7 ms·

Why Comcast Should Be Sued

91 points by d0ne 15y ago

jtwb 15y ago
Deceptive marketing? Yes. Inflated prices? Yes. Lack of competition? Totally. But using law to impose your "moral perspective" on a pricing structure is not a solution. The problem is that there exists no plan with reasonably-priced, reasonably-fast non-capped internet access, while there is a demand for it. This is a market failure caused by a lack of competition in the market. We should seek out and advocate for solutions which increase competition in the consumer broadband marketplace and ignore foolish non-solutions like this.
- fourk 15y ago
  "The problem is that there exists no plan with reasonably-priced, reasonably-fast non-capped internet access, while there is a demand for it." I believed the same thing until recently. HN User Aloisius let me know about Web Pass, which is unfortunately available only in buildings with 100 or more residence units, in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2711784 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2711784 "symmetric 100 Mbps uncapped service in San Francisco for $33/month"
losethos 15y ago
The company looks at it's bills at the end of the month and decides how much profit. Bandwidth is irrelevant.
jarrettcoggin 15y ago
Having done this same calculation myself, this was part of the reason I moved to Business Class. That and that I actually wanted to start a business eventually. I think the ratio should be something much higher, such as 80%, not 0.69%. That would give you 7.56 TB of available bandwidth of the maximum possible 9.45 TB, based on the 105Mbps speed listed. And that's only downstream.
- ams6110 15y ago
  You have business class at home? What is the cost delta compared to their residential service?
  - jarrettcoggin 15y ago
    I can't remember the number off the top of my head, but I think it was about $20 more a month.
    - cshesse 15y ago
      Did you have to get a contract and pay the business installation fee?
      - jarrettcoggin 15y ago
        Yes I did. From what I understand the contract length is negotiable, but the installation fee is not because they have to come and give you entirely different equipment. The customer service is MUCH better with a business class account.
  - fshaun 15y ago
    Mine is about $60 more, but some of that is for some static IPs. Also nice being able to call Friday night for Saturday tech appointments when modems die...
    - pasbesoin 15y ago
      When I just looked, $14.95/mo per static IP. I wonder whether that provisioning is baked into the contract term or whether it can be changed as needed.
      - jarrettcoggin 15y ago
        My static IP only costs $4.95/month. The options above this are differently priced though.
samlevine 15y ago
It's a consumer plan, they're always absurdly oversubscribed. It doesn't make any sense to charge consumers for a leased line because even if they're listening to Pandora and watching Netflix like crazy they won't hit the (currently) high data cap. If you don't want caps (either explicit or defacto) get a business plan from Comcast; It's quite afordable relative to other options that businesses would pay for. Of course it isn't anything different than what you're paying for right now, but they won't shut it off after you've uploaded the contents of a 1TB hard drive to a backup service.
- jarrettcoggin 15y ago
  I disagree. I had 3 roommates at one point, and all 4 of us were subscribe to Netflix. It was VERY easy for us to hit the cap with everyone watching Netflix alone, let alone playing games or streaming music in the common areas. After I moved out and got married, my wife and kid routinely have Netflix playing in the background as they sit at home during the day while I'm at work. When I go home, I usually have work to do at home as well, which only adds to the usage. Using numbers found in the article, if you use Netflix on a daily basis for 3 hours a day watching HD content purely, it would park you at about 210GB of the 250GB cap according to Netflix themselves: http://blog.netflix.com/2011/03/netflix-lowers-data-usage-by-23-for.html http://blog.netflix.com/2011/03/netflix-lowers-data-usage-by... So yes, using Netflix and Pandora can easily put you over the cap. EDIT (for clarity): This article talks about the quality settings in the account settings area, but if you adjust the settings to allow for highest resolution, it would still apply.
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    > I disagree. With which point? I think you're trying to say that most consumers WILL hit the cap based on your experience - but how typical is your experience? You're an HN reader with 3 roommates, some of whom are probably HN readers too. And how many other people leave Netflix on all day, instead of just leaving the TV on a cable channel? There will come a time - really fucking soon, too - when your story is representative of the average broadband user - but we're not there yet.
CoryMathews 15y ago
wow I am lucky to get 25Mbs down (avg ~15). much less 105, and I have the highest available residential plan. Is South Texas just that far behind the normal Internet speeds?
- silentOpen 15y ago
  I live in Pasadena, CA, in the middle of LA county, one of the most populous in the USA and I have the following choices for maximal bandwidth: AT&T DSL at 6Mbps/1.5Mbps for $40/mo Charter Cable at 60Mbps/?Mbps for $100/mo I think both plans have caps, though I've never hit them. Charter wouldn't tell me their upload speeds and demanded I give them my SSN so I went with ATT. The United States does not care about its economic future. It cares about keeping the next quarter's profits up for the corrupt telecom cartel that's turned bribing local governments into a science.
ender7 15y ago
Oh, competition, wouldn't it be nice to have you around. Of course, given the massive up-front infrastructure investment, such competition is unlikely to materialize. What would be wonderful is if the government ran fiber to everyone's homes, and then let companies lease it from them. I wonder what the cost would be to last-mile a major city....
- tbrownaw 15y ago
  Of course, given the massive up-front infrastructure investment, such competition is unlikely to materialize. I thought it was more that cities (I think it's at that level, anyway) tend to sell exclusive rights to do that so wired competition beyond 1 cableco + 1 phoneco is largely illegal?
