Industry Insider Blasts Comcast

gordette writes "I'm posting this because Comcast did the same thing to me that this journalist describes — held my HD channels hostage by insisting that I shell out for an expensive cable package. The journalist is blasting Comcast for their 'shakedown' of consumers, and is doing so in full view of industry insiders. She also links to an earlier blog post describing Comcast's Motorola DVR problems."

"back charges"

[farkus888]

comcast once required a notarized letter from my landlord stating that I was not resident at a particular address while a previous resident was before I could turn on my service. unless of course I wanted to pay off the $300 in back charges said resident owed. left me without internet for a week since my landlord was on vacation. needless to say they are getting canceled the day FIOS is available in my area.

Re:Oh stop whinging

[vivaoporto]

You certainly didn't RTFA. They sold an upgraded (and expensive) package for her promising HD channels but now they are wanting her to upgrade again to another more expensive package in order to get the *real* HD channels. That's the traditional bait and switch, and it doesn't matter if it is TV, medical treatment or a piece of soggy wet paper, it is outright fraud.

Re:Wow

[drawfour]

Her breakdown was:

$102.99 for the DIGITAL GOLD Package which includes: standard cable (limited basic and expanded basic), digital special interest channels, music choice, Starz, Starz Plex, Encore, Encore Plex, HBO, HBO Plex, Showtime, Showtime Plex, and Digital Converter and Remote where applicable;
$11.95 for DVR with HDTV;
$45.95 for high speed Internet

So $46/mo ($552/yr) was for Internet. But to answer your question, I'd say it's fairly common for people to pay something close to what she's paying. Lots of people get the premium channels packages. A few years ago, I had it. Then I moved in with a friend who was a cheap bastard, and all we had was the non-digital expanded basic. Got used to not having all the premium channels, and I got along just fine. Now that I've moved into my own place, I didn't bother with the premium channels. No need, there's plenty of stuff to watch as is.

Re:Oh stop whinging

[Mistlefoot]

And she was hardly fleeced. To quote "When I upgraded to HD in 2005, Comcast never disclosed - not once - that they would require a shift into an even more expensive cable package.". Oh my god. Comcast didn't indicated that almost 2 years later the price might go up. I'll be Comcast currently offer many more HD channels then they did in 2005. And of course, by her logic, they should do that without raising their price. Because offering this additional content (and HD content cost more to feed then normal channels) does cost.

I notice as well that the customer rents her HD terminal - hardly like she's being forced to stay.

She could choose Direct TV (satellite) - but oh, wait, they charge $9.99/month for HD content. Hmm.. Isn't the same $120 per year she is complaining that comcast want?

I'll also note that on May 7 this same author writes "I'm a Comcast customer, too. But my experience with Comcast, bar some exceptions, has been fairly positive. For one thing, the system is incredibly reliable. Outages just don't happen, at least in my area." (http://www.multichannel.com/blog/1300000330.html? starting=13) It's amazing how her attitude can change so quickly when she finds out she'll have to pay more money for more content.

Re:"back charges"

[SeaFox]

You'll be surprised how many deadbeats are out there when it comes to cable bills.

A household of three people can easy amass a $1000+ debt to a cable company by having someone who lives there sign up for service under their name after someone [i]else[/i] there has been disconnected for non-payment. This is just one address we're talking about here.

People balk at having to give their SSN's to the cable company to get service, but it's information they want so they can send you to a collection collections if you don't pay or run off with digital boxes (those thing can run $300-$500 [i]apiece[/i] depending on the model's capabilities.

The notarized letter sounds like overkill, but they could have chosen to charge you a deposit instead. I know of one cable company that did this if anyone was signing up for service around the time colleges started, because students were especially bad about skipping out at the end of the spring term with unpaid bills.

Re:Oh stop whinging

[clickclickdrone]

This is quite surprising. I always thought the US was awash with options. In the UK we only have one cable company now after the two main ones merged and changed their name. ADSL is all handled by BT but resold via the hundreds of ISPs so you choose who you want based on price/download cap etc. WIth the local loop being slowly unbundled, speeds are rising. Most people have the option of 8Mb ADSL but those who have been unbundled can go to 24Mb I think. Not sure about cable - I think that's 10Mb - it was when I used to be Blueyonder.
As far as TV goes, it's cable via Virgin Media, Sky (spit) if you want digital Sat and Freeview for digital via an aerial. There is of course also analogue TV via aerial but that's about to be switched off - a pity as a good analogue signal beats the current crop of digital ones hands down.
Many operators are now offering bundles with phone/TV/broadband and mobile (cell) all in one package assuming you can find one that suits your usage.
HiDef is still in its infancy with a handful of Sky and Cable channels at premium prices.

just cancel

[nanosquid]

I have Comcast for Internet access and am reasonably happy with them. I think their cable TV channels are way overpriced, so I'm not subscribing to anything there, but, then, I have never watched much cable.

So, why not just cancel? You have alternatives: DSL, satellite, OTA, other cable companies.

