Comcast blasted for seeking "loopholes" in rule requiring disclosure of all fees.

Comcast blasted for seeking “loopholes” in rule requiring disclosure of all fees.

  • Chris Koss@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    0·
    2 years ago

    I think comcast getting fucked by regulators forcing fee disclosure has the potential to make a lot of people ‘too hard’

  • fubo@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    If your billing is too complicated to be accurately described to your customers, then you may have put yourself in a situation where you are incapable of being honest with your customers. That’s on you.

    It’s the job of regulators to ensure that you are honest with your customers; therefore, they can reasonably forbid you from having billing so complicated that it cannot be described accurately.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
      0·
      2 years ago

      It’s funny, my local ISP tells me I owe X dollars a month and that’s what I pay. How on earth do they do that? Comcast is telling us it can’t possibly be that simple

      • misguidedfunk@beehaw.org
        0·
        2 years ago

        I’d love to have a local option. We get spectrum or wind stream, which means spectrum. They charge whatever they want because they have a pseudo monopoly.

      • fubo@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        The airlines managed to figure it out, weirdly enough. Calculating the price of an airline seat is Turing-complete, and at least one airline software service, ITA, needed the runtime compilation feature of Common Lisp to do it efficiently. Yes, when a user asked for a ticket price, their systems wrote and compiled a piece of code to determine the answer.

      • keeb420@kbin.social
        0·
        2 years ago

        mine even manages to do it for the price they advertise. and without a data cap. and without having to have a comcrap router in order to pay more to not have a data cap. i had my own router i didnt want to use theirs mine was better. but the only way i could find to pay to not deal with the cap was to have their router. fuck that.

        • psudo@beehaw.org
          0·
          2 years ago

          Yeah, but are they making their faceless shareholders insane profits? I say this as a joke, but I do feel like that’s a large reason why Comcast and the like are so terrible to their customers.

      • xavier666@lemm.ee
        0·
        2 years ago

        Many companies, specially telcos, have a complex scheme of paid plans to confuse the users so that they become fed up and say “ok, so how much do I have to pay”. This is their exact objective.

        My local ISP (not a part of some huge elite ISP) is similar to yours. Pay X and you get unlimited internet for a month at Y Mbps uplink/downlink. Somehow it’s too complex for Comcast.

        • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
          0·
          2 years ago

          Heck, my ISP, which is a huge elite ISP, has a simple number too. You know why? There is competition in this market. I pay $80 a month for 1000/1000 fiber. That includes free HBO Max. Not as good as Sonic, but it’s a simple number.

  • ChrisN
    0·
    2 years ago

    “The label hasn’t even reached consumers yet, but Comcast is already trying to create loopholes.” Is anyone surprised? I’m not a huge fan of Google’s privacy practices, but their Fiber service is outstandingly easy to use and fast. I’m lucky to live in Kansas City though…

  • worfamerryman@beehaw.org
    0·
    2 years ago

    They need to do a reset of their pricing them. Figure it out again from the ground up.

    I pay exactly what my isp advertises never a cent more.

    I live in a third world country.

  • SomeGuyNamedPaul@beehaw.org
    0·
    2 years ago

    There’s an easy fix, just don’t allow charging any fees that aren’t listed along with the advertised price. See? Very simple. They’ll figure out how to list them thereafter, believe in them.

  • k32481@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 years ago

    If it is too hard/difficult for a company to itemize all their fees, they are charging way too many fees.

  • dan@upvote.au
    0·
    2 years ago

    I’m so glad I don’t have to use Comcast any more. A small local ISP (Sonic) expanded to cover my area last year and offers 10Gbps symmetric fiber for $40/month - half the price I was paying Comcast for 1.2Gbps down / 35Mbps up.

    • frostycakes@beehaw.org
      0·
      2 years ago

      I’m super jealous. At least I’m moving to a new apartment with fiber from CenturyLink at it, but even they are running $70/mo for gigabit. I’m living the T-Mobile 5G home internet life right now because CL only has DSL at my current place, and fuck Comcast in general.

      • dan@upvote.au
        0·
        2 years ago

        Yeah I’m super grateful for it. Before I was living at my current place, I lived at an apartment, and we could only get Comcast cable. The apartment building had an agreement with Comcast that ensured they were the only available internet provider.

        Leave it to Comcast to make FTTP suck.

        Wow, that’s bad. I didn’t know they did that.

        Comcast have a legit fiber network where I live (San Francisco Bay Area). It’s not even GPON or XGS-PON or anything like that where multiple houses share bandwidth; with Comcast’s version you get a dedicated fiber run from your house all the way to the headend, no multiplexing.

        You do pay a premium for it though. It was originally 2Gbps symmetric for $300/month, now it’s 6Gbps for the same price (with 10Gbps coming soon).

        • frostycakes@beehaw.org
          0·
          2 years ago

          Even worse is that RFoG is compatible with the various PON standards (it’s just the entirety of the coax cable plant, just mirrored over light), so there’s zero reason why FTTP locations can’t have standard fiber configurations and it be shared with the copper plant backbone that was the original reason for RFoG.

          Comcast (and the rest of their cableco pals at Charter, Cox, et al, with the exception of Altice) are bascially addicted to copper. My parents had a new house built last year in a greenfield community, and, you guessed it, Comcast ran coax to the houses instead of FTTP like CenturyLink did. I do not understand why brand new copper plant is being buried and installed in 2023, it’s obscene.