8 ms·

Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

86 points by nathancahill 13y ago

jbraithwaite 13y ago
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.
bensmcc 13y ago
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.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
aestra 13y ago
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?
msellout 13y ago
I was able to avoid the appointment and fee by telling the sales rep that I am a computer scientist and able to handle the installation myself.
humannature 13y ago
but the real question is how can we get upgraded to 105Mbps without our monthly bill going up too? Does it cost anything more for Comcast to serve a customer 105Mbps vs 50Mbps?
eli 13y ago
It's not exactly the crime of the century to want to charge you a fee for upgrading service.
- sebastianavina 13y ago
  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...
  - eli 13y ago
    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.
    - hobs 13y ago
      For most areas, that is wrong. I have been in the same area for a decade, and got offered 8mbps for an increased cost 8 years ago. That's it. Why? Because there is no competition.
      - eli 13y ago
        What does a $250 upgrade fee have to do with that? If anything, shouldn't high fees encourage competition?
        randallsquared 13y ago
        High fees pay for the lobbying of local government to continue the cable monopoly, in many places in the US.
      - mkaziz 13y ago
        @eli- no, because Comcast et al actively suppress competition a la muncipal networks.
ck2 13y ago
On a side note, what do you do at 105mbps that you cannot do at 50mbps? Unless maybe you have a multi user household. I pay $50 for 5mbps. It's highway robbery.
- gnoway 13y ago
  Nothing, but you can do it 2.1x faster. Don't feel too bad, I'm paying $32.99 for 1mbps cable. I can do just about everything I want, I just have to plan for it to take longer than I'd like.
- 300bps 13y ago
  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: https://support.netflix.com/en/node/306 https://support.netflix.com/en/node/306 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.
  - nkurz 13y ago
    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!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
kyleblarson 13y ago
"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?
- jotm 13y ago
  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...
- daniel-cussen 13y ago
  You have to add the benefit of saving ~$250 to the benefit of getting the top post on HN. Then you divide.
  - kyleblarson 13y ago
    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.
    - nathancahill 13y ago
      Where do I go to cash in my internet points?
      - reeses 13y ago
        That is so two bubbles ago.
- ansible 13y ago
grecy 13y ago
Can confirm. 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.
- larrys 13y ago
  "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?
  - grecy 13y ago
    It's for a few reasons. 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)
    - 13y ago
res0nat0r 13y ago
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.
drakaal 13y ago
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.
- jotm 13y ago
  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...
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    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.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      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. https://www.google.com/search?q=tftp+hack+cable+modem https://www.google.com/search?q=tftp+hack+cable+modem
sriram_sun 13y ago
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.
ulfw 13y ago
These things happen when you have a monopoly on internet providers.
linuxhansl 13y ago
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.
holyjaw 13y ago
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.

86 points by nathancahill 13y ago

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.

bensmcc 13y ago

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.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

aestra 13y ago

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?

msellout 13y ago

I was able to avoid the appointment and fee by telling the sales rep that I am a computer scientist and able to handle the installation myself.

humannature 13y ago

but the real question is how can we get upgraded to 105Mbps without our monthly bill going up too? Does it cost anything more for Comcast to serve a customer 105Mbps vs 50Mbps?

eli 13y ago

It's not exactly the crime of the century to want to charge you a fee for upgrading service.

sebastianavina 13y ago
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...
- eli 13y ago
  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.
  - hobs 13y ago
    For most areas, that is wrong. I have been in the same area for a decade, and got offered 8mbps for an increased cost 8 years ago. That's it. Why? Because there is no competition.
    - eli 13y ago
      What does a $250 upgrade fee have to do with that? If anything, shouldn't high fees encourage competition?
      - randallsquared 13y ago
        High fees pay for the lobbying of local government to continue the cable monopoly, in many places in the US.
    - mkaziz 13y ago
      @eli- no, because Comcast et al actively suppress competition a la muncipal networks.

ck2 13y ago

On a side note, what do you do at 105mbps that you cannot do at 50mbps? Unless maybe you have a multi user household. I pay $50 for 5mbps. It's highway robbery.

gnoway 13y ago
Nothing, but you can do it 2.1x faster. Don't feel too bad, I'm paying $32.99 for 1mbps cable. I can do just about everything I want, I just have to plan for it to take longer than I'd like.
300bps 13y ago
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: https://support.netflix.com/en/node/306 https://support.netflix.com/en/node/306 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.
- nkurz 13y ago
  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!

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

kyleblarson 13y ago

"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?

jotm 13y ago
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...
daniel-cussen 13y ago
You have to add the benefit of saving ~$250 to the benefit of getting the top post on HN. Then you divide.
- kyleblarson 13y ago
  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.
  - nathancahill 13y ago
    Where do I go to cash in my internet points?
    - reeses 13y ago
      That is so two bubbles ago.
ansible 13y ago

grecy 13y ago

Can confirm. 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.

larrys 13y ago
"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?
- grecy 13y ago
  It's for a few reasons. 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)
  - 13y ago

res0nat0r 13y ago

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.

drakaal 13y ago

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.

jotm 13y ago
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...
- DannyBee 13y ago
  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.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    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. https://www.google.com/search?q=tftp+hack+cable+modem https://www.google.com/search?q=tftp+hack+cable+modem

sriram_sun 13y ago

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.

ulfw 13y ago

These things happen when you have a monopoly on internet providers.

linuxhansl 13y ago

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.

holyjaw 13y ago

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.