As a German I was shocked to find out that in the US Charter would not let me configure anything in “my” Charter modem. No dynDNS server, no ports forwarding, not inspecting what is wrong, not even blocking internet for certain MAC addresses. And when I asked if I can just buy my own modem, they said that whenever there is a problem and you have your own modem, they will charge you a fee PER DEVICE that is connected (how would they even now if I use my own modem?).
Quite overwhelming for me who just ALWAYS just buys and configures Fritz!Boxes anytime I need to setup a new internet connection somewhere.
Here we have the richest country in the world, inventor of the internet with the most innovative tech companies with the absolute worst internet experience among developed countries: Overpriced, bad quality of service and zero flexibility. Customers are treated like absolute dummies, it is a totally different world. And Germany is actually quite bad compared to asian countries.
> Here we have the richest country in the world, inventor of the internet with the most innovative tech companies with the absolute worst internet experience among developed countries
It makes sense when you consider that the US has a much higher resistance to business regulation and consumer protection- less overhead for innovative new businesses but also allowing entrenched interests to consolidate as much as they have.
The city of Alameda originally had municipal coax network throughout the island - but the city council voted to turn over control of the network to comcast - and they dont allow any municipal networks to be installed...
In the US, if you have local, small ISP(s) serving your address, you really should give them a try.
Here in San Jose, CA, I'm pretty happy with Sail. It actually took me around a year to bring them to me: Initially my address was not served by them, I have to say I "want business internet" on their website to make someone contact me, and eventually bring their residential service to me (they use some short range wireless technology, a dish but not pointing to satellites but their other relay dishes nearby, so the latency is much better than satellites).
Another thing is that I refuse to use any service that doesn't allow me to use my own router directly without any additional NAT. This is why I chose Sail over Sonic, a more popular local ISP in the Bay Area: In my area Sonic's only service is the one they resale from AT&T, which doesn't allow you to use your own router.
The market process turns these tensions between suppliers and consumers into a profit opportunity for extant and would-be competitors. The sad fact is that the market process is actively interfered with by the political process.
The history of the US and Canada is one where well-meaning individuals have been duped into giving powers to politicians who in turn create "reasonable" regulations that have the effect of protecting select firms from the market process. And when the costs of these anti-competitive regulations emerge (higher prices, worse service), those same well-meaning individuals demand those same politicians to "fix" things, but only in ways that further entrench those monopolies rather than removing the source of their monopoly power at the root.
That's funny considering people in Germany complain about the same problems. But yeah, I really hate this stuff, I'm running my own router connected directly to the fiber cable my ISP laid to my home. No limitations.
What does the ISP lose here? Really, the only reason I can think of for these limits is to charge more for "optional" services and to hide the fact that you're oversubscribing. My ISP does it too, by providing routers that can't even reach advertised speeds. Fortunately, with a decent device, I can get the full speed.
This law is missing a key ingredient that we have in the EU: the ISP need to provide you the credentials you need to access your service. No tricks where only the ISP provided router is whitelisted to get them from the network.
Yeah this is how AT&T fiber forces you to pay for their router/WiFi combo box. The box contains an authentication certificate that is required for connecting to them. So frustrating
Congress needs to pass a law so this stops being a political football under control of the Executive. You'll know if all the fuss about Net Neutrality was empty rhetoric if the Democrats don't propose any legislation in the next session. It's my controversial opinion that most of the debate around this issue at the policy level is political theatrics based more on partisanship and personalities than material differences in proposed and enforced law or administrative policy.
Definitely frustrating, but I've found it is worth the effort to bypass their router after authenticating.
This can be done by authenticating, then using a managed switch to swap the wall module from the VLAN with the at&t router, to a VLAN with another router spoofing the at&t router's MAC address.
I've been using this approach for years and have found it worth it as I do not trust the provided router. The downside is I have to spend five minutes going through this process every time there is a power outage, luckily there are only a few a year here so not much of an issue.
I just run my own router behind AT&T's router. Everything in the home connects to my own router. The loss of bandwidth is minimal, if any.
Are there any benefits to what you're doing over just doing that?
Edit: In my case, bandwidth drops from 970mbps at the ATT gateway to 930mbps at the internal router (2nd NAT). Latecy drop is higher, from 3-4ms at the ATT gateway to about 9-11ms, but most likely that is due to the Moca 2.5 that I've had to run between ATT and my internal router.
What you're describing is probably a "double NAT" situation, where both your ISP router and your own router are providing NAT. This can work fine albeit with some extra latency for simple use cases, but if you ever run any services on your home network that either rely on UPnP or port forwarding, it'll fall apart.
The best-of-both-worlds solution here is to have the outer ISP-provided router put your own router into some kind of DMZ, or use a bridge mode if the ISP router provides it. This basically turns your ISP-provided router into a dumber modem, and leaves all NAT and routing to your own hardware.