Re:just cancel

[peragrin]

no he doesn't. In most of the areas serviced by comcast, and time warner they are the ONLY game in town. They are fighting like mad to keep it that way too, because if they have to compete on price they will lose, fast.

Comcast sucks donkey balls...

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when they did the @home takeover, they halved our bandwidth, took away our newsgroups, and thought that it would be funny to charge subscribers $8 more/month and non-subscribers $22 more/month. I wouldn't trust these clowns to stick bread in a toaster, unless, of course, the toaster were unplugged and had no way of heating up.

Re:Oh stop whinging

[secretwhistle]

I'll cast my last post into the flames:

I lived in South Dakota in a town with a pop. of 50,000. There were two cable providers and prices were lower and services better because of the competition.

I lived in Lincoln, Nebraska (pop. 200,000) and got a huge cable package with DVR for less than I'm paying now. Again, there were multiple options.

Now, in a metro area with a pop. of approximately 1,000,000, I can't get the services I want at a price I want. I can't get the best deal thru my current provider because they don't provide the phone service in my area. They do in other parts of town. I can't run an all-in-one package with the phone company because I can't install a satellite dish.

Companies like Comcast get away with the abhorrent service record because they climbed into enough back pockets to ensure monopolies in large metro areas. They don't have any reason to keep prices low or provide responsive customer service.

In a supposed free-market economy, this should be near impossible. But, sadly, it isn't.

Re:Oh stop whinging

[Matisaro]

She actually has an old package of gold from at&t and if she wants new channels she has to get the modern package, pretty simple

Re:Wow

[ScolopendraGigantea]

http://www.dell.com/content/products/results.aspx/ dimen?c=us&cs=04&dt=List&l=en&s=bsd [dell.com]

For less than two months worth of cable you can get a machine significantly newer than your 7 year old PC. If you're that strapped, maybe you should reconsider whether you really need "all the HBO's, Cinemax's, Showtimes, Starz, Encores etc including On Demand channels."

Just saying.

Sets with QAM tuners work fine

[SIGBUS]

My Sharp Aquos set has a QAM tuner for cable, as well as an ATSC tuner for over-the-air reception; also, I have a pcHDTV HD-5500 in one of my systems, and it also works with both QAM and ATSC. Both work just fine on the unencrypted local HD broadcast channels. I'm on Comcast in the Chicago area (Romeoville front-end).

When I was shopping for the HD set, I specifically made sure that what I was buying had a QAM tuner. I was not about to take a salesman's word for it.

Re:just cancel

[trogdor8667]

I'm in a Comcast town. Back in the 70s it was the Atlanta Cable Company. They came to our small city and said "We'll pay every dime to wire your entire city for cable television. You simply have to agree to not let any other businesses come in and wire the city for cable for 30 years." My city agreed. The non-compete agreement ended a few months ago, and Atlanta Cable became Comcast well over ten years ago. However, Charter is the only other cable company within 100 miles of here, and from what I can tell, Comcast owns 49% of their stock, and makes their decisions for them. So, Charter's not about to come and wire the town.

You mention satellite. Satellite is great. I'd get Dish in a heartbeat, if my landlord allowed it. So, if you want TV (not just downloading off the internet or over-the-air or DVDs), you're stuck with DISH, DirecTV, Comcast, or nothing. Since I can't use Dish, that breaks it down to Comcast or nothing.

We're a fairly big city now, but still only have one DSL provider; BellSouth. BellSouth isn't bad, except that they don't offer any speeds over the generic 768kb connection that is the bare minimum they need to consider it "broadband." So, for high-speed internet in my area, once again, its Comcast or nothing.

So don't say just get real... a lot cities don't have options to go to a competitor when it comes to these situations. And I live IN the city. Don't even get me started on what my friend who lives about 40 miles out has to go through...

Re:"back charges"

[Kwirl]

For the record, you are NOT required to give them your SSN. They ask for it for account verification purposes, but in most states they are not classified as a utility service provider, and are not allowed to require your SSN. When I worked there, simply stating that you did not want to divulge your SSN was all I needed to hear before I moved along to the next item in setting up a new customer.

Re:"back charges"

[Lumpy]

The thing about the SSN is bullshit. Comcast knows it and had their asses handed to them with a SSN fiasco from 2 years ago. The Drivers license number or State ID number is enough information to find and "get" you. comcast knows this, but they want the SSN to credit check you so they can assess your risk from day one. (letting you float a full 28 days before sending reminders or sending you the nasty-gram 5 days after your due date based on your credit score, or even shutting off your box the day after your due date if your Credit score is low enough)

That is the only reason they want your SSN.

Re:just cancel

[Kwirl]

Your perspective is skewed from the blind hatred of large corporations that is harbored by so many readers here.

The costs of building and maintaining an efficient broadband network on a nationwide scale is tremendous. Just how many companies do you think could afford to build a system of that scale? Now, the FCC limits Comcast and ALL other cable providers to a MAXIMUM of 30% market penetration. This means in order to provide the entire country with high-speed cable internet, you would need FOUR financially thriving cable systems. It would make no sense for either Comcast or Cox to compete for the same market, because doing so would just mean that somewhere else in the country, high speed cable service is being denied. The FCC does this because they are offering the telephone companies a means to compete with the cable companies.

