Comcast Wanted Man To Pay $19,000 After Falsely Advertising Service On His Street (arstechnica.com) 125
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: What's it like to spend $10,000 for Internet service and wait six months for Comcast to hook it up? Jonathan Rowny knows the answer. Rowny and his wife and child moved from Virginia to Washington state in May 2021. Rowny told Ars that before closing on the house in the city of Buckley, he checked Comcast's website to confirm that he could sign up for broadband. "I went ahead and placed my order and scheduled the install for the day after we moved in or whatever... I think it was about four days before closing [on the house] that Comcast canceled my order," he said. Rowny said that someone from Comcast called him with the message that "your house is not serviceable."
Comcast initially told Rowny that he'd have to pay over $19,000 for a line extension. After spending a couple of months investigating his options, Rowny hired a contractor to do part of the work and paid Comcast to do the rest, for a total of about $10,000. Construction took a bit longer than expected, and there was one final frustration after the line extension was completed: Comcast wouldn't send an installer to Rowny's house because the company's records incorrectly showed the work wouldn't be done until April. Rowny had to contact a senior vice president to get that issue sorted out and finally got service in mid-January.
We confirmed last week that Comcast's online ordering system was still giving false availability information on Rowny's street. At another house about 400 feet further down Rowny's street, the Xfinity.com address checker said that Internet service is available, and the website let us add an Internet plan to the cart for purchase. That was on Tuesday, and we notified Comcast of the likely error. Comcast has since corrected the address checker so that it now says the home is "out of footprint" and "Xfinity service is not available at this address." A Comcast spokesperson told Ars that this address "doesn't have service and is not currently connected to our network, and we have never had a request for service construction to that address... that is an error and our local team is looking into why it is listed on the site." If someone had ordered service for this address before it was corrected, that person would have faced the same problem Rowny encountered in May 2021. We also asked Comcast if it is evaluating the rest of the area for similar mistakes and did not get an answer.
Comcast initially told Rowny that he'd have to pay over $19,000 for a line extension. After spending a couple of months investigating his options, Rowny hired a contractor to do part of the work and paid Comcast to do the rest, for a total of about $10,000. Construction took a bit longer than expected, and there was one final frustration after the line extension was completed: Comcast wouldn't send an installer to Rowny's house because the company's records incorrectly showed the work wouldn't be done until April. Rowny had to contact a senior vice president to get that issue sorted out and finally got service in mid-January.
We confirmed last week that Comcast's online ordering system was still giving false availability information on Rowny's street. At another house about 400 feet further down Rowny's street, the Xfinity.com address checker said that Internet service is available, and the website let us add an Internet plan to the cart for purchase. That was on Tuesday, and we notified Comcast of the likely error. Comcast has since corrected the address checker so that it now says the home is "out of footprint" and "Xfinity service is not available at this address." A Comcast spokesperson told Ars that this address "doesn't have service and is not currently connected to our network, and we have never had a request for service construction to that address... that is an error and our local team is looking into why it is listed on the site." If someone had ordered service for this address before it was corrected, that person would have faced the same problem Rowny encountered in May 2021. We also asked Comcast if it is evaluating the rest of the area for similar mistakes and did not get an answer.
Is Starlink a valid option? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was just wondering why Starlink was not available at his location. Seems a simpler/better solution.
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Maybe cable outperforms Starlink, but Starlink isn't going to cost you $10,000 to install.
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Maybe cable outperforms Starlink, but Starlink isn't going to cost you $10,000 to install.
If you are only interested in the cheapest why not just strap a second hand mobile phone to the side of your PC and call it a day.
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As with many things, there usually is a middle ground. $10,000 is a lot of money to pay for an internet connection. For most people's needs, there are cheaper options, even if they aren't at fiber-like speeds.
I actually had to make do with a connection not far from what you describe. I was at my in-laws home in rural Michigan, a place with no easy access to cable. For three weeks I used internet tethered from my cell phone for my job. It wasn't blazingly fast, but it was fast enough for video calls. For mos
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Yes, but can you even get it right now? (Yes, you can place an order - that doesn't mean you can be assured of getting it at some predictable time.) Could this guy have gotten it at the time this dispute was playing out? Starlink was still only beta at the time, limited to a very few scattered coverage areas.