The AT&T router I have has an "IP Passthrough" mode which basically does a DMZ with my downstream router, but the router receives a public IP address. The AT&T router is essentially "invisible", but it takes up so much physical space, power, costs me $10/month, and is one more link in the fragile chain between me and the Internet.
Other comments here mention how to put the AT&T router behind a Ubiquiti gateway and proxy the authentication to it via some scripts. This reduces the reliance on the AT&T router for direct traffic, but you still need the router operational for those authentication handshakes.
The latency measured inside is around 9-11ms, so much higher than the 3-4ms measured at the ATT gateway.
I am not doing any port-forwarding, but I can definitely see it run into all kinds of problems, or require some configuration beyond my simple skills.
I'll investigate your comment: The best-of-both-worlds solution here is to have the outer ISP-provided router put your own router into some kind of DMZ, or use a bridge mode if the ISP router provides it. This basically turns your ISP-provided router into a dumber modem, and leaves all NAT and routing to your own hardware.
For me the loss of bandwidth was more severe. I gained about 200mbps on my 1gbps connection after bypassing (~650mbps -> ~850mbps). I also had a significant decrease in latency (~10%). Note, these improvements were even with the DMZ+ passthrough enabled on their router
The router they provided also had a tendency to both get 'congested' and drop connections.
Last, they have remote access to the provided router and do automatic, remote updates, which I am opposed to. I suspect they have other features they can abuse remotely. I want to control all my own hardware.
> every time there is a power outage, luckily there are only a few a year
loled - i mean sure its no biggy, but i dont even remember when i had to reprogram the ovens clock the last time. probably been a year or two since the last outage.
Unfortunately no longer the case with the new router that has a built in ONT and (according to forums, anyways) doesn’t use the same long-lived 802.11x mechanism :(
Thankfully, AT&T doesn't run PPPoE on fiber (but hush before they get any bright ideas), but even if the 'residential gateway' is in bridge mode, it's performimg a useless function for users that don't need/want it to do NAT or WiFi or whatever it does for TV.
Ethernet on one side, and ethernet on the other, a couple ms between them.
A question for those in the know, can I not just take the SFP plug that plugs into my AT&T gateway/routr and plug it into an EdgeRouter with a SFP port?
I thought SFP is the one doing all fiber-to-ethernet conversion, so would that work?
You cannot. The router AT&T provides authenticates the connection. What you could do is run your own router with a copied MAC that forwards the auth and keep alive packets. Here is a guide for OpenWRT. https://pyther.net/2020/05/03/bypass-att-gateway-openwrt.htm...
I am wondering if this US Law is specific to Cable Companies, does it also apply to those using Fibre and good old DSL?
And in the EU, does that mean you could theoretically buy your own ONT + Router if you have an Fibre Internet Connection?
I hate having so many boxes, so I have always preferred to have Modem / ONT + Router in One, but it seems to be an unpopular option around the world. As a matter of fact I would even want my TV to be the Wireless Router so I could no boxes underneath my TV.
The credentials are not enough. I am French and replaced the ISP (Orange) provided router (which is a piece of crap) with my own router.
The reverse engineering needed to get access is huge. There are people who managed to match the credentials with the DHCP request to be sent but Orange can change this anytime.
Other providers (Bouygues for instance) are easier as they do not try to do that.
What surprises me is that they have maybe 0.001% of their subscribers who will even think about replacing the box (and dealing withe the issues as this is not supported) so I tend to think that the ISP is just dumb rather than malicious.
Yupp its a german thing. Here Vodafone have been forced to allow other routers. In the UK virgin wouldn't let me use my own, it had to be in crappy bridge mode.
1. This law does not affect Comcast, because Comcast does not charge you any rental or extra fees for using your own modem. Switch from a Comcast modem to your own, and your internet bill comes down exactly by what had been the cost of your Comcast rental.
2. Comcast generally raises costs every year or so, almost always at this time of year.
I have been with Comcast for about a decade and live in SV. I started out paying them $30/mo for 10 mbps and now pay $25/mo for 25 mbps. Their 'regular prices' are ridiculous, but I just call them once a year and ask for a discount (and sometimes say I'll leave) and they find a discount if I commit to a year. There isn't any competition where I live, so I don't mind.
I'd be interested to know if others in SV (or elsewhere) have seen effective prices (not just nominal rack rates) increasing.
For the record, I don't love Comcast and have even written blog posts about how much I dislike them. But in terms of pricing, I've had an OK experience over a long period of time.
While it doesn't effect Comcast directly, it does change perceptions and forces in the market. That is, the market can now bear, and Comcast is taking advantage of that. Or so it seems.
Though to give Comcast some (microscopic) credit, they've never attempted to charge me to rent my own equipment in the decade or so I've been dealing with them.
i bought my own cable modem, installed it, never got around to calling them or returning their modem, and after maybe another month or two, comcast just stopped charging me the rental fee and didn't ask for their modem back.
They will charge you for it if you ever cancel service. (And they'll charge the full retail price when it was new, not the current value.)
