Cable Companies Can No Longer 'Rent' You the Router You Already Own (theverge.com) 62
Is your internet service provider charging you every month for the cable modem or router that you purchased with your own money? Or, perhaps, have you never bothered to buy those items because you couldn't escape the fee? That fee is illegal as of yesterday. From a report: Last year, Congress passed a law that should have fixed this ridiculous loophole as of June 20th, 2020 -- and though the FCC managed to extend the deadline six months by spinning up some bullshit about how cable companies didn't have the resources to stop charging you money, the law should take full effect Monday. Do note that the actual text of the law still allows some BS to occur. If your ISP sends you a router, you'll need to return it to avoid charges. Frontier in particular has been notorious for charging customers $10 a month for their equipment "whether you use it or not" -- the company's words, not mine -- but Frontier is clearly aware it won't be able to do that anymore. Starting this month, the company's equipment page has changed to remove the part where it talks about the mandatory fee.
Thank you congress! (Score:1)
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Re: Thank you congress! (Score:2)
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Don't blow it all on a full tank of gas (Score:2)
For your lawn mower, that is, Mr Weekend Warrior
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What is the over/under on how many months it takes for Frontier to create a $10 monthly router connection fee? Perhaps they even try to get good PR by announcing they will start providing routers free of charge.
Now count the real cost. (Score:2)
Instead of falling for the corporate b8 ($10/month times many months is a lot more of your money than it looks which is why they tricked customers in the first place) consider why this is a victory for every consumer.
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Can you tell my why this is a victory for the consumer?? If I read the law correctly, a company charging you for something they did not provide to you (i.e. rental fee on YOUR equipment YOU purchased) is fraud. Flat out fraud.
Needing a special law passed to prevent companies from this specific instance of fraud is not a victory. In fact it perpetuates the idea that companies can get away with this - that fraud does not apply to them! Victory would be the company dragged into court on 100,000 counts of fr
Half the job? (Score:2)
But can't cable companies refuse to allow you to use your own equipment?
I was told I don't qualify because I have a fixed ipv4 IP, which seems like salt-in-the-wound as a fixed IP is also slower because it's its tunneled to the customer's end point over ipv6.
Cable Companies Probably Fine With It (Score:3)
Cable companies probably like this, if they are anything like the financial institutions I work with. No one likes to field customer service complaints about excessive fees, but if it is an industry standard it is hard to remove the fees without your base prices being higher than competitors. And shoppers almost universally look at base advertised price instead of all the add-ons when making purchasing decisions.
Now cable providers can just role the expected revenue from these fees directly into their base price without fear of being undercut by a competitor.
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Also, now that you aren't paying them to "rent" the equipment, they can always just blame it on the customer when something isn't functioning correctly. Not getting the desired speeds? It's probably your modem.
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Yeah, sometimes it's the customer's equipment, but now it will become the default excuse.
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I’ve had Comcast for the past 12 years. I’ve had to call about 30 times for outages. All 30-ish times, they blamed my modem. In each case, they wanted to ship me a new one. One with with a wi-fi network enabled for them to let other people use. Because there’s a bandwidth crunch that forces them to instituted caps, yet they have spare bandwidth for an additional access points.
Anyway, of those 30-ish times, it was the fault of my modem zero times. It always ended up being a broader outa
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Yeah, sometimes it's the customer's equipment, but now it will become the default excuse.
It is the default excuse because it is usually correct.
About 80% of "I have no Internet" problems can be fixed by either power-cycling the modem & router, or unplugging and replugging the cables.
Another 5% can be fixed by removing the sweater that was tossed on the shelf, inadvertently covering the router and causing thermal shutdown when it reached 300F.
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Re: Cable Companies Probably Fine With It (Score:2)
It's DOCSIS, should work regardless
HAHAHAHAHA. You've obviously never looked through the firmware changelogs on cable modems.
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Knology / Wow pushes out firmware to some customer-owned cable modems, too. I own a Motorola modem and they upgraded it when I first connected it and called in for configuration.
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I'm on Comcast, and have been pretty much for the past 20y through their various rebranding and acquisitions. I've pretty much always been on my own modems to save on the renting fee and avoid the forced signal sharing that their hardware enforces. I'm only on my 3rd modem in 20y. I always bought a modem that was on the pre-approved list and they never blamed my modem for the issues I might have had. They can get a signal report from the modem and have trusted these when necessary. The only reason I upgrade
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I'm by no mean an apologist for Comcast but I have to say that in the past 10y they have been much more professional than they were between 2000 and 2010.