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Starlink is only a good as a last resort and even then isn't necessarily an option. There is a >$500 up front cost and $100+ cost per month. For some people this might not be a problem for others it is a bit steep for their Internet needs.
The other problem with Starlink is that you need a rather wide clear area of the sky for it to work (at least until they get a lot more satellites up).
The final problem is that getting Starlink is a bit of a crap shoot at this point. You can sign up for Starlink an you
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I was just wondering why Starlink was not available at his location.
My father's got a place up in the BFE region of North Carolina and it's on the waiting list. Seems to be a common thing if you live where Starlink is your only only would-be option for broadband that actually qualifies as broadband.
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I get a 5ms ping with Comcast cable... probably would be at least 15 times higher with Starlink
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I get a 5ms ping with Comcast cable... probably would be at least 15 times higher with Starlink
Starlink isn't there yet, but satellite in general allows for considerably lower latency than optical fiber -- because the speed of light in a vacuum is 50% faster. Here's a technical explanation from a network scientist at University College London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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There's 2 parts to the equation, speed of light in whichever medium and distance. IIRC, Starlink satellites are about 300 miles up, so a minimum of 600 miles to get to a base station and use fibre. So for example, here it is about 50 miles to where a Starlink base might be, that double the speed still means 3 times longer travel time.
Probably why https://www.starlink.com/ [starlink.com] claims latency as low as 20 ms in most locations and compare to traditional geosynchronous satellite internet rather then fibre.
Eventuall
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Satellite will never be lower latency than terrestrial fibre for a few reasons, not least of which is that it's a shared frequency band. Each user must share it with many others, which means packets waiting their turn.
Of course part of the terrestrial network is shared as well, but with much higher bandwidth. Often the servers are located physically much closer too.
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Aside, for interesting comparison, I currently get exactly 46ms latency to 8.8.8.8 in California using HawaiiTel gigabit fiber here on O'ahu.
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If latency and performance are thing then starlink probably isn't going to cut it. For example if you work from home and make heavy use of your connection. Satellite is better than nothing but being wired in is still vastly Superior
Starlink isn't there yet, but satellite in general allows for considerably lower latency than optical fiber -- because the speed of light in a vacuum is 50% faster than speed of light in an optical cable. Here's a technical explanation from a network scientist at University College London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
(I think people associate satellite with low latency because they're thinking of the high altitude satellites that have traditionally been used, not the low orbit ones used by Starlink).
As
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Re: Is Starlink a valid option? (Score:2)
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I just happened to look up the speed of light in air, seems it is only slightly slower then vacuum. Clouds, rain, trees are going to mean needing more power though and some frequencies do terrible in rain.
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Posting this from Starlink.
31ms latency. As low as FiOS? No. But for a service that can work damn near anywhere without trenching and pulling cable and such? Amazing. Absolutely 100% usable day in and day out.
I’m sure this’d be a hell of a lot more appealing than a $19,000 bill for Comcastic so-called service.
Speedtest link;
https://imgur.com/a/7Jrvf4r [imgur.com]
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Satellite in general? What faster-than-fiber options actually exist? OneWeb is working on a LEO system, but it sounds like they will strictly serve businesses and governments, not end-users, and they're not there yet either.
Meanwhile the geostationary options add roughly 72,000 km to the trip - almost twice the length of the equator. There's no lag reduction to be had there.
Satellite *in theory* could be faster, at least for connections spanning more than around 1000 miles as the crow flies, but I'm not
Comcast wanted $210,000 from me to do the same (Score:4, Informative)
Comcast told me over the phone that they could service a house I was thinking of buying. I bought it and tried to sign up for service. Turns out they couldn't. Fast forward 18 months and they wanted $210,000 to run a 700 foot line extension.
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Solution is to treat internet providers as utilities again - they have to hook it up if they want to do business in the state.
