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Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading "10G Network" claims

arstechnica.com

21–30 of 145 posts

Re: Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading "10G Network" claims

#21
post #15
post #8

I didn't realize they were actually selling a 10 Gbps service tier as part of this branding. It's never been available in my market, so I assumed that they were advertising the uplink capability of the thing my modem was connected to! Happy to see this go, but I'm still shocked to learn that the name was _less_ misleading than I had thought.

The article says it provides 10Gbps of service to 98% of customers upon request, which would be powered by fiber-to-the-home. I don't need 10Gbps, but I do want symmetric upload and download speeds. Does anyone know if it's possible to ask them to run fiber and have only an upload speed increase?

I think you're asking for something like their 10G service, but at a lower cost and speed?

> The Comcast "Gigabit Pro" fiber connection that provides 10Gbps speeds costs $299.95 a month plus a $19.95 modem lease fee. It also requires a $500 installation charge and a $500 activation charge

I'm not sure that the pricing for that service actually pays for their installation and equipment costs, so I don't think you'd get much of a discount if you only ran it at 1Gbps symmetric. I did know someone who got the service and didn't bother to make the rest of his equipment work at 10G, so was only using a 1G port. And it works fine, but still costs $320/month + any other taxes and the $1000 install.

Re: Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading "10G Network" claims

#22
post #15
post #8

I didn't realize they were actually selling a 10 Gbps service tier as part of this branding. It's never been available in my market, so I assumed that they were advertising the uplink capability of the thing my modem was connected to! Happy to see this go, but I'm still shocked to learn that the name was _less_ misleading than I had thought.

The article says it provides 10Gbps of service to 98% of customers upon request, which would be powered by fiber-to-the-home. I don't need 10Gbps, but I do want symmetric upload and download speeds. Does anyone know if it's possible to ask them to run fiber and have only an upload speed increase?

> The article says it provides 10Gbps of service to 98% of customers upon request

This part is funny to me because I've tried to sign up for their FttH and they declined despite it being in the area, and the same thing happened to others I know. I'm not sure how they came to that percentage but I don't believe it.

Re: Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading "10G Network" claims

#23

I am always baffled at how US businesses can pretty much do and get away with anything they want, with little to no concequences. I'm not saying where I live is perfect but every time there's a scandal here I only need to look to the US to see we don't have it that bad.

Regulatory capture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

In Capitalism, eventually capital owns everything.

Re: Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading "10G Network" claims

#24
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact is the 10G offering is only available in a very small number of very specific locations.

Does their device at least support 10Gbps internal networks, I assume? In that way it's still not misleading, in my opinion. Of course the uplink only receives and transmits whatever you pay for (or in that case, what they allow you to pay for based on what is available.)

Their "latest Xfinity Gateway" has a 2.5G Ethernet port: https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/modems-and-ro... ; you need something else to do 10G.

Re: Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading "10G Network" claims

#26

I’ve wondered if what we need in society are nonprofits that advocate exclusively against certain evil and nefarious corporations. Imagine what an org could do with a few million and a mission to combat Comcast and expose their behavior. One organization whose mission is to expose Amazon’s bad behavior. A PR check on monopolies. Consumer Affairs, etc. do good work, but we need a more 1:1 relationship.

Probably turn out like the Mozilla Foundation and hundreds of other foundations giving piles of money to do good, which ends up meaning do good for the directors of the foundation.

Re: Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading "10G Network" claims

#27

Interesting, I never once made that distinction, always assumed it meant 10gbps. Was this actually confusing people or just companies fighting in court?

I thought it did too. I went to their website to check out the specs, the fastest 'Xfinity 10G' plan available to me in a major city was 2Gbps/0.2Gbps

It’s called “Gigabit pro” or now “Gigabit x10” and is symmetrical 10gbps.

It’s not on their regular website. You have contact them directly to have someone come out to survey and see if you are eligible for a fiber run.

https://youtu.be/tQV0ltA1tCk

Re: Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading "10G Network" claims

#28
post #21
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says it provides 10Gbps of service to 98% of customers upon request, which would be powered by fiber-to-the-home. I don't need 10Gbps, but I do want symmetric upload and download speeds. Does anyone know if it's possible to ask them to run fiber and have only an upload speed increase?

I think you're asking for something like their 10G service, but at a lower cost and speed? > The Comcast "Gigabit Pro" fiber connection that provides 10Gbps speeds costs $299.95 a month plus a $19.95 modem lease fee. It also requires a $500 installation charge and a $500 activation charge I'm not sure that the pricing for that service actually pays for their installation and equipment costs, so I don't think you'd ge…

I had gigabit pro for a few years, they gave me a half off promo that made it worth it at $150/mo, which is not much more than the close to $100 after miscellaneous fees that the regular gigabit down 35Meg up HFC cable plan costs, not to mention the fiber reliability is so much better - no brief outages and I even had Comcast business proactively reach out to replace gear when their monitoring noticed the fiber switch starting to fail.

I think they also discounted the install and activation to be $500 total.

I split it among around 8 housemates which included the upstairs unit of our house, so it ended up being very affordable and there was always extra bandwidth to go around. The main benefit I enjoyed being greater than 35Mbit upload speed.

Re: Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading "10G Network" claims

#29
Slimecast constantly lies at every tier of their organization. I won’t overwhelm you with example as they can be easily searched for, but here’s three good ones:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/comments/17cdku6/li...

https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/plan/i-was-lied-to-...

https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/customer-service/xf...

I personally have experienced the lying on every recent interaction with the company, and like many other Americans have no viable alternative providers.

I’m in no way surprised that they are using a lying terms that is clearly intended to mislead people into thinking they are doing better for their customers than they actually are. That the companies’ culture on display.

It’s so unfortunate because I have seen glimmers of what this company be in their charity work and in the occasional stepping up to help people (though there always seems to be a big stepping up when community broadband initiatives are on the table).

Re: Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading "10G Network" claims

#30
post #8

I didn't realize they were actually selling a 10 Gbps service tier as part of this branding. It's never been available in my market, so I assumed that they were advertising the uplink capability of the thing my modem was connected to! Happy to see this go, but I'm still shocked to learn that the name was _less_ misleading than I had thought.

Last I knew, they still needed to finish working with their counterpart monopoly on their collaborative new Xumo device and get all the systems lined up to use it.

Then they need to kick the little old grandma's still watching traditional cable off their network and set them up on a new Xumo streaming box instead. Then they drop the old video channels and use their frequencies to provide faster service on the same old copper wires.

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