Return their modem, get a receipt, double check the serial number on the receipt matches the equipment you returned, and save that receipt. You may need it if you ever move or drop Comcast in the future.
Over that period of time you may be able to pay them the current balance sheet value of the exact device they let you on the date your service started. By now it has depreciated entirely.
I think I heard about that in a story posted probably the malicious compliance reddit group, and am NOT a lawyer...
Last time I had comcast internet, they charged me a rental for a modem I never even received in the first place since I told them I had my own modem from day 1.
Many ISPs use limited-duration promotional rates to sign up new customers, after which a discounted rate returns to a higher rate. We can debate the pros/cons of that practice as a marketing tactic, but that's not the same as the unfair charging practice described in the article. As far as I know, Comcast does not engage in forcing customers to rent equipment.
To be clear, this law prevents a company from charging you the rental fee even if you provide your own modem. They often do it under the guise of support - while still admitting that they will not actually be able to provide support for models that are effectively not in their support database (because they only include the models they rent)!
>They often do it under the guise of support - while still admitting that they will not actually be able to provide support for models that are effectively not in their support database (because they only include the models they rent)!
Because I purchased a (supported) cable modem from a third party, my ISP won't provide services which are supposed to be included in my service.
Their systems don't "recognize" my cable modem as existing on their network, so services that should be provided through my link are denied, claiming that my devices "aren't on the network."
It's a huge scam. We need real competition in internet service providers.
> How could you vote with your wallet if there is not competition?
Actually, where I live there is competition.
In fact, there is a second cable ISP in my apartment building.
What's more, in addition to the cable ISP I have (Spectrum), I have a DSL link (Fusion) as well.
I'd dump Spectrum (and tried to do so), but long term construction has blocked access to the access points for my building, so I'm stuck with them for now.
Once the scaffolding blocking access is removed (it's been up for more than three years), Spectrum will be history for me.
Even more, Verizon has been claiming they're trying to get access to implement FIOS in my building, but I think they're lying since they were able to site a cell tower on the roof a couple years ago.
However, I live in the most densely populated city in the US.
In most other places in the US there are, at most, two ISPs which provide service. Usually a cable provider and a DSL or Satellite provider.
That's what I meant be a lack of competition. My apologies if I didn't make that clear.
Actually, that remote admin protocol ISP used TR-069 is a open protocol that was implemented on many router you can buy on the market. Even without remote control, there is nothing prevent them from just tell you the parameter you need to use(pppoe account or whatever). They can't support it is clearly a lie in most case.
DOCSIS authentication is based on the HFC-side MAC address of the modem (part of the DOCSIS management protocol) and TR-069 is not required for any basic functionality - it is typically only used to manage functionality that it not common in third-party modems like an integrated WiFi AP.
The more complicated matter is that firmware is typically delivered to the modem via the DOCSIS management protocol (lower level than TR-069) and so the ISP must have firmware available for all supported modems. This is the major factor that leads to compatibility lists. It is possible for the ISP to not manage firmware but most don't want to take the risk as a malfunctioning modem can take down a neighborhood in some cases.
> as a malfunctioning modem can take down a neighborhood
The worst case scenario is a poorly secured cable modem gets infected by malware, then infects a bunch of other cable modems before switching to "take down the neighborhood" mode in which it transmits random garbage onto the cable. Since the cable is a shared resource, any misbehaving modem can prevent all others being able to connect.
Perhaps just 1% vulnerable modems across the USA, and most people's home internet would be offline for weeks until whoever in every single neighborhood has an infected modem is identified and unplugged.
Considering that, I can completely see why they wouldn't want you using a cheapo modem you got from Walmart.
Yeah I totally agree. One bad modem could take out/degrade internet for hundreds or thousands of customers connected to the same CMTS. It's actually surprising it doesn't happen more often.
I don't see many (any?) people trying to connect their own GPON equipment to GPON fibre networks.
> likely overheat and degrade the connection if you use it so violently.
No need to transmit all the time to cause disruption... You could for example repeatedly transmit packet headers followed by a long break, and collision avoidance algorithms would stop any other device transmitting.
Frontier used to - they were sued in multiple states for it so I'm not sure if they've stopped everywhere already or not. Comcast does in some markets. AT&T fiber still does as far as I know.
I've had the privilege to live for the last five years or so in locations with multiple options for ISP, each with a major cable provider and another ISP offering gigabit fiber to the home. Specifically, markets where both providers can offer high speed connections and you can realistically expect both to serve your residence.
My experience is that even this minimal amount of competition absolutely cuts through the bullshit that you get from a monopoly provider.
Classifying as utility companies may be one path to the end state we both desire, but lived experience proves it is not singularly so.
Do note that in the US, the largest influence on the monopoly position of ISPs is not to do with any inherent property of the industry, but due to exclusive contracts/rights of way that local governments grant to ISPs. Obviously, the ISPs seek this sort of arrangement and lobby for it. The regulation that can help the ISP situation in the US may just as well be restrictions on municipalities as restrictions on ISPs.