Maybe I will give this another shot then. I tried using my own equipment in the late-00's but ran into so many problems, such as their customer service refusing to help troubleshoot unless I plugged in one of their devices during troubleshooting. Now I just rent. Saving $100 per year is not worth much hassle on my part.
There is no real competition to Comcast in my area, as AT&T data speed are a joke where I live. And I'm in an affluent suburb of a major city, so there is no excuse other than the compani
Re:Cable Companies Probably Fine With It (Score:5, Insightful)
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That is a nice way of spinning the fact that those companies, who were charging rental fees for customer owned devices previously, were actively committing fraud to appear competitive.
I am not aware of any fraud taking place at these companies. To be more specific with Frontier, they seem to have had a clear policy that you will be charged equipment charges whether you use them or not. Including if you return the equipment or refuse its installation. The exact text from their website read "Frontier charges you a monthly lease fee for your Frontier router or modem—whether you use it or not." That isn't fraud. I pay the same amount for my meal at my favorite Korean restaurant even th
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They don't charge you for dessert unless you order one.
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If dessert (or more commonly soup or salad) is included in the price of the meal, then you pay for it whether you order it or not. Just because they don't break it out as a separate line item doesn't mean you aren't paying for it.
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But in the case of the ISPs, it isn't included in the price they advertise.
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I am not aware of any fraud taking place at these companies. To be more specific with Frontier, they seem to have had a clear policy that you will be charged equipment charges whether you use them or not. Including if you return the equipment or refuse its installation. The exact text from their website read "Frontier charges you a monthly lease fee for your Frontier router or modem—whether you use it or not." That isn't fraud. I pay the same amount for my meal at my favorite Korean restaurant even th
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I'm curious, do you really believe that whole "not fraud" thing, or did you just give up?
For gods sake, how is this fraud? Fraud requires deception, and the cable company's official policy was to charge the fee regardless of whether you used the equipment or not. The charge was on every bill, allowing the customer to inquire if they hadn't read the policies thoroughly (which no one ever does). It wasn't hidden from the consumer.
I agree this is a shady business practice, but it isn't fraud. Even if you think it should be illegal, the charge certainly wouldn't be fraud. Likely some kind of overch
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In most cases, they don't even advertise the real base price either. They advertise the promotional rate and bury the standard rate in the fine print if they provide it at all. Can't let you know what your neighbors are paying if you're willing to pay more.
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Are you kidding me? Cable companies are generally monopolies in their respective areas. Hidden fees exist largely to ensure they can pretend their prices are reasonable, claiming to have a $49.99 basic cable package, for example, so people sign up. People aren't comparing their subscriptions to those of rivals because there aren't any.
They are still building their opinion of what reasonable cable pricing is from competitors, even if those competitors don't offer services in the same area. No one has some intrinsic knowledge of what a reasonable cable package bill is.
I do agree localized cable monopolies are a huge problem though, and pricing would be far less and service much better if that didn't exist. I wish legislation would be focused there instead of caring about $10 router charges (although I do think they could do both at the sam
ban forced rent comcast some areas / some packages (Score:2)
ban forced rent comcast some areas / some packages force it.
If you are forced to rent then it must be part of the base fee.
ATT forces it /rent /mo
comcast does with static ip address (added fee for static ip address must come with rent fee)
comcast does it fiber only areas.
comcast does it on gig-pro at $300/mo + $15-$20
others??
The actual core of the problem ... (Score:2)
... is the legality of taking money without giving something of equal worth in return.
Normally, we call that theft. Or robbery. Or fraud. Or at least usury.
And I still do not understand, why in the most common cases, we just shrug, and call it "profit" or "property" or "interest" or "just business".
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> Normally, we call that theft. Or robbery. Or fraud. Or at least usury.
Remember, in some places this has been going on for twenty years, stealing millions of dollars from ordinary people.
The system has supported them this whole time, with every level of government rejecting claims and complaints based on reason, logic, morality, and constitutionality.
So we won this one. Great. There's 9999 more to go and hundreds being added every year.
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The actual core of the problem is the legality of taking money without giving something of equal worth in return.