Yes the cable industry spends millions and millions of dollars a year lobbying the government. Does that make them evil? Take a look at http://www.csuchico.edu/~kfountain/alpha.html [csuchico.edu]this list of lobbyist organizations and keep telling yourself that lobbyist groups are reserved for evildoers. The fact is that lobbying the government is the most efficient way to get things done. You want marijuana legalized? Start raising funds for a lobbyist organization, such as the ones for tobacco and alcohol, and you will start seeing results when enough billions get pumped into the right pockets.

Comcast is a business, that wants to make money. In Slashdot mythology, that is a defining characteristic of evil, but I would challenge you all to show me a business plan to create a free nationwide network of broadband coverage that offers the technical support and capabilities that Comcast allows. They make money by providing a service, and if it bothers you that the FCC regulates geographical competition among the cable industry, then maybe YOU need to lobby someone to bully the FCC into removing their 'lets give the phone companies a chance' campaign so that the cable companies can have the logistical option of competing without government imposted regulations on the size of growth.

Personally, I think it is about on par with what would the PC market look like if the government sanctioned a 30% marketshare cap on Microsoft. Do you really trust the OSS community to pick up the slack for the rest of the 70% of desktop users out there? Which demographic would MS be forced to focus sales towards? Bah, I may have missed some points, but this is just off the top of my head. If you want to correct me, then by all means I welcome constructive feedback, but if you want to just flame me for having a different perspective, just send me a PM and spare the burden of your hatred upon the servers.

Re:"back charges"

[BosstonesOwn]

Actually the landlord can't do much to prevent you from getting satellite tv. But the cable companies do have that attitude.

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/facts/otard.html#QA [fcc.gov] explains the dish/antenna thing better then I ever could.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[Chuckaluphagus]

Manufacturer's website for an HDTV will usually say if it has a QAM tuner in addition to ATSC/NTSC. Vizio does this for their televisions, for instance, it's one of the reasons I went with them. Consumer Reports (consumerreports.org) will also say whether a television they're reviewing has a QAM tuner. QAM tuners are still not common, though, so your selection is somewhat limited.

Re:Free TV-get what you pay for

[orgelspieler]

If you live in a major market, you can still get reasonably good TV for free. In Houston there's something like ten English-speaking channels over the air-waves. Most of the signals are pretty strong, and if you get a good set of bunny ears, you can pick up some of them as clear as cable. The only reason we got Dish last year was because my wife was pregnant and moody and got really mad about the whole Monday-Night-Football-on-ESPN thing.

I wonder how all of this is going to change when the airwaves go digital...

Re:Comcast sucks donkey balls...

[badasscat]

Or he could call Dishnetworks or Directv and have them come and install a satellite setup for him.

There are tradeoffs with every TV service. The parent said he was waiting for FiOS... which I have, so I can tell you from experience that there are tradeoffs with that too. I've also had DirecTV in the past.

With FiOS, you pay the highest prices anywhere. Oh, they advertise "$95 a month" for their three service package (TV, phone, internet), but they nickel and dime you to death. They charge $12.95 for an HD-DVR - same box was $5 from Cablevision. They have tons of little extra fees tacked on that they don't tell you about. My "$95 a month" plan ended up quoted to me at $121 a month over the phone, and I actually pay at least $155 a month when all is said and done. With Cablevision, getting the same package of services I was paying $126 a month. So FiOS is an expensive option.

FiOS is also the least reliable of all the services I have used. Cablevision was honestly rock solid for all three services - no problems. With FiOS, I have channel breakups almost every day, I get audio dropouts, and my router dies at least once a week (you have to use their router).

You may as well ask why I switched... at this point, I really don't know. I'd heard FiOS had the best picture quality, and that may be true, when it's working properly. I had no problem with my Cablevision picture quality, though I moved to FiOS at the same time as I moved from a 26" HDTV to a 42" HDTV so I can't really say for sure which has the better PQ. But now I'm locked into a year contract. And I don't want to change my phone number again.

As for DirecTV, you know what they say about it going out in the rain? Well, it's true. Oh, it's not as big of a problem as their competitors' commercials make it out to be, but it does happen. It may not be an issue if you live in a dry state like Arizona, but I live in the northeast and we get some wicked thunderstorms in the summer. My DTV was going out about once a week, sometimes for hours at a time when I had it.

Also, DirecTV is well known for awful picture quality. They're the standard-bearers of "HD-lite" - taking a 1920x1080 signal and down-rezzing it to 1280x1080. They were sued in court over their commercials that advertised the "best picture quality" and they lost - they were forced to withdraw the ads. They've recently launched a few new satellites that give them greater data capacity, but everybody knows that they'll just add more channels rather than improving PQ - it's what they've always done when they've added capacity. At the very least, they are re-compressing MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, which is an inherently lossy process even keeping the same resolution.

So, you pick your poison. There is no "perfect" TV service, only whatever you personally consider to be least bad.