Last year I had to deal with Comcast with regards to an identity theft.
When I refused to jump through their extra hoops (I had provided them more than enough information to prove my claim, they wanted everything just short of a DNA Swab,) they told me that I would never be able to get service through them unless I kissed the ring.
When I told them that I base my residency choices on being able to -not- have Comcast as a cable provider, their script rather obviously did not have a response to that based on where the conversation went after.
They -expect- to be a a monopoly, and their internal policies already reflect that.
Yup. I'd love to see some sort of automatic regulation for situations of market failure. E.g., If the 2 largest players in a market have more than an 80% market share, the presumption should be regulation.
In SF, I have multiple ISP options. I get gigabit fiber for $40/month and no nonsense. But my girlfriend lives in an area with Comcast only, where the price is much higher, the service is much worse, and they had loaded her bill down with absurd equipment rental charges.
When sufficient competition doesn't exist, we shouldn't just abandon people to predatory companies.
In general, I agree, though I think I'd also include some consideration of size or barriers to entry. As an example, photomultiplier tubes are used to detect very small amounts of light, down to a few photons. They are primarily produced by Hamamatsu, which has about 90% market share for PMTs. And they are ridiculously reliable, used in detectors that last for decades. Even without competition in PMTs, they make good products. It's a very small market, and doesn't have room for much competition, so I don't think that market share alone can be the sole determinant.
That said, if the quality were to drop, if they were to engage in anticompetitive behavior, if they were to provide tools to subvert an election, if they were to repeatedly buy out competitors, or any combination of the above, I would drop them in a heartbeat.
In that case, I think there's not a lot a regulator has to do. But I think it's still appropriate to have a regulator tracking the space, so that they can quickly respond to the sorts of declines you discuss.
The presumption should be making it easy to enable competition, which the current rules don't do. Make it easy for Google to come in and lay fiber on their own dime.
I think Japan does that. NTT provide physical connection, but you also need a separated contract with ISP. The problem is that everything just become more complex and two side blaming each other when something go wrong.
I used to do this in Seattle with a DSL connection. The physical link was through Qwest (now CenturyLink), but the ISP was Avvanta (formerly blarg.net) so that I could host services from my home. Looks like still offer that option, although I can't imagine a lot of people are signing up for DSL anymore.[1]
IIRC, the price difference was enough that only people who really wanted a public IP block out of their home would have done it.
> but you also need a separated contract with ISP.
Which is unnecessary: only the 'retail' ISP should really need to talk to the 'wholesale' fibre provider.
In fact, in the Ars example, on initial connection, if the fibre has no existing contract, you are sent to a landing page which lists all the available ISPs.
Clicking on one (AFAICT) sends you to their order page where you enter your personal/billing information to sign up, and henceforth they are your Layer 3 ISP.
In Japan, there are some ISP that bundle the contract (they deal with NTT (the fiber provider) themselves). In that case, if you are moving ISP, you need to re-do the entire contract, including another set-up fee for the fiber line.
AFAICT, to switch, you go to your current ISP's portal and click on "cancel". Your fibre drop is then disassociated from them, and then when you reboot your router you get back the "which ISP do you want?" page.
The fibre line is pre-existing just like your electrical or natural gas probably is now: there's no re-setting-up that component. You are in a default VLAN that gives you options, and when you sign up the VLAN is changed.
Municipal broadband is an interesting idea but physical infrastructure inevitably needs maintenance and I'm not sure tax dollars should be used to maintain fiber optic lines to residences. Maybe governments can build the initial infrastructure which can then be leased out to ISPs who will also be responsible for maintaining it.
>Municipal broadband is an interesting idea but physical infrastructure inevitably needs maintenance and I'm not sure tax dollars should be used to maintain fiber optic lines to residences.
There's no need to lease the fiber infrastructure, just provide interconnect nodes for ISPs.
Municipal broadband maintenance can be paid for by charging interconnect fees to the ISPs who wish to service that area.
Once the infrastructure is in place, barriers to entry for ISPs is very low. All you need is bandwidth and connection to the municipal network.
Maintenance can be provided on a cost plus basis by an independent (i.e., not the ISPs) company that manages and maintains the infrastructure.
And surpluses from interconnect fees can be used for both network enhancements and other municipal programs.
Not really. A better comparison would be electric cable where the company who provides you power is also responsible for maintaining the infrastructure. It's more practical to do it this way, otherwise every time your lights went out, you would have two parties who would be potentially responsible for fixing it.
>Not really. A better comparison would be electric cable where the company who provides you power is also responsible for maintaining the infrastructure. It's more practical to do it this way, otherwise every time your lights went out, you would have two parties who would be potentially responsible for fixing it.
Where I live, the company that delivers the power is responsible for maintaining the delivery infrastructure, while those who provide the power are (or can be) completely separate entities.
