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Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

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Re: Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

#51

Post by nathancahill »

kyleblarson wrote: post #29
daniel-cussen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to add the benefit of saving ~$250 to the benefit of getting the top post on HN. Then you divide.

Good point. Makes me think of people who go on mileage runs to accrue airline miles for status. They tend to compare value in cents per mile, and if the run yields a low enough cost per mile, it's worth their time to take a flight just to turn around and come back. It would be interesting to see a similar calculation taking into consideration time, likelihood of getting on the HN front page (or being the top post), a…

Where do I go to cash in my internet points?

Re: Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

#52

Post by pixl97 »

officemonkey wrote: post #25
ck2 wrote: post #3

On a side note, what do you do at 105mbps that you cannot do at 50mbps? Unless maybe you have a multi user household. I pay $50 for 5mbps. It's highway robbery.

I have 6 mbps for $51/mo with AT&T. I quoted them 50 mbps for the same price with a local cable company. I wanted higher speeds. They couldn't get me close to the other deal, so I told them they had to compete on price. They offered $35 with a year contract. I told them I was going to get service with the cable company and call back to cancel and they dropped my price to %50 off for six months with no strings attache…

Same goes for business owners too. We had a 20Mbit fiber from our cable company where the multi year contract was expiring. We contacted a bandwidth broker to find us a better deal. He came back with a much better deal on fiber from the local telco. We submitted the telco contract to the cable company and they price matched us. We went from 20Mbit to 50Mbit and dropped the price by half. The broker cost somewhere around $300, and was the best money we ever spent.

Re: Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

#53

Post by oz »

Shinkei wrote: post #46
larrys wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Our company has also started ripping people off in similar ways (like a $50 fee to downgrade internet speed) " Explain why you feel that is a "rip off". More specifically if this company came to you as an employee (I assume you are an employee) and they said "hey we aren't making money and we need to reduce your salary" how would that fly with you? Anyway I'm asking a serious question. I'd like to know the exact met…

Are you trolling? In an industry that is not regulated as a utility due to monopoly issues, profit margins are irrelevant. But in an industry that activity stiffles local competition with monopoly powers, this is all the info I need: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=CMCSA+Key+Statistics The serious answer to your question is that the price a consumer pays should reflect the value of the service they are receiving and…

>should be proportional to the cost of providing this product/service.

I'm sorry, but I can't agree with that as a general principle. In this specific instance, with Comcast et al who benefit from monopolies, sure. But as a general principle, the 'value' of a product or service is whatever people are willing to pay for it. If I buy widgets in Asia for $1 each, and Americans are willing to buy them for $1,000,000 each, than that's their value.

Re: Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

#54

Post by JWLong »

nitrogen wrote: post #44
larrys wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't you find that it should be at least somewhat commensurate with the work required though?" Business doesn't work that way. You make hay when the sun shines. And there are cases when you can't charge. Because of things your competitors are doing. In a restaurant they don't charge you for napkins and water although they could. (Actually they do charge for premium water but that's a fairly recent invention). The i…

...and this is why the last mile needs to become a regulated utility. Whose place is it to say Comcast is making too much profit? Mine, as their former customer.

That's a rather large non sequitur you're wielding there. You had your say when you cancelled on them.

Re: Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

#55

Post by JWLong »

whistlerbrk wrote: post #24
kyleblarson wrote: post #17

"After 10 hours on the phone with customer service, two trips to the local Comcast office and a chat with a rogue technician, the myth has been busted" So the author spent maybe 12 hours figuring this out? Is his or her time worth more than 20 or so bucks per hour?

Ethics is the point, not ROI.

And this is the lesson that Capitalism teaches: if you do not like the ethics of another company, you are free to create a competing business model and hurt their ROI (if their current customers agree with you).

Re: Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

#56

Post by DannyBee »

jotm wrote: post #43
drakaal wrote: post #33

I worked at TCI prior to the certification of Docsis 1.0. Back then if you wanted to go from 512k to 1M we would "roll a truck" because we needed to check that your signal was good enough that you would not only get service, but that we wouldn't go broke every time it rained and the signal would degrade. Basically you needed to have 20% better signal than was needed for the service so that you wouldn't fall off-line…

I thought that can be done remotely? On one of my old ISPs I could change every setting on the modem on the company's website. It was quite scary, actually, how little privacy I had in this regard. They could easily check the signal strength to the modem that way...

It absolutely can be done remotely. Every one of these modems does SNMP, exports everything it has in the way of statistics, and they can read it remotely

The modems are nowadays configured to only allow requests from certain ip space with certain passwords because you could actually accomplish a lot in the docsis 1.0 days by messing around with SNMP.

Re: Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

#57

Post by 300bps »

ck2 wrote: post #3

On a side note, what do you do at 105mbps that you cannot do at 50mbps? Unless maybe you have a multi user household. I pay $50 for 5mbps. It's highway robbery.