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A better solution would be to hold them liable for their claims. If you ask if coverage is available at X, and they say yes, then you'd better get either standard-rate service in a timely fashion, or a punitively fat payout to promote better accuracy in the future. At the very least it would encourage them to be honest about where their coverage is spotty or nonexistent.
And that should go triple for the coverage maps provided to the government to assess compliance with various laws and assessing subsidy p
Re:Comcast wanted $210,000 from me to do the same (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one benefit to PUDs and why we should let them provide internet services in rural areas. To run about a 500ft 7kV line across my property and install the necessary transformer, my local PUD estimated only about $6500. That's quite a bit of copper and a not-inexpensive transformer, plus labor to pull the wire and hook it up at the pole, and for infrastructure that no one else will benefit from (that's just from the pole to my building site, no one else further downstream).
A 700ft cable run shouldn't be more than about $1k, assuming you dig your own ditch and run your own conduit (maybe a couple days work if you rent the right equipment). Total ought to be under $2k for something like that, and any portion that can be shared with future customers ought to be covered as a basic infrastructure cost.
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I had a 5 mile bike commute to Google when I worked for them, and can see their main campus from my house. I can't possibly claim to be rural. Also I laughed at the idea of the California PUC doing anything pro-consumer.
Also Comcast did not allow me to choose the point of termination of their services on my property. I had offered to put the box at a far corner to minimize their side of the run. Nope. It had to terminate on the side of the house.
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Also Comcast did not allow me to choose the point of termination of their services on my property. I had offered to put the box at a far corner to minimize their side of the run. Nope. It had to terminate on the side of the house.
Build a nice little shed there and call it the "guest bedroom" ... :-)
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If only California zoning weren't so cursed as to make that the easy option.
Instead I banded together with a bunch of neighbors in the no-Comcast direction to trench and lay fiber. I now have 10 gbps symmetric, but at an install cost of ~$13k. Better than Comcast though.
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You are correct that California's PUC doesn't give a damn about consumers. But they do, at least occasionally, love to screw over telcos.
$10,000 - $20,000 covers the node hardware cost (Score:2)
$10,000 - $20,000 covers the node hardware cost + the cable run.
Power transformer is an lot easier to tap in. But if you are at the end of an cabled area they may need to install an new node to be able to hit your home with an good signal
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Maybe they have a higher class of people at those power utilities than at internet megacorps?
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Sounds like it would have been less expensive to physically move the house 700 ft.
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I don't think you can do that without owning the property though. It's kind of unfortunate.
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Well, you likely can't do it legally without permission from the owner. If I were living there, though, and a serious buyer told me he wanted to provide me with a few months of internet at no cost to me, I'd certainly be cooperative.
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I know when I bought my house in 2000 in a rural area I got permission from current owner and agent and I went in with a laptop and did a dial-in test.
Yes, old days of dialup, my concern was crossing providers and area codes to get to my ISP.
About a year after I moved in a drunk driver took out the big gray box down the road, and I suddenly got 56k connections after the repair. Then 3 months later I was able to get DSL. If I had known all of that, I would've taken out the big gray box myself ...
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We need a law that says that if their service area checker says your area has service, then you can sue them for false advertising if they don't install your service for the normal installation fee. That's the only thing that will get them to stop deliberately lying about service areas. This is willful fraud, and they know it.
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Hard to decide if stuff like this is wilful corporate fraud backed by policy (written or effective via management practices) or just a lazy tier 1 phone answering person who checked the zip and said "yep" to get the OP off the line so they could get their call time metrics down. Or maybe even a zip code based system, etc.