As such, it seems to me that even your example would argue for municipal broadband.
So the government should pay for a thing to be created but private enterprise should maintain it? I believe if anything, you flipped this. Because when I think private enterprise, I think maintenance and long term strategy of only profit. They will do nothing and then dump the hot mess back on the people when it breaks down.
Last mile infra should be owned, operated and maintained by the people. ISPs should connect to the network and offer services. I should be able to have multiple ISPs and free local network access.
Public employees working on municipal internet are not going to be carrying weapons or have the idea that literally everyone they encounter is out to kill them drilled in with every training session.
> Classifying ISPs as the utility companies they are is the only way to end the gouging and systematic fraud.
This would further entrench them as government-chartered monopolies. Heck, most of the current anti-competitive forces extend from either explicit government monopoly grants or regulatory capture.
Or continue to beg the political process to solve the problems they created when they interfered with the market process.
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
> This would further entrench them as government-chartered monopolies.
They are going to be entrenched as government-chartered monopolies any way you look at it. ISPs either need a right of way to lay cable or a license to use RF spectrum. Even if you could magically overcome those problems, or are willing to deal with the chaos of removing the applicable regulations, the Internet would become fragmented since the dominant players would freeze competition out of the market. (Recall the olden days of online service providers when everyone's network was independent of everyone else's, and even then it was only regulation of the telephone companies that allowed those service providers to exist.)
> ISPs either need a right of way to lay cable or a license to use RF spectrum.
As I understand it, both of those can (and do) support multiple competing services. Further, regulation dealing with scarce (ostensibly government-owned) resources is significantly less anti-competitive than, say, regulation requiring all would-be ISPs to also serve cost-prohibitive rural areas.
Look, I can appreciate the position that a government-granted public monopoly might be better for consumers than a government-granted private monopoly, but consumers might still be better served by removing those government-created barriers to competition.
> the dominant players would freeze competition out of the market
How do you imagine they would achieve that using only market forces?
> it was only regulation of the telephone companies that allowed those service providers to exist
I'm not grasping your argument. Perhaps unrelated to your point, but telephone service was (and largely still is) a government-granted monopoly. And there too, rather than removing those regulatory barriers to competition, the illusion of competition was created by adding more regulations.
Instead of such an overreach, we should go the other direction towards a freer market. We should get rid of the red tape that lets these cable companies hold a monopoly so that companies like Google can come in and lay fiber at their own expense if they so desire.
Implying "red tape" is the only barrier to entry is a pretty big oversimplification. Also calling it an "overreach" without any justification for that characterization doesn't help anyone.
To extend his point, "red tape" isn't the only regulation-related problem. Don't forget that in many local governments gave monopoly grants to select ISPs. Then there's the "bootleggers and baptists" [1] effect, where well-meaning regulation has a larger anti-competitive effect benefiting extant firms, e.g., requiring would-be ISPs to also serve cost-prohibitive rural areas.
Pretending that extant government regulation is the never the problem is just as bad as pretending it's the only problem.
I never said it was the only barrier, but it is far and away the primary barrier. Google was laying fiber in many cities but the regulatory burden was quite stifling.
As far as justification, it goes the other way around. If you want to interfere in the free market, you need to provide good justification that this problem is not being created by the regulatory environment already. 99.9% of the time, it is.
Earlier this year I purchased my own router and modem and when I called Spectrun to cancel my rental, I was informed I needed to sign up for a new package - the price of which was about $2 more than I was previously paying WITH rented equipment
That's amazingly customer hostile. In this area with Spectrum you can self-service swap out your cable modem as often as you want by logging into a support portal and entering the MAC address of the new modem and waiting a minute for their system to provision it. No CSR interaction required.
Lucky man. I was doing this during the start of lockdown (when spectrun was having an outbreak at their CS office). So calling to get the modem provisioned took about an hour and a half. The initial provision file was wrong so had to go through waiting on hold again
comcast did the exact thing to me. I had to sign up for a new plan. But they also wouldn't let me use the new plan promos. Oh, and a month later when I got my first bill at the new rate it still had rental fees. Took about 8 months of calling each month to have the rental fee go away. And then when I finally cancelled because I was moving they charged me for not returning the modem/router I returned over a year ago. Fun times.
Have either of you filed FTC and/or FCC claims? The more data we give those agencies, the better chance we have that someone will actually care and finally break them up.
Can't speak to Spectrum specifically but in a past life I did customer service with a cellular company. Their billing system was set up so that you couldn't update the features on an account (a feature being a data plan or texting plan, for example) unless _all_ of the features on the account were current.
It was a pretty blatant move to push customers off of grandfathered plans. For example this was about 10 years ago when iPhones were becoming popular, and at the time at least there were iPhone specific features for data plan and visual voicemail. So someone upgrading to an iPhone would be forced to give up any grandfathered plans on their account.
Can they give everyone a free router and charge a $10/month system access fee regardless of whether you use their router? This is how cell service in Canada used to be structured haha.