Pricing in our economy is not connected to the value of the service to the recipient. In this case the value of a company provided router doesn't intrinsically change just because the customer has their own router. The value only changes for that specific customer in that specific situation. In this scenario I agree it should be very easy for the company to just not charge for the router, and I agree it was a very shady business practice. But the belief you could easily make this behavior illegal across the
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In that case, what's your checking account number? I am providing you with this reply and will bill you at the low low rate of $15. It's nice to know that I needn't worry about this reply actually being worth $15 to you or even if it's wanted at all :-)
Have fun buying whatever your grocery store is overstocked on at full price even if you're allergic to it.
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I don't get the connection of your post to anything being discussed. No one has to do business with Frontier, just like I don't have to do business with the email reply service you are suggesting.
And are you equating this situation to a grocery store forcing you to buy something you don't want whenever shopping at their store? Seems like a practice which would put them out of business quick, but it doesn't sound illegal. Not much different than being forced to pay for membership to an organization before I
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There are places where you either do business with frontier or you get to live 30 years ago. You have more trouble paying bills, banking, and dealing with government services. This year in particular, you need an ISP for your kids to go to school or to apply for unemployment at all.
So imagine if there was ONE grocery store and you buying whatever they were overstocked on was the policy or no food for you. Or for that matter, imagine there are two grocery stores and both have the buy what we tell you to buy
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I find it odd that you can't understand what is illegal about requiring you to buy something you don't want or need.
What is illegal about it? What statute? Is it just creating a line item on the bill that causes this law to trigger? If you bundle the price into another charge is it okay? They are upfront about the charges and policy so fraud is obviously not a concern, so what law was broken?
I don't think you know much about the legal system. Something being shady or immoral doesn't make something illegal. There needs to be an actual law broken. In this case the legislature felt no law had been broken so they created a n
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The part that crosses the line is they advertise service at $x per month knowing it's impossible to actually get service for less than $(x+10). Even if they tell you about the extra $10 while you're signing up (they don't), it would be bait and switch.
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The part that crosses the line is they advertise service at $x per month knowing it's impossible to actually get service for less than $(x+10). Even if they tell you about the extra $10 while you're signing up (they don't), it would be bait and switch.
Considering our laws allow them to charge a number of fees on top of their advertised price, that practice is certainly not illegal. I wouldn't be opposed to legislation which stopped that practice, but standard fees which can be hidden in a sea of legalese is perfectly okay. You sign off on everything while signing up, even if you don't realize it.
For instance I just went to Xfinity's page and they list a promotion with a "Pricing & Other Info" link that lists plenty of other potential charges, and lin
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For a long time, I knew of a house where they would sell you pot. Must have been legal since they kept doing it and nobody showed up to bust them.
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For a long time, I knew of a house where they would sell you pot. Must have been legal since they kept doing it and nobody showed up to bust them.
Yet you should also know plenty of people who are arrested for the same activity (or at least know that people do get arrested for selling pot). Yet you don't know companies who have been successfully sued for having fees which aren't part of an advertised price. Companies can get in trouble for truly hiding fees until the bill comes. They can even get in trouble for trying to disguise fees as taxes. But "hidden fees" are not illegal, as long as they aren't completely hidden.
Because most humans are of low intelligence. (Score:2)
That makes them easy to manipulate and difficult to free from manipulation.
You've already posted this! (Score:2)
Here [slashdot.org].
I guess editors talking with each other about publishing stories will come along with unicode support on Slashdot?
Comcast still can charge for owning your modem (Score:1)
comcast also has the public hot spot on there rout (Score:2)
comcast also has the public hot spot on there router as well.
Dear subscribers (Score:2)
Good news, everybody. We are removing the $10 equipment fee from your bill effective this month.
FYI, Effective next month your Internet plan rate is increasing by $5, and we are introducing a new "$5" regulatory cost recovery fee to help recover the cost incurred due to compliance with a new law that limits our equipment charges.
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Well, I guess they already charge some people a regulatory fee for internet access, huh? In that case, sure they'll increase it.
It matters not. At the end of the day... peoples' bill will wind up increasing by at least a few bucks more than the decrease involved in taking the equipment fee line off the bills - to make up for the cost (a.k.a. lost revenue), plus additional to cover the time of employees that will have to be involved to figure out how to implement this.
Comcast used to give me money back (Score:2)
Oz charges not explicit (Score:2)
In Oz you are generally charged a fee for your router which is less than the real value of the router.
The ongoing monthly charge doesn't explicitly mention router fee, but it would be built in.
I own my router, purchased from a past (now defunct) ISP.
The router supplied by my current ISP never worked, the replacement never worked.
Hmmm, I'll look into this.
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