Had a friend who moved into a named sub-division, called local cable office and told them which subdivision he was moving into, they said "yup" and as it turns out the builder/contractors
Head out to site (Score:3)
Buckley, WA - Pop. ~5,000
Yeah, you want to head out there and visually and physically check for Internet service. I moved out to nowhere too with the whole work from home, so Internet is critical now. Place I was moving to said it had 1gbps fiber, and you're damn tooting when I got serious about putting an offer in I took my dumb ass out there and physically checked it myself. Strange enough, it's the local county's telco, like old school telco shit going on out here. They're the ones with the fucking 1gbps fiber. Fucking insane world where the community of 20k is getting vastly better Internet than anywhere I lived in a city of 180k, like not even a close comparison in current versus the Comcast/AT&T crap I received in the suburbia hellscape. I had BBQ about two weekends ago with one of the tech guys and we talked about how much he loves ubiquiti shit, showed me how he ran some fiber to his shed he's got out back so that he can hide away from the family, and so on. They've got like six "techs" that live in town and for the most part they're just running around helping out the old people read email and shit, but every once and a while they have to go repair shit or dig shit for laying down new fiber. Was showing me some hill where they got a ditch which, a shit ton of fiber, some other equipment I've never heard of, and ran a trunk over the hill for their expansion they're doing later this year.
I digress though. Point being guy should fucking bite the bullet and double check. Comcast and AT&T maps are utter garbage. If I hadn't had a drink in three days and someone handed me a map from Comcast showing me where a lake was, I'd just take my chances wandering. Because odds are I'd have the same likelihood of finding that lake. And the way laws are with utilities (cough) lobbying (cough), if their map is 170,000,000,000% wrong, it's on you the customer, contract be damned.
AT&T and Comcast are absolute shit and no one should take any word that they have to say as applying to anything remotely connected to reality. Especially the fuck sticks in Congress that they keep bribing, er, lobbying (cough) Marsha Blackburn (cough).
Re: Head out to site (Score:4, Informative)
Yep, I live in a small town in Idaho (50k people). Not only does the telco have fiber at my house - but we also have municipal fiber from the city owned power company: both offer 1Gbps. The municipal fiber is cool because you just pay $15/month as part of your electrical bill - then you can use any of 10 different ISPs to get service.
After trying all the services I settled on using the telcos 1Gbps service. It costs $60 total.
Meanwhile - I lived in Boston for a while and had to beg for 250Mbps at $100ish. Ridiculous!
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It's a hell of a lot expensive per mile (in addition to fewer miles) to run fiber in small town than in a big city. Around here, the lawsuits alone over the right-of-way access would cost more than the entire job in a small town in flyover country. Took us 14 months to get a circuit installed in one of our stores (and 13 in another a couple of years ago).
And if there's a military base anywhere nearby, it's entirely possible that there's a considerable amount of normally unused infrastructure already in plac
Re: Head out to site (Score:3)
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There needs to be law (Score:3)
Clearly, the ISPs web sites and maps can't be relied upon. Internet access is as vital as electricity and water nowadays. It's bad enough if you are renting, but at least you can move. When buying, is is a lot harder. I think this is a case where utilities should be required to state in writing whether they can provide service at that address before closing.
the maps may cover an town but it takes someone (Score:2)
the maps may cover an town but it takes someone to come on site to check the local line levels / cable runs to see what they really are like.
and some systems well it may been 20-30+ years ago when this town got cable and that was 5-6+ Mergers and Acquisitions ago.
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In that case, the utility can either respond that they can't provide service, or send someone on site before responding in the affirmative - they only need to check signal outdoors, not indoors, at least in my area where everything is aerial. Either way, it's an essential service, and something buyers need to know before closing. Maps and web sites checks clearly aren't sufficient.
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I think this is a case where utilities should be required to state in writing whether they can provide service at that address before closing.
Well, it sounds like they did just that. What they should be required to do is live up to their promises. You took an order to install internet at a certain address for a standard install fee? Then that's what you'll do. If it costs you $200,000 to do so, that's on you for not checking before you accepted the order.
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No, they didn't do just that. They checked the website. From TFA :
"Rowny told Ars that before closing on the house in the city of Buckley, he checked Comcast's website to confirm that he could sign up for broadband."
IANAL, but checking a web site isn't the same as a letter from Comcast stating service is available at that address. Web sites have errors on them all the time, unfortunately. Their content changes dynamically, also, in a way a letter doesn't. Don't get me wrong, I think Comcast should be liable
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I don't know that further regulation is required - Comcast is clearly guilty of *at least* false advertising already. I see no reason we shouldn't enact a mandatory minimum sentencing for such socially endemic crimes perpetrated by a relatively small number of repeat offenders.