Generally I’m not a fan of this kind of targeted legislation and rule making. Pricing should be mandated to be advertised all-in or left alone; these folks aren’t gonna let this income go.
And then to make sure nobody runs off with a free* router, they can add a $100 account early termination fee. Thus solving the problem once and for all.
I’m looking to get away from all the sorts of access fees and charges with my current carrier, yet after doing the math the ETF would have come out to a full calendar year of the same fees plus about 3%.
Oh except despite having multiple carriers in my city, none of the other ones seem interested in servicing my building.
Comcast has never charged me for bringing my own modem.
More frustratingly, though, they charge you more for internet-only service than they do for TV+Internet. Every time you try to go Internet-only, they offer you a 'deal' where they throw in cable TV service for -$5. And then they ship you a cable TV box that you store in a box in your attic under penalty of hundreds of dollars if you lose it and can't return it at the end of your service.
I've returned the cable TV box before, and they just ship you a new one. ("We've noticed you have TV service but do not have a cable TV box, here is the equipment you need! Aren't we nice?!")
Thankfully I've got FTTH now. Slightly-less-thankfully I'm on ATT so I've got to pay the rental fee, but it's still a much better deal than Comcast ever offered. When Sonic finally serves my house directly Real Soon Like Now, the bill will be cut in half again. But still, mandatory rental fee.
you can get the internet for the best price they have if you are willing to just cancel. call them and ask for the best price for internet only. explain you’re going to cancel. if they give you the best price great. if not cancel and switch to a special price for a new customer for your SO.
I’ve done this so many times that I’ve lost count. I sucks that it’s a time drain doing this + last time I cancelled I had to buy a new modem (because the old one was not supported- which is BS because it worked for 5 years on their network already)
Actually say you want to cancel. You will be routed to a cancellation department. They are ridiculously empowered. I have a memo to do this with a few services once a year.
I'm curious to know where you live. I've had Comcast for a long time and have looked into pricing on a regular basis. It has never been less expensive for me to add other services, and I never have. Instead, I just go with the "starter' level of service, which is currently 25 mbps. When it's running properly, that's more than enough speed for us.
SF Bay Area. It's been a couple of years, but, IIRC, 100 or 200Mbps was $65/mo and the same plan with cable TV was $60. I've actually never had any issues with the quality of their service, I just hate the scripted CSR/upsell situation. But that's the same everywhere.
I briefly had gigabit with them for $140/mo, just because I could. (because I've complained for so many years that if I could get gigabit, I would). 1000 down/50 up or similar. But eventually the novelty wore off and I downgraded to 250.
Currently for me, symmetric gigabit is $80/mo with ATT, $90 resold by sonic, but if/when Sonic brings their service directly it's $60.
As a 2 person household, yeah, I'd have a hard time saying 25Mbps down is not enough. It's a lot of work to use 100 down, forget gigabit. And there's a bit difference between filling a 100mbps pipe, and actually being limited by it.
If you join that class action you can bet that you’ll never get any of that money back. The best you can hope for is a coupon for 10% off one month of Frontier service, but you’ll need to provide your SSN and other personal information to a third-party that is processing the coupon requests. Most won’t risk exposing their PII in such a way for very little return.
However, the lawyers will receive millions from the class action.
Comcast's ahead of this in Illinois. They gave a significant discount for using their modem / router for "unlimited" internet. I'd rather not use their modem. I already gave my own, but it would cost about $500 more per year to use my own.
Same thing in California. I have the exact same situation going on. We had to unplug our equipment because using our own would effectively mean a 35 dollar cost to use it, because they offer "unlimited internet" (the old non-data capped service that used to be standard) for a discount. So, 15 cable modem rental gives saves you 50 for "unlimited" — you just have to use their gear! The customer benefits!
It's crazy making. I do NOT want them to know everything about how we use their service, what devices are connected, usage patterns, etc. But we can't avoid it. We're getting data farmed and we're billed extra if we don't allow it.
This bill does nothing to alleviate this situation for customers, and Comcast just announced that this data cap scheme is going to be rolling out across their network.
They have essentially monopoly control in a lot of markets and there are practical limits to how much they can charge people before the outcry makes regulatory capture more expensive. So the play is to take more household budget from other companies, they're pushing hard into mobile. Having their ISP customers provide them with blanket Wifi coverage allows them to deliver this service in residential areas without battling for tower space.
Xfinity Mobile, at least in Illinois, is a Verizon MVNO. So presumably their wifi network just gives them negotiating leverage for their carrier arrangement.
It's unfortunately true with a ton of things: hotels, rental cars, etc. Taxes, franchise fees, other taxes, facilities charges, etc. can all add on 20% or more. Especially if you're comparison shopping, you really need to verify whether you're looking at a base fee or the final tally.
Airbnb does this all the time. Their advertised prices don’t include cleaning fees.