- lotharbot 15y ago
  > What would be wonderful is if the government ran fiber to everyone's homes, and then let companies lease it from them. http://www.utopianet.org/why-utopia http://www.utopianet.org/why-utopia -- sixteen cities in northern Utah have done exactly this. My dedicated fiber connection runs about $35 a month for 10 up/10 down, no caps that I'm aware of. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/google-bestows-1gbps-fiber-network-on-kansas-city-kansas.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/google-besto... -- Google is running fiber in Kansas City, KS. I'd assume they've run the numbers and can cost-effectively last-mile the whole city.
  - devicenull 15y ago
    I remember reading somewhere that they are doing it, and releasing all the information about how they did it, as well as common pitfalls. The purpose of that was to give other cities the information they needed to successfully implement it.
  - groby_b 15y ago
    Or if the government actually used its regulatory power and mandated that companies need to lease last-mile to anybody who wants it at competitive rates. Competitive rates means not at a loss to the provider - so the libertarian can please stop screaming. At the same time, last mile should be treated as a commons, simply because having everybody provide that doesn't make a lick of economical sense. (And if it has to be, split ISPs and last-mile providers. You can't run both. That removes a giant conflict of interest)
CGamesPlay 15y ago
How did this kinda of article make its way to the front page? This kind of math makes no sense whatsoever, and the fact that Chris has probably never seen 13.125 down his pipe should have been an indicator that this was flawed logic. Love to hate on Comcast, but I try to be intelligent about it.
- DrHankPym 15y ago
  I'm really tired so I'm not 100% sure it's exactly linear, but if the bandwidth is around half then you get twice as much usage. So instead of 5 hours it would be 10 hours, which I'm guessing is around 1.4% of the month.
tastynachos 15y ago
This guy just wasted two minutes of day on this crap article. HN has gone really down hill, this was one notch below blogspam...
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to register and let us know.
wmf 15y ago
Your Internet usage is probably bursty, so you want bursty service; a 1% share of 100 Mbps is dramatically faster in practice than a T1. Someone is about to suggest that ISPs advertise minimum speeds instead of burst speed, but that doesn't serve the interest of most customers since perceived performance does correlate strongly with burst speed.
shawnee_ 15y ago
Comcast's primary goal right now is to prevent a raising of the debt ceiling. Once this is done it will be much easier for the FCC to be eviscerated and destroyed -- or at the very least, maimed. With that pesky FCC out of the way, Comcast will then be free to take a deep breath and expand its belly, unrolling that flab of inefficiency even further, stifling and suffocating as many sources of potential innovation and competition as possible. With no viable threats (as Comcast will be both the Gatekeeper and the traffic police), its ability to dictate who can drive in the fast lane and the slow lane and who is even allowed to drive on the road at all will spill over from the highways to the suburbs to the rural country roads. http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2011/07/white-house-slams-cuts-to-fcc.php http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2011/07/white-house...
- roc 15y ago
  I have no doubt that Comcast's lobbyists take every opportunity to push for "starve the beast"-style cuts to the FCC. But I sincerely doubt they think it remotely in their interest to see the US actually default. Being able to squeeze more profit per subscriber loses its luster if another economic calamity causes home internet access to become a luxury again. They already see the danger that they may become a dumb pipe that only provides backhaul access for wireless cells. (see their wireless deals and partnerships) If another economic snap forces people to choose between their home internet and their smartphones, guess who wins and guess who hemorrhages subscribers like a POTS provider? And they'll have a hell of a time convincing people to pick those plans back up, years later, if/as things recover. Even though home phone service has become dirt cheap with VoIP offerings, that hasn't brought back customers. If people cut Comcast and start to go wireless-data only, it'll be terribly hard to reverse. To say nothing of Comcast's investments and stock price, which would tank (along with most everything else) in the crisis that would follow an actual default.
  - shawnee_ 15y ago
    Good points, but default is not the automatic consequence of failing to raise the debt ceiling. The issue is just creating more noise and static that distracts from the core issues that the GOP doesn't want people to notice: that the GOP wants to cut funding to the FCC, and without the FCC and more stringent net neutrality regulations, companies like Comcast can exercise whatever kind of monopolistic behaviors they want.
tzs 15y ago
The author's premise is wrong. I don't get faster connections because I want to download more data than I could on a slower connection. I get faster connections so that I don't have to wait as long for my downloads to complete.
- sukuriant 15y ago
  Same result To expound upon that, being able to receive more bits through the pipe will likely result in being more willing to download/stream will likely result in more downloads/streams, so just by being able to get things faster will you be more likely to get more things.
daimyoyo 15y ago
If you want to sue based on immoral business plans consider that T-Mobile recently doubled the cost of incoming text messages for prepaid customers. These are texts you can't control getting, yet when you do they charge you anyway. Incidentally, their highest mobile data plan includes 10Gb for $89.99. At the same rate as they charge for texts, that plan would cost $6.4Million. I honestly don't understand why congress hasn't demanded cell phone carriers include texts in the cost of plans.

