Worst Ways Cable Companies Confuse You by Making You Pay More
With confusing packages, hidden fees, misleading promises, and confusing terms, everyone agrees that cable TV and ISPs are the worst. I tried to compare online shops in my area and ended up with a terrible mess of sketchy terms and incremental sales. It should not be.
Data limits are completely arbitrary farm fees
Everyone hates data limits, but they are more prevalent now than ever. “Trials” of Comcast data use , like the one in my hometown Atlanta, have been going on for years . A glance at their plans even in one market reveals that their prices are inconsistent. In most regions, Comcast sets a 300GB data limit regardless of internet speed. Users are then charged $ 10 for a 50GB migration. Alternatively, you can opt for their “super economical” flexible data option, which lowers your data limit to 5GB in exchange for a $ 5 discount. If you upgrade to this plan, Comcast charges $ 1 per GB , which is five times the 50 GB cost from $ 10 to $ 50. For surcharge purposes, Comcast rates 1GB of data from two cents to a dollar . This makes no logical sense. Comcast’s fees are not subject to any particular pattern or reason.
Also there doesn’t seem to be a real reason why data limits are being set where they are. Comcast’s data limit is 300GB for all residential plans. This limit does not scale based on your internet speed or the amount of data consumed. The 10Mbps customer who streams Netflix sometimes has the same data cap as the customer who pays a lot more for 105Mbps, so they can download the entire 40GB of Destiny in less than an hour. The only exception is that in Tucson, Arizona, Comcast’s limits can go up to 600GB for faster plans, further highlighting how arbitrary those plans are.
AT&T is better than Comcast in this area, but only technically. Company data limits scale based on internet speed . On closer inspection, however, there are some worrying inconsistencies. For speeds up to 6Mbps, you can upload up to 300GB per month, which is about five days of uploading at maximum speed. For 12-75 Mbps, the limit reaches 600 GB. The 12 Mbps plan would still reach the maximum download speed in five days, but at 75 Mbps, you could eat that limit in 19 hours.
The math is getting worse at the highest level. AT&T will offer 1 TB of data to users at speeds ranging from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps. At 100Mbps, you can use 1TB of data for 24 hours if you downloaded continuously at maximum speed. If you are one of the lucky few who manage to get to the gigabit level? This cap will disappear in two and a half hours. Now it is obvious that no one will download at full speed 100% of the time, but it is curious to note that as your speed gets better , the limitation on your speeds gets worse .
There is also no evidence that there is a technical reason for the existence of these covers. Comcast’s internal customer support documents explicitly prohibit it from saying that congestion management is behind restrictions . Comcast’s VP of Internet Services says the limitation is a business decision , not a technical one. So it’s no surprise that both AT&T and Comcast offer unlimited surcharges for data transfer for around $ 30. These options are not well publicized, so you might have to call and ask for them specifically. In the long run, however, they can save you a lot of money in excess fees. At least not until the FCC gets tired of hearing so many complaints about them .
Bundled service packs are confusing and expensive
Most cable companies choose to bundle their services. After all, if you want internet and television, why not buy them together for a lower price? Basically it makes sense, but in practice, the packages and promotional prices make it nearly impossible to know how much your service actually costs and whether you will save by downsizing or by accepting one of the many “upgrade” offers cable companies are trying to try. … to sell to you.
I used my own home as an example to try online shopping. My goal was to find a relatively fast internet package without the accompanying TV junk. Both AT&T and Comcast demanded an address before I could see prices. I also tried to compare service prices with Time Warner and Charter in my regions, but as with 67% of America, I only have two options for ISPs, so national pricing is not possible. As soon as I indicated that I only wanted internet service, AT&T offered me four data plans with speeds no higher than 6 Mbps, with a maximum price of $ 35 per month. Comcast, meanwhile, offered a reasonable and affordable 25Mbps data plan for $ 39 a month. Seems pretty simple, right?
Upon closer inspection, Comcast’s 25Mbps plan requires me to subscribe to the basic TV package, which was included in the price. And this despite the fact that I specifically indicated that I do not want a TV package. For some reason, it also comes bundled with Showtime. If I scroll further on their website, I find the same 25Mbps package for $ 67 / month without cable. Now I expect that not buying the services together will make them more expensive, so I might consider getting a package just to save some money. However, in small print, Comcast says the $ 39 / month price is only for 12 months. After that, the tariff with a speed of 25 Mbit / s from TV will grow to $ 72 per month, which is even more than I would pay just for the Internet, which is all I want . To save as much money as possible, I need to order a cheaper plan now and then make sure I don’t forget to change my plan again in a year from now.