If Airbnb included those fees the pricing would often come out higher than a hotel in many cases. And hotels include cleaning costs as part of the nightly rate
If you search for a certain date range, Airbnb will calculate and display the full price for each property on the SERP. It makes sense to compare asymptotically when you don't know the length of stay. The cable and telephone companies billing practices on the other hand are purely deceptive with no utility for the consumer.
Resort fees aren't new. Perhaps they've become more common but I haven't noticed. The more common issue with hotels, which isn't really their fault, is you might have 5 different taxes added to the bill which can add up to a good 20% of the total bill.
I think requiring to advertise full price is even more market friendly than sneaking in more fees. This just incentivizes dishonest behavior. It’s hard to advocate against such a rule. The US health system is also in dire need of such a rule.
You can rent cars, houses, computers - what law would normally forbid those financial relationships?
Cable companies and other utility providers need special treatment in the law because they enjoy special advantages as monopolists. Instead of saying "anyone is allowed to dig up the road, bury cables and let the customers choose the provider with the best service" we often allow only one or two cable providers and add some special rules to make them treat their hostage customers better.
>Instead of saying "anyone is allowed to dig up the road, bury cables and let the customers choose the provider with the best service" we often allow only one or two cable providers and add some special rules to make them treat their hostage customers better.
Wouldn't installing conduit be a still-better option for consumers? Also, the government-granted ISP monopoly approach prohibits would-be providers that don't need to use cable.
Anyway, your dichotomy ignores the historical reality: local politicians subsidized builds by promising providers they didn't have to worry about competition, subsidies extracted from the future captured customers, subsidies that are in fact the very things people complain about now.
As far as I understand it, this is about saying a company can't charge you a rental fee for your modem when you're using your own modem you bought yourself. It does seem like a special law just for this shouldn't be necessary.
As a customer we're already paying for "renting" telcos' infrastructure which delivers the service to us. Modem is an essential piece in the infrastructure, without it consumer cannot get the service.
The fact that telcos itemize the modem means it's supposed to be a kind of elective, just as in older days when one could rent a "fancy" phone directly (with a voice-mail indicator!) from the provider. Those were add-ons, with extra fees.
I see no validation for not allowing customers to use own modems. Sure, the techical support fee will be gamed in such case. But at least this will clearly separate the infrastructure from the user equipment.
If modem indeed falls into user equipment category, then the rental must be elective. If it's infrastructure, then it has been already paid for in the delivery fees.
Companies can generally agree to sell you a product only as part of a package deal. You can't get the Happy Meal toy without paying for the burger and fries. So normally they could insist you can't get the cable service without paying for the modem rental.
Whether they are allowed call it a "meal deal" or a "convenience fee" or a "special discount" or a "rental fee" is more about marketing than economics.
>You can't get the Happy Meal toy without paying for the burger and fries.
I'm sure your general point stands, but you absolutely can. And in San Francisco, you technically can only buy the toy separately, though for much cheaper when paired with the meal.
Once again, just like with Covid, we can look to what New Zealand did for the obvious and correct answer:
Have the government lay fibre to every home and business, and allow any ISP to compete for service over that fibre.
Australia tried, and around 10% of homes got connected. But the conservative Liberal government got in power and changed it from fibre to DSL, a move that was universally derided as unfeasible both economically and technologically.
It was known to be a waste of tens of billions of dollars - but Rupert Murdoch doesn't want poor people to have access to information outside his propaganda network, so he handed the election to the Liberals (the conservatives) in exchange for destroying the network and salting the earth so it was hard for even a future government to fix.
Telstra, the big incumbent ISP with a monopoly in many areas, also had alot to do with it. Instead of gigabit fibre, we now have 25mbit DSL, which doesn't work when it's raining even lightly, or in strong winds.
This network was also slower to build, and far more expensive than the fibre.
But as long as it's built with fibre, it works. New Zealand's network is enourmously successful, and now anyone has access to gigabit fibre on their choice of ISP. It works both in theory and in practice, you just must not allow a conservative government to hand it over to monopoly corporations.
The common "government can't be trusted" rubbish is bunk, the government only screwed it up in Australia because that was their goal, the fibre networks have always been a success.
So as long as the government does it it’s ok as long as the government doesn’t do it incorrectly? Therein lies the problem, governmental failure is always a possibility as Milton Friedman observed, and if they fail there’s no penalty to failing other than the size of government increasing :) Even in America the issue is that we’ve over-regulated the internet industry to the point where even a company like Google has issues, although one could argue they did it for different reasons i.e. to force the existing companies to lay down fiber faster. Regulatory capture is the real issue.
This entire discussion is about privately held organizations systematically charging customers for services they did not receive with no oversight to prevent it. Your argument doesn't even make sense in this context.
Some would argue that those "privately held organizations" are able to avoid market pressures via regulatory capture, if not outright grants of monopoly by governments.
If you want to argue that a government-granted public monopoly is better for consumers than a government-granted private monopoly, I'd be inclined to agree. But there are other options that might be better still for consumers, which is what I think the above poster was trying to get at.