91 points by d0ne 15y ago

jtwb 15y ago

Deceptive marketing? Yes. Inflated prices? Yes. Lack of competition? Totally. But using law to impose your "moral perspective" on a pricing structure is not a solution. The problem is that there exists no plan with reasonably-priced, reasonably-fast non-capped internet access, while there is a demand for it. This is a market failure caused by a lack of competition in the market. We should seek out and advocate for solutions which increase competition in the consumer broadband marketplace and ignore foolish non-solutions like this.

fourk 15y ago
"The problem is that there exists no plan with reasonably-priced, reasonably-fast non-capped internet access, while there is a demand for it." I believed the same thing until recently. HN User Aloisius let me know about Web Pass, which is unfortunately available only in buildings with 100 or more residence units, in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2711784 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2711784 "symmetric 100 Mbps uncapped service in San Francisco for $33/month"

losethos 15y ago

The company looks at it's bills at the end of the month and decides how much profit. Bandwidth is irrelevant.

jarrettcoggin 15y ago

Having done this same calculation myself, this was part of the reason I moved to Business Class. That and that I actually wanted to start a business eventually. I think the ratio should be something much higher, such as 80%, not 0.69%. That would give you 7.56 TB of available bandwidth of the maximum possible 9.45 TB, based on the 105Mbps speed listed. And that's only downstream.

ams6110 15y ago
You have business class at home? What is the cost delta compared to their residential service?
- jarrettcoggin 15y ago
  I can't remember the number off the top of my head, but I think it was about $20 more a month.
  - cshesse 15y ago
    Did you have to get a contract and pay the business installation fee?
    - jarrettcoggin 15y ago
      Yes I did. From what I understand the contract length is negotiable, but the installation fee is not because they have to come and give you entirely different equipment. The customer service is MUCH better with a business class account.
- fshaun 15y ago
  Mine is about $60 more, but some of that is for some static IPs. Also nice being able to call Friday night for Saturday tech appointments when modems die...
  - pasbesoin 15y ago
    When I just looked, $14.95/mo per static IP. I wonder whether that provisioning is baked into the contract term or whether it can be changed as needed.
    - jarrettcoggin 15y ago
      My static IP only costs $4.95/month. The options above this are differently priced though.

