a simple patch to remove the restriction, that anyone could run locally by downloading the patch. Instead however they'd insist it was a hardware change and send someone to futz around on your computer.
Now of course you can charge what you like and price differentiation doesn't have to relate to actual costs at all, but lying to deceive the customer that the charge is paying for some direct action of employees necessary to enact the alteration is simply fraud.
Now there are of course costs, upstream bandwidth, data handling at intermediate routers and such. That's why it's entirely reasonable for them to charge more for a faster/broader data plan - http://www.comcast.com/internet-service.html it's already charged at more than twice the rate of the 50 Mbps plan (whilst I imagine the real _additional_ cost is probably maybe a few dollars); but that's fine as they're not pretending it costs more because they have to pay for faster electricity or something daft.
I don't see why my analogy is any more ridiculous than yours. Windows 7 Home is more-or-less an artificially limited version of Windows 7 Pro. You can pay money and "unlock" the Pro features. I'm OK with that. Even though I'm unlocking bits that were already on my hard drive, there's no scandal here.
If we both agree you can charge whatever you want and price differences don't have to relate to actual costs then what's the problem?
You are upset solely that they called it an "installation fee" rather than an "upgrade fee"? I see your point... but like I said, hardly the crime of the century.
you need more competition on isp's on US. I live in Mexico, every year I get more Mbps on my plan because the competition is pushing for better plans at lower prices... I just receive a letter from my company notifying how many Mbps now I have, and why is better to stay with them...
US ISPs seem to offer faster speeds every year too. But I of course agree that they generally need more competition. Verizon finally lit up my block for FiOS and I'm getting faster speeds at 25% less cost.
I supposed there is no morality in the world that say you shouldn't be able to charge 150 bucks or whatever price for 5 megabits, but the quality of life would improve immensely with high bandwidth.
That is, the difference between slowly browsing the textual internet forever on dailup and watching khanacademy youtube videos with a crappy DSL connection. Imagine that everyone are on gigabit connections? What would that entails in term of increased well-being and economic propserity to humanity?
Cable companies don't seem to care about anybody but themsleves. Not the future of humanity, not the employees, not the concept of enlightened self-interest, not even the rich. They only care about MONEY.
I'm not usually one to stand up for big businesses (especially telecoms companies) but you're being ridiculous.
>> "watching khanacademy youtube videos"
You don't need crazy fast internet to watch YouTube videos. I've been watching theme fine since I was on 1 mobs broadband. And do you really think that if we suddenly have super fast connections people will spend time watching educational content instead of porn and cat videos?
>> "Cable companies don't seem to care about anybody but themselves"
They care about their shareholders and maximising profits. They are running a telecoms business not trying to improve humanity!
You don't need crazy fast internet to watch YouTube videos. I've been watching theme fine since I was on 1 mobs broadband. And do you really think that if we suddenly have super fast connections people will spend time watching educational content instead of porn and cat videos?
My point of comparsion was between dailup and DSL, and how DSL enables khanacademy videos. With faster internet, it will alow things beyond khanacademy videos.
And do you really think that if we suddenly have super fast connections people will spend time watching educational content instead of porn and cat videos?
A faster internet allow more things that can be done to improve humanity as well allow humanity to watch better porn and cat videos.
They care about their shareholders and maximising profits. They are running a telecoms business not trying to improve humanity!
If you the rest of the comment. I was noting how short-sighted the cable corporations are. If anything, they are like paperclip AI that wishes only to make paperclips. Cable corporations are like that, except it's all about printing money.
It seems like they are charging $250 for unplugging and plugging in a modem. Sure, most people will pay it without thinking twice. But is it really necessary to inflate our already high broadband costs?
Comcast charged me a "wireless setup fee"[1] when the technician came over to setup my new connection. The problem is: he didn't touch my personal wireless router nor was there any mention of the wifi fee on the receipt when he left.