And then there's Spectrum... (Score:3)
Here in the general Orlando area, Comcast is not too bad, they get the work done. And that I can say *nice* things about AT&T these days compared to a decade ago, well that's just black magic! Then there's Spectrum.
In several satellite offices of our company we needed to setup business Internet service. These offices are in strip malls and medical office plazas, and we knew going in that Spectrum was available at those places. So when we requested service, we'd have independent contractors come out with the damn router (invariably an Arris DS1670a), look for a cable, and tell us there wasn't one. They'd have to call in "Construction" to get a cable run to the building. Construction would "do something" and say the contractor could come out. And again, contractor said there was no cable, they'd call Construction. This went on for over three months at one office, spread among seven services calls. At the last contractor visit, I asked to speak with Construction directly. Well, turns out I can't, and I can't even get them to call me back. I dutifully reported this back to our Telecom department, who made very nasty calls to Spectrum to get this straightened out. Which eventually did happen. By the way, the contractors are not paid if there is not a cable to connect the router to, it's considered a failed install, and they get nothing for the trip. Waste of time for them and me.
At another site, where practically every office and business on the plaza has Spectrum service, we were told it was not available at that particular office. This, despite having been in the office before build-out, and finding their ground feed and splitters. At another site, they honestly did not have their cable run in place, but took over four months to get the run in place, including a couple of months where they dug their colorful plastic cable conduits into the ground, but left them in pretty loops at the side of the building. To be clear, these are places where our nextdoor neighbors have Spectrum service, yet Spectrum tried to tell us *we* couldn't have it. We're an international company, don't tell us such crap. They took the order, said they could do it, then attempted to welch out of it.
some franchise setups force the ISP to cover town (Score:2)
some franchise setups force the ISP to cover the full town at the ISP cost.
Confusing Headline (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I the only one that found this headline confusing? It almost reads that the man himself falsely advertised Comcast’s services.
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> No, your not.
This sentence no verb.
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Same fight, 2016 (Score:4, Informative)
At the time I was a 13 year customer of Comcast. In 2016 I was looking at a new house that had just been built and had no cable lines run through its underground conduit, was told that it would cost $2,700 by Comcast Site Survey to get services at this newly built house. Site Survey goes quiet for a month! After I purchase they said it's suddenly $6,500 to get services installed!
I read Comcast's King County Franchise Agreement, engage King County Cable Administration and suddenly the installation is FREE. And the installation should have been done nearly four months prior (Eight months if you count the builder who was quoted $8,000 in Feb 2016), The franchise agreement clearly stated a few key things, 1) In an area with more than 1,000 people per linear mile they cover install and 2) costs for install for the first 150 feet are covered by Comcast
For me, I have a 350 foot driveway, but they were trying to charge me the fee to attach to the power pole for my property which was 20 feet across from their lines on the main road. That was the major charge right there is Comcast's 'lease' of the power pole that was only there to service my house...
Makes you wonder how can a $6,500 bill suddenly be zero unless someone is trying to screw over the customer?
So how do you really know (Score:2)
Before we started letting mega corporations buy all the houses you could put a rider into a housing contract. But nowadays the house market is so screwed up any seller is just going
They did the same to me (Score:3)
Meanwhile in Europe... (Score:2)
When I bought my apartment the building had fiber preinstalled. I contracted the internet the same day I closed on the apartment and had the modem installed couple hours later. I could choose between dozen different companies and signed up for a pre-paid service offered by local company. Installation was free, modem was free, I pay 20 Euro for 200MB/s but they offer up to 1GB/s for 30 Euro. And we're talking about a small town, population 25.000.
the fraud goes deeper (Score:2)
This is probably the same data they use to collect various government subsidies for making broadband "available".
Personal experience (Score:2)
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And yet we'll have the usual muppets getting on here to tell us why Starlink is terrible and won't ever measure up to the stellar service being offered by the legacy telcos and cable cos.
If this article demonstrates what they are meant to measure up to, I'm glad they don't.
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The biggest problem with Starlink is regulators can point to it and say "See, no monopoly!", thus leaving the existing terrestrial broadband shitshow without any real competition.