samlevine 15y ago

It's a consumer plan, they're always absurdly oversubscribed. It doesn't make any sense to charge consumers for a leased line because even if they're listening to Pandora and watching Netflix like crazy they won't hit the (currently) high data cap. If you don't want caps (either explicit or defacto) get a business plan from Comcast; It's quite afordable relative to other options that businesses would pay for. Of course it isn't anything different than what you're paying for right now, but they won't shut it off after you've uploaded the contents of a 1TB hard drive to a backup service.

jarrettcoggin 15y ago
I disagree. I had 3 roommates at one point, and all 4 of us were subscribe to Netflix. It was VERY easy for us to hit the cap with everyone watching Netflix alone, let alone playing games or streaming music in the common areas. After I moved out and got married, my wife and kid routinely have Netflix playing in the background as they sit at home during the day while I'm at work. When I go home, I usually have work to do at home as well, which only adds to the usage. Using numbers found in the article, if you use Netflix on a daily basis for 3 hours a day watching HD content purely, it would park you at about 210GB of the 250GB cap according to Netflix themselves: http://blog.netflix.com/2011/03/netflix-lowers-data-usage-by-23-for.html http://blog.netflix.com/2011/03/netflix-lowers-data-usage-by... So yes, using Netflix and Pandora can easily put you over the cap. EDIT (for clarity): This article talks about the quality settings in the account settings area, but if you adjust the settings to allow for highest resolution, it would still apply.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  > I disagree. With which point? I think you're trying to say that most consumers WILL hit the cap based on your experience - but how typical is your experience? You're an HN reader with 3 roommates, some of whom are probably HN readers too. And how many other people leave Netflix on all day, instead of just leaving the TV on a cable channel? There will come a time - really fucking soon, too - when your story is representative of the average broadband user - but we're not there yet.

CoryMathews 15y ago

wow I am lucky to get 25Mbs down (avg ~15). much less 105, and I have the highest available residential plan. Is South Texas just that far behind the normal Internet speeds?

silentOpen 15y ago
I live in Pasadena, CA, in the middle of LA county, one of the most populous in the USA and I have the following choices for maximal bandwidth: AT&T DSL at 6Mbps/1.5Mbps for $40/mo Charter Cable at 60Mbps/?Mbps for $100/mo I think both plans have caps, though I've never hit them. Charter wouldn't tell me their upload speeds and demanded I give them my SSN so I went with ATT. The United States does not care about its economic future. It cares about keeping the next quarter's profits up for the corrupt telecom cartel that's turned bribing local governments into a science.

ender7 15y ago

Oh, competition, wouldn't it be nice to have you around. Of course, given the massive up-front infrastructure investment, such competition is unlikely to materialize. What would be wonderful is if the government ran fiber to everyone's homes, and then let companies lease it from them. I wonder what the cost would be to last-mile a major city....

tbrownaw 15y ago
Of course, given the massive up-front infrastructure investment, such competition is unlikely to materialize. I thought it was more that cities (I think it's at that level, anyway) tend to sell exclusive rights to do that so wired competition beyond 1 cableco + 1 phoneco is largely illegal?
lotharbot 15y ago
> What would be wonderful is if the government ran fiber to everyone's homes, and then let companies lease it from them. http://www.utopianet.org/why-utopia http://www.utopianet.org/why-utopia -- sixteen cities in northern Utah have done exactly this. My dedicated fiber connection runs about $35 a month for 10 up/10 down, no caps that I'm aware of. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/google-bestows-1gbps-fiber-network-on-kansas-city-kansas.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/google-besto... -- Google is running fiber in Kansas City, KS. I'd assume they've run the numbers and can cost-effectively last-mile the whole city.
- devicenull 15y ago
  I remember reading somewhere that they are doing it, and releasing all the information about how they did it, as well as common pitfalls. The purpose of that was to give other cities the information they needed to successfully implement it.
- groby_b 15y ago
  Or if the government actually used its regulatory power and mandated that companies need to lease last-mile to anybody who wants it at competitive rates. Competitive rates means not at a loss to the provider - so the libertarian can please stop screaming. At the same time, last mile should be treated as a commons, simply because having everybody provide that doesn't make a lick of economical sense. (And if it has to be, split ISPs and last-mile providers. You can't run both. That removes a giant conflict of interest)

CGamesPlay 15y ago

How did this kinda of article make its way to the front page? This kind of math makes no sense whatsoever, and the fact that Chris has probably never seen 13.125 down his pipe should have been an indicator that this was flawed logic. Love to hate on Comcast, but I try to be intelligent about it.

