In the United States, high speed Internet service providers are like drug dealers that agree not to operate in each other’s territory.
That way they can set prices as high as they want.
Comcast is getting even fatter off of the FCC’s “Emergency Broadband Benefit” which gives out “free” (taxpayer-subsidized) Internet to people on government benefits or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Line.
They also cut their Customer Support to the bone, making people spend hours dealing with “chat robots” and Interactive Voice Response systems before they can get through to an agent, which is often in another country, and can’t do anything except schedule a lineman.
Every time they do that, no matter how much they insist they won’t bill for it, I have never NOT had them try to add $100 to my next bill, which I again had to spend about two or three hours getting them to take back off.
Comcast has been losing their butts on people canceling pay TV because the only thing on cable is commercials and crap programming so they can move everything else over to Pay Per View. Why would anyone spend money on equipment rentals and “packages” like that unless they’re some sort of “sports fan” with lots of money.
So the result is that Comcast has been steadily jacking up the cost of their broadband service and equipment fees. It’s not even worth renting a modem from them unless you’re on the EBB and don’t pay for it, because in 5-6 months you could have bought your own.
But even I was shocked when I read about this couple in Seattle that Comcast said would have to pay $27,119 for wiring even though their entire block is wired for Comcast anyway.
Ars Technica: Couple bought home in Seattle, then learned Comcast Internet would cost $27,000
Web / Gemini (NewsWaffle) / “WebWaffle”
Comcast makes so much money off of monopolies, shaking down streaming companies, and government contracts and welfare programs, and yet they still get to jerk people around like this and the Democrats set this EBB thing up that turned into “Affordable Community Broadband” without demanding Title II regulation (as a utility) back in exchange for ISPs taking the money.
The couple is limping by on a “4G Hotspot”. I don’t know what that means.
I tried to escape Comcast for a while with T-Mobile 5G Home Internet and that was amazingly shittier. About the only upside was that the landlord couldn’t run over anything with a lawnmower while I was on vacation and knock me offline again.
The downside was that T-Mobile’s Home Internet modems can hardly ever lock on to a decent signal and mostly just overheat and crash and die completely every few months and make you perform effort to send one back to the T-Mobile shit bin like it was a launch XBOX 360.
Maybe this couple can file some sort of complaint with the state Attorney General simply due to how egregious this is, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Bad customer service was one of the reasons why Comcast changed their name to XFinity. Bad companies change their names to get away from scandals and bad press and stuff, but in Comcast’s case they just got worse and worse as “XFinity” and they still brand stuff under both names like they gave up halfway through.
Sounds like this couple had better get used to the 4G unless they want to pay Comcast half of a house in Indiana for 186 feet of coaxial cable.
Mostly the reason why the federal government wants everyone to access the Web somehow, especially on “smart” phones, preferably on “smart” phones, and why they waited so long to do that, is because they had to turn it into a centralized Corporate Sewer full of DRM and spyware first.
Thanks to “modern” Web browsers like Firefox and Chrome, they even get to see what’s on your mind if you change your mind before you finish typing it. “Awesome” bars and “Omni” boxes and “Firefox Suggest”.
It’s literally the thought police unless you opt out for a browser that’s still Free Software, such as LibreWolf, SeaMonkey, or GNOME Web. Or use Tor for more privacy.
Then, they know most people will dive right in to “social media” and tell them openly what’s on their mind. They like that too.
Apps are, of course, much worse. At the bottom of it all, they have Comcast and Cloudflare logging stuff and helping them compile dossiers about citizens.
They waited for things to finally get this bad and then declared the Internet to be “essential” to daily life. That was not a mistake.
Some people will push back a little, most people won’t.
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