Meanwhile, the AT&T kits I found are too slow for my needs. 6 Mbps is not enough, however cheap it may be. However, I decide to check my TV and Internet kits just in case, where I find (much to my surprise) that my home is entitled to theridiculous speed of Gigapower, but only if I subscribe to mainstream TV. a package including over 220+ channels. It is impossible to achieve speeds higher than 6 Mbps at my home if I do not buy an unnecessary TV set.
To make matters even more confusing, both companies only offer advertised prices for a limited time. Comcast does not require a contract, but it will increase your monthly bill after the end of the promotional period (anywhere between six, twelve, or eighteen months). AT&T requires a contract and reserves the right to raise prices at the end, but does not explicitly state that you will pay more. However, there is a huge fee for early departure.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to get around all this confusion. Your best bet is to find the offer that works best for you today, then set up a recurring reminder to call your cable company every year or so and negotiate something more affordable . You can usually close the same deal as a new client byfirmly but politely threatening to leave .
There are so many hidden fees that I can barely keep up with them.
Package issues aside, all of the plans I covered in the previous section also included a ton of excessive and complex fees. Most of them are so deeply buried in the fine print that I’m still not sure I found all of them.
For example, AT&T’s Gigapower costs $ 140 a month. However, on the collapsed tab on the checkout page, I found that the package included an “extra” premium TV package that was selected by default. It was free for the first three months, but subsequently my account increased by $ 54 per month . On the next page, I found a total $ 30 discount that required me to allow AT&T to track my internet activity to serve ads , and there is no way to disable or remove it . At the time of this writing, I have checked every method I can find on the AT&T website except for placing my order and calling for it to be deleted ex post facto, but I cannot find a single button that allows me to opt out and pay $ 30 extra. To AT&T’s credit, most of the usual device and installation fees were waived, but I felt like I was tricked twice before I even got to the checkout and went on the hunt for it. Think about what the people who call and subscribe agree to without even knowing it. This is not a good feeling.
Comcast’s plans were also riddled with additional fees. This $ 39 / month plan for 25Mbps internet with all cable TV packages was more than just a promotional price. It also required me to sign up for automatic payments and paperless billing. If I didn’t, or if I ever turned off any of them, the plan would go up $ 10 per month. There was also another $ 10 a month fee for renting a modem. To Comcast’s credit, I was given a very clear opportunity to use my own, but by now my $ 40 / month internet plan could have been as high as $ 60 if I hadn’t used it on Comcast’s terms.
None of the companies went out of their way to mention their data limits. Comcast had a link to their data plan exactly once in a hidden link on their promotions page. If AT&T mentioned its data limits anywhere, I couldn’t find it. The underlying logic behind this is that most users don’t even need to know that there is a data cap because they rarely reach it , but that’s hardly an excuse to hide the potentially huge costs from users.
The only defense here is to read absolutely everything . Cable company websites are labyrinths that hide a wide range of commissions and surcharges. I spent a whole day researching every detail of several packages because that’s my job and I still don’t know if I found every board. In the worst case, if you are not sure how much you will need to pay, call someone and ask. If you can ( legally ) record a conversation with a customer service representative and get the person to tell you exactly how much you will be charged and how often, even better.
Gigabit Port Deployment Announcements Grossly Exaggerated
Internet speed in the US is slow. According to content delivery network Akamai in its State of the Internet report , at the end of 2015, the average US broadband speed was 11.7 Mbps. For reference, the FCC updated the legal definition of “broadband” to 25 Mbps in January 2015. So when a company promises gigabit internet speed, people pay attention. You may even keep this promise in mind when thinking about where to move. For example, when Comcast announced that it would begin rolling out 2 Gbps internet speeds in the city of Atlanta .
Such announcements are widely publicized, but in practice they are extremely limited. For example, Comcast said it plans to make gigabit services “available” in Atlanta as early as May 2015. This happened only a year later . Customers must also reside within one third of a mile of Comcast’s core network . In addition, there are installation costs that can easily exceed thousands of dollars . In some cases, Comcast dropped customers altogether because of the prohibitive costs involved. This is a bit tricky to reconcile with Comcast’s claims that the service will be ” available to 18 million homes by the end of 2016.”
AT&T prefers to announce its gigabit availability in terms of “markets “, listing the cities in which it exists, rather than indicating the number of users with access. However, living in a city is not the same as having access . In AT&T’s own accessibility tool, you can see that Gigapower can be listed as “available” within a city, but once you check specific addresses, many of them will be unavailable. Verizon did the same with its FiOS rollout in New York .
Most of these deployment announcements are designed to sound impressive, in order to grab press attention and help earn the FCC’s favor . They are not a sure indicator of what kind of service you can actually get. Worse yet, if you buy into the hype, you might move to an area that doesn’t have the services you hope for, or worse, pay thousands of dollars more than you expected to receive.