Re: rock and a hard place (Score:3)
prior to starlink, they were already doing that, so I don't think anything has changed there. they claim they are competing with each other (att and Comcast). they are even allowed to claim they support an addr as long as they support an addr within a mile.
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What do you consider the "boondocks"? Internet providers consider places 100m further down the road from someone getting service to be the "boondocks" in some locations. Living just a few miles outside of a major city can have the same results.
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If people decide to live in boondocks
Not sure what that has to do with anything. Internet access needs to be regulated like any other utility in 2022. If a carrier is effectively given monopoly over a geographic area (whether it be rural or urban) they shouldn't subsequently get to pick-and-choose which residences within that area get service... Because the government has effectively locked out all competition at that point. Any additional costs incurred in rural areas can still be recovered there through higher service costs in those are
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Yeah, and those farmers are going to need every penny so they can afford to pay Comcast to lay line.
We could do this dance all day, why not just admit you're a self-centered idiot?
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This story is pretty non-newsy to anyone living on a country road anywhere. I don't care if Comcast, AT&T, Verizon etc - at least one of them will report being able to offer service at your location but when you call them up they will say they can't. This is 100% the norm. Its been the case for myself multiple times and just about everyone I know that 'lives out in the county' its worse on the DSL side actually; because in a lot cases it would be possible to install DSL at a given location but for the f
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Kind had that happen.
Had 2 phone lines (as was common in the dialup days), dropped one, got DSL. Wanted faster DSL when it was offered, but no second line/pair available for me, so I was stuck at lower rate.
Saw a facebook post/ad/thing from Windstream (my provider) about how anywhere that they offer service you can now get the faster service. So I snarkily replied "well, unless there is no second pair available". 10 minutes later I have a PM from Windstream telling me to call customer service and referen
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And this is why when telephone service was being rolled out across the US, AT&T got the monopoly but ONLY if it provided service to everyone who wanted it, even if this meant they had to put up a set of poles out to a single house. Because at that time it seemed like telephone service was going to be a necessity; today however the internet providers are acting as if internet is just a simple luxury. I do have relatives who had to have the expensive lines put in on the phone comany's dime.
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AT&T also got the Universal Service Fund, where the government allowed them to collect money from every phone bill everywhere and then spend that money building out service where it would otherwise be unprofitable.
Comcast doesn't have that because the Clinton Administration redirected the Universal Service Fund to pay for laptops in schools instead of universal Internet service.
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They do, however, get the federal excise tax from the Communications Act of 1996, which has collected over $200B specifically for broadband rollout.
My heart pumps purple piss for them that they had a decades-long subsidy taken from them, while being handed another decades-long subsidy that nobody has ever audited to make sure that the proceeds actually paid for the stated purpose.
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Switch from a fund they could only spend where the costs were significantly higher than average to a fund they could spend anywhere and they spent it where they expected to make the most money. Color me shocked.
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Comcast's contract talks about starting on the install date and subject to ability to install. They asked him to pay because they wouldn't have made their money back building out just for his cable bill.
What I wonder about is if he really lives in a location where this buildout can only be used for him, or does he have 20 neighbors who now actually are able to get service from Comcast because of the work that he paid for?
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Oh look, I have my own personal troll. I love having rent-free vacations in someone else's head!
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Mistakes obviously happen. On this map this seems to be a remote area in the middle of forests. It kind of remInds me of the cherry picking that was used
Re:rock and a hard place (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast and other telecoms are required to provide coverage maps to the government for a range of assessments, including some very juicy corporate handouts.
Seems to me that coverage map should be legally binding - if someone they say has coverage, doesn't, that should come straight out of their bottom line. Repeatedly. Until the problem is fixed. And fixing the map should carry a substantial additional penalty to discourage such fraud.
And using a more generous coverage map in advertising should be a clear-cut case of fraudulent advertising, with substantial penalties for that.
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When I recently bought a house, one of my contingencies was that I would order fiber optic Internet service and it had to be successfully installed before I'd close. If the phone company failed to install it, I could back out and get my money back.