DrHankPym 15y ago
I'm really tired so I'm not 100% sure it's exactly linear, but if the bandwidth is around half then you get twice as much usage. So instead of 5 hours it would be 10 hours, which I'm guessing is around 1.4% of the month.

tastynachos 15y ago

This guy just wasted two minutes of day on this crap article. HN has gone really down hill, this was one notch below blogspam...

pavel_lishin 15y ago
Thank you for taking the time to register and let us know.

wmf 15y ago

Your Internet usage is probably bursty, so you want bursty service; a 1% share of 100 Mbps is dramatically faster in practice than a T1. Someone is about to suggest that ISPs advertise minimum speeds instead of burst speed, but that doesn't serve the interest of most customers since perceived performance does correlate strongly with burst speed.

shawnee_ 15y ago

Comcast's primary goal right now is to prevent a raising of the debt ceiling. Once this is done it will be much easier for the FCC to be eviscerated and destroyed -- or at the very least, maimed. With that pesky FCC out of the way, Comcast will then be free to take a deep breath and expand its belly, unrolling that flab of inefficiency even further, stifling and suffocating as many sources of potential innovation and competition as possible. With no viable threats (as Comcast will be both the Gatekeeper and the traffic police), its ability to dictate who can drive in the fast lane and the slow lane and who is even allowed to drive on the road at all will spill over from the highways to the suburbs to the rural country roads. http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2011/07/white-house-slams-cuts-to-fcc.php http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2011/07/white-house...

roc 15y ago
I have no doubt that Comcast's lobbyists take every opportunity to push for "starve the beast"-style cuts to the FCC. But I sincerely doubt they think it remotely in their interest to see the US actually default. Being able to squeeze more profit per subscriber loses its luster if another economic calamity causes home internet access to become a luxury again. They already see the danger that they may become a dumb pipe that only provides backhaul access for wireless cells. (see their wireless deals and partnerships) If another economic snap forces people to choose between their home internet and their smartphones, guess who wins and guess who hemorrhages subscribers like a POTS provider? And they'll have a hell of a time convincing people to pick those plans back up, years later, if/as things recover. Even though home phone service has become dirt cheap with VoIP offerings, that hasn't brought back customers. If people cut Comcast and start to go wireless-data only, it'll be terribly hard to reverse. To say nothing of Comcast's investments and stock price, which would tank (along with most everything else) in the crisis that would follow an actual default.
- shawnee_ 15y ago
  Good points, but default is not the automatic consequence of failing to raise the debt ceiling. The issue is just creating more noise and static that distracts from the core issues that the GOP doesn't want people to notice: that the GOP wants to cut funding to the FCC, and without the FCC and more stringent net neutrality regulations, companies like Comcast can exercise whatever kind of monopolistic behaviors they want.

tzs 15y ago

The author's premise is wrong. I don't get faster connections because I want to download more data than I could on a slower connection. I get faster connections so that I don't have to wait as long for my downloads to complete.

sukuriant 15y ago
Same result To expound upon that, being able to receive more bits through the pipe will likely result in being more willing to download/stream will likely result in more downloads/streams, so just by being able to get things faster will you be more likely to get more things.

daimyoyo 15y ago

If you want to sue based on immoral business plans consider that T-Mobile recently doubled the cost of incoming text messages for prepaid customers. These are texts you can't control getting, yet when you do they charge you anyway. Incidentally, their highest mobile data plan includes 10Gb for $89.99. At the same rate as they charge for texts, that plan would cost $6.4Million. I honestly don't understand why congress hasn't demanded cell phone carriers include texts in the cost of plans.