If the fee is unavoidable (e.g., Verzion FIOS equipment) then it should be included in the advertised price. As it is, Verizon's tactics are closer to bait & switch. Adding $20 to $25 or more in proprietary equipment - with no opportunity to purchase - is shady.
Sure, I can and do choose Comcast intead. But the pricing creates a false sense of price, competition, etc.
The cable companies can simply raise their prices to compensate, and the consumers won't notice the difference because they'll be paying the same price as last month. Most people don't even know of the modem rental fee.
Not wrong, but maybe thinking of things in terms that are too simple, i.e., the natural corollary that if we would just stop letting sociopaths do what they do, then we wouldn't have things like this. But it's usually not sociopaths versus normal people. Sure, maybe there are a lot of CEOs who could be clinically diagnosed as sociopaths, but a lot of average people who don't fall into that bucket are able to rationalize their way into doing shitty things. I'm talking about everyone from waitstaff and gas station attendants to people doing admin work and small business owners—not just people in conspicuous positions of power making many times the national average income.
I'd wager that if you were able to get your hands on an oracle that could provide the true count of incidental contact and the measure of impact on the average person's life by sociopaths versus good people who do bad things as a matter of performing their daily routines, the difference is probably an order of magnitude heavier on the side of the latter. Not to mention Hanlon's razor and all that.
> maybe there are a lot of CEOs who could be clinically diagnosed
How many times is it that the CEO comes up with the idea to do something like this? For start ups, I can see the CEO actually having this kind of involvement. Jobs/Musk/Zuck all come to mind of a CEO that is in total control. ATT/Spectrum/Comcast/etc all seem to be on a different level. This adding of fees type of schemes seems more like something the bean counters come up with, and then eventually the CEO is informed/blesses the decisions. Would a CEO in these companies really be the ones scheming up ideas like this or be more concerned about the next acquisition?
When I changed my internet service recently an equipment rental fee was included in the cost per month, even though I have my own modem. I was pleasantly surprised when the first bill came and I wasn’t actually charged that portion. Nice to know that will be the expectation from now on.
Is there any research on the cost economics of a small-town ISP? I wonder if the ecosystem is conducive for a small-town ISP to come up and operate the last-mile? Is there competitive pricing on the metro core and transit ISP bandwidths? Is there a settlement free peering exchange with major content providers? What are the long-term or minimum-commitment contracts one would have to sign-up to become a successful small-town ISP? How much capital is required? etc etc. I wonder why would they do these obviously bad pricing choices like charging for modem that's not even taken by the customer.
Even though I have begged the cable company to address the underlying issue, I have gone through several dozen modem/DVR boxes due to lightning strikes. I can only assume that the equipment is super inexpensive, otherwise they would have sorted the problem ages ago. They have been making a fortune on renting out marked up junk for years, but I am sure they are already thinking of some clever ways to claw that revenue stream back.
Wow... I don't know why people tolerated this for so long? I wonder if there isn't a better way to be organised and put back the pressure on these monopolies?
Or it could be true that many have tried and failed at it?
Back in India, we still have a 100 Mbps connection for ~$16/month (500 GB cap and thereafter 2 Mbps unlimited)... There are more cheaper options than this still available.
One thing to call out is that if you buy your own router, you’re going to have a bad time getting internet connectivity issues fixed. Unless there is an outage in your area, your ISP will just blame your router.
So it may be worth the extra cost just to hold them accountable and ensure reliable internet
At least with Comcast Business, I never had this problem.
I used my own modem and router, and the few times I had a line problem they just asked me to connect my laptop directly to the modem with an ethernet cable to troubleshoot.
It’s not really just a “bottom drawer internet service” thing. Comcast rents me a Juniper switch for their metro Ethernet. I just consider it part of the price of the service. If they weren’t renting out the equipment, they’d just bump their prices up.
There was a strange thing I noticed when I moved from the rented router/modem combo provided by Comcast to a netgear Cm1000. The speed rate average dropped from 700mbps to 2-300mbps. Is this a configuration problem?
Another company did this. It was AT&T or Verizon. There was actual uproar over it and they eventually reversed the decision. However, you can’t always count on an uproar to always have any impact.
But the title doesn’t mention the FCC, and nothing else suggests which country it concerns either.
HN is an English-language website, which often translates to majority US. We can further speculate that HN is likely majority able-bodied, heterosexual, male, cis, white. That’s not a reason to make it less inclusive of people outside those majorities.
No idea if it’s a problem anywhere else, but then I didn’t know it was a problem in the US either. I just don’t like it when people assume everyone on the internet is an American.
Here we have the richest country in the world, inventor of the internet with the most innovative tech companies with the absolute worst internet experience among developed countries: Overpriced, bad quality of service and zero flexibility. Customers are treated like absolute dummies, it is a totally different world. And Germany is actually quite bad compared to asian countries.