My installation went off without a hitch but if Internet service is important to you it should definitely be a contingency in the contract. You can get an early read from https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#... [fcc.gov] but it's not real until it's installed and working.
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The thing is that Rowny did do their due diligence. The problem is that Comcast didn't do theirs. Rowny used the Comcast site to make sure there was coverage before making an offer on the house. Comcast's site said that everything was good to go for Internet service. Comcast even let Rowny sign up for Internet access and schedule an installation date. It wasn't until a significant period after signing up for Internet that Comcast came back to Rowny and said "Oops. Sorry. You are SOL. Pay us $19000 to rectif
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Not doing due dillagence is a harsh mistress
What more due diligence could they do? They contacted Comcast and verified that they could get service and set up an install date. Comcast only told them that they could not get service right before the scheduled appointment when they cancelled. I suppose they could have found the names of the Comcast installers in the area and then paid them a few hundred dollars to confirm whether it was actually possible to get service at their location.
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There are 4G and now 5G options, too, some of which don't completely suck (though they probably a lot slower than cable). And fixed wireless in many places.
He might also have been able to find a neighbor that did have service and put together some kind of fixed wireless of his own.
But if you live in a remote area, you have to accept that your options are limited. And expensive.
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But why should you have to accept it? This was not the case with the original telephone roll-out, lines were put up at the expense of the phone company. Why should the internet be any different? Especially since most landlines are going away and are relying on internet phones or mobile phones. (if you're remote, good luck getting good mobile service too)
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The telephone subsidy was wrong. it was a handout to rural states. That led to At&T having to being broken up to create some competition as the subsidy made AT&T into a monopoly. Why should we repeat a mistake?
Not really true. The breakup had a lot more to do with the fact that Bell was providing both local AND long distance service. Breaking up the company into local and long distance entities allowed other smaller companies to compete with what had become a monopoly of phone services.
Also, the subsidy was the right thing to do at the time. Bell was literally the ONLY company offering viable country wide telephone service so of course they were a monopoly because they initially had little to NO real competit
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The problem with some areas not being able to get broadband service is not actually exclusively limited to rural areas.
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Because we're a country, we're neighbors. The society is more important than the individual hiding behind a barbed wire fence. For a civil society, communication is seen as important. You can use that phone to call a doctor, report a fire, etc. Why would a country what a backwards and indigent rural population where the government tells them "you aren't important"?
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But why should you have to accept it?
Because the world doesn't evolve around you. Welcome to grown up land.
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No, it's laissez-faire capitalism land.
No offer acceptance (Score:2)
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How about lobbying for a law to hold telecoms legally liable for their coverage claims?
At the very least, if the coverage maps a telecom provides to the authorities for various legal analyses says you are in a covered area, you'd better be able to get connected at the standard price within a couple months or they automatically face a substantial monthly fine per pending customer, with the would-be customer receiving a portion as incentive to report corporate fraud. Maps may be revised, but at the price of
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A year ago I needed faster Internet and the only option was Comcast. I refused to use Comcast in the past because of all the horror stories, but I bit the bullet and signed up for 100Mb service. Service was mediocre and stalled sometimes, but mostly it was good enough. Then Google Fiber came to town with 1-2Gb service just as Comcast was overbilling me for overages. I got Google and it's been fine. Terminating Comcast was a nightmare. The first time I did a chat to object to the overbilling I was told
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I learned years ago when dealing with telephony or cable companies they usually lack the motivation to do the right thing. When it came to billing errors or fees that they had no business charging, I make one phone call to try and resolve it. If they failed to take action or start giving me the run around, I filed a complaint with the FCC. Amazingly, the resolution time went from 30 days or so to one business day with a manager personally responding.
It always comes down to motivation. When the governing
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That's why you need to live in a state where the Attorney General's office has an active consumer protection unit.
When I was in high school I had a friend who wanted to go to law school after college. He got an internship in the Massachusetts AG's office where his job was to read consumer complaints and fire off a form letter to the business. Almost always the business, after getting a letter from the AG's office, would fix whatever the problem was. If they didn't my friend would hand off the complaint to
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