After some time on the phone, I was able to get my monthly cable modem fee removed (seemly forever) but they tried to sneak it back into my bill recently.
I wish we had more options for ISPs in america.
[1] Not sure of the exact name or cost but it was around $75-$90.
Related... Recently Comcast claimed that they did an "internal audit" and found that I was not charged a monthly fee for the modem I rent from them.
The only wrinkle is that I provided my own modem.
Then they insisted that I "prove" that I purchased a modem, I suggested that if they charge me for something that they have to proof that they sold me said service.
Anyway, I haven't heard back since. Waiting for the next bill.
Has anybody else experienced this, seems like a scam to me.
Bit of a different experience here: Cox Cable recently performed the same upgrade, but instead of charging me $250 for an installation, they instead decided to inject JS and HTML into every non-https site I visited (wel, once every hour or so) with a reminder that I've been upgraded to a new tier at no additional cost, but I need to buy a DOCSIS3.0 router.
I... I think that's a fair deal better than being charged $250.
I can verify this. I just built the house I live in now last year, so I'm the very first person to ever have Comcast / cable installed at my house. I have 105 megabit internet and there is no fee.
I've talked to a couple techs who mentioned it, but the appointment I made there was no such mention of fee nor was I ever charged.
Question for folks who have 50 or 105 Mbps connections. Do you really get that speed? I have Century link and am supposed to get 12 Mbps. However, I'm lucky if I get 5 Mbps. Sometimes it slows down to a crawl - 50 to 60 Kbps.
Isn't this the same as the $30 "activation fee" that almost all cell phone providers charge? Not for anything but just to add a fee for the hell of it? Because I can fee?
"After 10 hours on the phone with customer service, two trips to the local Comcast office and a chat with a rogue technician, the myth has been busted"
So the author spent maybe 12 hours figuring this out? Is his or her time worth more than 20 or so bucks per hour?
It doesn't work that way. If you can take any given hour and trade it for a certain amount of money, then you're lucky. I don't know anybody who can take 12 hours and trade them for $240, or say $600 (as you are hinting that this time is worth significantly more than $20/h).
I could get a second job, but that would pay less per hour, would start at a higher (fixed) number of hours, and bring a lot of responsibilities. Plus, it would cut into my precious free time.
Only for hyper-demanded successful freelancers time is completely fungable and arbitrarily tradeable into dollars. The rest of us can't monetarize their free time so easily. And I think a $250 saving for a day's work is pretty good for regular people. Besides, I think there was a bit of hyperbole in the "10 hours"...
And this is the lesson that Capitalism teaches: if you do not like the ethics of another company, you are free to create a competing business model and hurt their ROI (if their current customers agree with you).
It's not all about the money, maybe he enjoyed exposing Comcast's lies - most of the time anything interesting/exciting beats money, or people wouldn't be writing posts on Tumblr, drawing digital art, fixing old stuff and commenting on Hacker News...
Good point. Makes me think of people who go on mileage runs to accrue airline miles for status. They tend to compare value in cents per mile, and if the run yields a low enough cost per mile, it's worth their time to take a flight just to turn around and come back. It would be interesting to see a similar calculation taking into consideration time, likelihood of getting on the HN front page (or being the top post), and value of getting on the HN front page.
I work for a telco and we recently upgraded our cable infrastructure to handle 100Mbit (previously 50Mbit was the fastest). All the customer needs is a DOCSIS 3.0 modem, we re-provision in our system and they'll get 100Mbit. They come into our store, swap modems, and they're done.
As for the hilarious/stupid/disappointing things OP was told by sales/tech support/whoever, I can also confirm that. Every day I have conversations with people all over the business who don't know the basics of our business like the difference between Megabit Megabyte, etc. etc.
Our company has also started ripping people off in similar ways (like a $50 fee to downgrade internet speed) and they'll even use the same lies and stupid answers when we as staff question this move. It's a money grab, plan and simple.