Go back and watch a VHS tape recording of an over-the-air broadcast TV show. You will be amazed at how colossally crappy the quality of it is because you're now used to various levels of high-def TV. The quality we get used to is only going to go up from here.

Beyond that, look at Netflix's recommendations today:

https://support.netflix.com/en/node/306

To get 1080p streaming, you need 7 Mbps. To get 3D you need 12 Mbps. Now imagine you are streaming one 1080p show from Netflix, your wife is streaming another on a different device, your son's Minecraft server has 19 kids from school attached to it, your daughter is watching HD YouTube videos and your main computer is downloading Windows 8.1 updates.

That's why I have 75 M/bps downstream and 35 M/bps upstream through Verizon FIOS anyway. That and it was $74.99 per month including their Prime TV lineup and unlimited landline phone service.

Re: Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

#58

Post by larrys »

grecy wrote: post #37
larrys wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Our company has also started ripping people off in similar ways (like a $50 fee to downgrade internet speed) " Explain why you feel that is a "rip off". More specifically if this company came to you as an employee (I assume you are an employee) and they said "hey we aren't making money and we need to reduce your salary" how would that fly with you? Anyway I'm asking a serious question. I'd like to know the exact met…

It's for a few reasons. One is, as you mention, because it's nothing more than a button click to downgrade. Less than a 1 minute call with a CSR. How they can justify $50 for that is anyone's guess. The second is they're saying things like "it's to cover the cost of having CSRs, printing bills, etc." But actually, the $110/mo charge covers that, and always has. Third is because the company is making plenty of profit,…

"How they can justify $50 for that"

They don't need to justify. The only reason they would even think about this is if the detriment didn't outweigh the benefit. If perhaps x% of people think that it's a ripoff and 90% don't or don't even know or think everything is a ripoff anyway then why not get the extra revenue?

My guess is that the amount of people that even have any understanding of what is involved is quite small.

"But actually, the $110/mo charge covers that, and always has."

What do you mean "and always has"? Are you saying because they consistently turn a profit then you have decided they have enough to cover their fixed expenses and they shouldn't try to add to the bottom line? Not to mention that off the top with a billion dollar corporation you really don't know what is going on there anyway.

"Third is because the company is making plenty of profit, but the parent company wants more, so they're pushing it to do stupid stuff like this"

In a capitalist system there is really no such thing as "plenty of profit". The mere fact that you feel like it's up to you (or anyone else who makes comments) to decide "ok that's enough" really does not make any sense. I mean you've never seen profitable companies go out of business or bankrupt that at any point in time someone would have said "they make plenty of profit". (We can start with General Motors, Chrysler etc.)

"A large percentage of employees are looking for work elsewhere, it's just unfortunate there are not many options"

I'm unclear what the amount of employees looking for work matters with respect to what they charge. Are you implying that things like this make employees want to leave? I somehow doubt that.

Re: Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

#59

Post by 300bps »

larrys wrote: post #31
grecy wrote: post #19

Can confirm. I work for a telco and we recently upgraded our cable infrastructure to handle 100Mbit (previously 50Mbit was the fastest). All the customer needs is a DOCSIS 3.0 modem, we re-provision in our system and they'll get 100Mbit. They come into our store, swap modems, and they're done. As for the hilarious/stupid/disappointing things OP was told by sales/tech support/whoever, I can also confirm that. Every da…

"Our company has also started ripping people off in similar ways (like a $50 fee to downgrade internet speed) " Explain why you feel that is a "rip off". More specifically if this company came to you as an employee (I assume you are an employee) and they said "hey we aren't making money and we need to reduce your salary" how would that fly with you? Anyway I'm asking a serious question. I'd like to know the exact met…

The only real answer is that a company should seek to charge the price that maximizes their long term profitability. If that's $50 to click a button, that's $50 to click a button.

But this rule completely breaks down when you're dealing with regional monopolies like Comcast. In that case, you do have to introduce the concept of pricing fairness to avoid someone abusing their monopoly - as Comcast appears to be doing in this case.

Re: Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps

#60

Post by larrys »

oz wrote: post #53
Shinkei wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trolling? In an industry that is not regulated as a utility due to monopoly issues, profit margins are irrelevant. But in an industry that activity stiffles local competition with monopoly powers, this is all the info I need: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=CMCSA+Key+Statistics The serious answer to your question is that the price a consumer pays should reflect the value of the service they are receiving and…

> should be proportional to the cost of providing this product/service. I'm sorry, but I can't agree with that as a general principle. In this specific instance, with Comcast et al who benefit from monopolies, sure. But as a general principle, the 'value' of a product or service is whatever people are willing to pay for it. If I buy widgets in Asia for $1 each, and Americans are willing to buy them for $1,000,000 eac…

Threads like this always bring out people on HN and elsewhere that simply don't think like business people.

You can choose "value" as your strategy and sometimes that can work in your favor. But many times the public is easily duped by your competition and what they have advertised as "value" and it's not that simple.

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