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Telocity Wants Its Gateways Back
"Friday afternoon I arrived home to find a box on my doorstep from Telocity. A little note inside informed me that they want their gateway back and... wait for it... if I failed to return it to them, they would charge me $499, as per their service agreement!
Now, I'm not claiming to be perfect, but I do like to think I would have noticed a clause saying I owe them $500 for anything! I tend to read contracts pretty carefully. Now, the last contact I had with these people was about three months ago. I've since gotten Verizon DSL (which is pretty lousy by the way, but at least it's available and I'm pretty sure not going bankrupt any time soon), I wonder if their mad? Kinda out of the blue to ask for the thing back.
At least they have me a pre-paid shipping package and Airborne was nice enough to come pick up the package this morning.
I called Telocity and had them make a note on my account stating that it was shipped back today and they noted the airbill number. I'm not going to risk them saying they never got it back, you know? I don't usually have a "spare" $500 laying around that I don't mind parting with!
I was getting set to start doing some hacking too, I figure that thing could have made a cheap web server or router or something. Would have been fun figuring out anyway. I'm sure I'm not the first person with that idea, I just hope no one did so because apparently those gateways were never ours to keep. Heads up folks!"
The real Unitron is a 2764 BIOS chip in my first 8088 motherboard that said 'Unitron BIOS' when the machine booted up.
Better check that 8-level DIP switch to make sure you've told the system the number of floppy drives you've got. And if you have a CGA card or a Hercules (or, gasp, a MDA like I did for a long, long time)
Nice MBA 101. Did you learn it at community college? There is no secondary market because: 1) DirectTV is making their own gateway product 2) The gateway is useless without the corresponding DSLAM They just want their stuff back so they can write it off for accounting purposes.
Moderation Totals:Flamebait=2, Interesting=1, Total=3. Looks like 2 out of 3 moderators are more interested in silencing criticism of the editors than following the moderator guidelines. Too bad, you lose. Thanks for playing.
First, the AC who submitted this story is none other than Anne Tomlinson. Second, the people making the demands are Rob and Jeff, not Telocity. And third, it involves a Cisco router, not a DSL gateway. The story was obviously a parable folks.
now what are you slashbots going to be bitching about? that your right to hack/free spech/etc is being violate?
PULL-EASE!!
Damn right. I did the same thing with the car I leased that I recently returned. I took a sledgehammer and dented the shit out of it and then ripped out all the wiring I could find, slashed all the seats, and cut the tires. Man, that teaches them to lease stuff to me and expect it back.
I have a much better story to tell.... At one point last year I got fairly fed up with my service provider, so much so that I contacted Telocity and setup an account with them. They enabled DSL service to my home and shipped me one of their gateway devices. Sound normal? At this point, the story got interesting: I never used the Telocity service. That is, I never connected via their line, never performed that last act that would have really made me a user of their service. In the meantime, I had straightened out my problems with my local provider, so I went back to using their service. Telocity called me, asking about my unused service; I said that I hadn't used it. What did they do? They send me another gateway device. Who am I to argue? A few weeks later I called Telocity and canceled my account. I carefully explained that I had been shipped two of the gateways and asked that they provide me with two RMAs and airbills so that I could ship both of them back. Instead, I was sent one airbill and one RMA. I shipped one getway back; end of story? Not quite. Telocity finallly realized their mistake months later and sent me one of the standard scary letters, explaining that I would owe them the cost of the device and that I had 10 days from the date of the letter to return it - across country. I returned the 2nd gateway, called Telocity on the day they received the returned device to confirm that it was in their possession, and asked about the status of my account. "Oh... we might have billed you... but don't worry, I'll make sure your account is credited if we did." That was late August, 2000. Would you believe that it took until last month for my account to be straightened out? That I spoke directly to Telocity 4 times, pointing out that my account had been canceled without use? In December they sent me a letter explaining that they could not use the credit card # that I had provided; the card had been renewed and the old information I had given them, including expiration date, was no longer valid. In January, I spoke to an agent on the phone: he said he would take care of the problem. In March, I spoke to another agent and explained the whole problem again: he put me on hold, talked to his supervisor, and then explained that he could see my call history and knew that I had cancelled my account (as far as he knew) on August 21st. By that point I was getting bills... yes, actual monthly bills for a service that I never used and had cancelled over 6 months before. I had to speak to another agent in June, once again asking them to credit my account for the amount they thought I owed. Hopefully in a few days or so I won't be getting another letter from Teloocity.
Is there any wonder they went out of business?
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th Ed., Vol 2
You do realize there are some places in the Eastern Time Zone that do not switch for Daylight Savings. Some parts of Indiana for one.
So, you read contracts carefully, but you don't do anything like keep a copy for future reference or anything silly like that? Sorry, but I'm not going to get all up in arms over an evil corporation making requests of you that you "don't really remember" in your contract with them. Send the box back and shut the fuck up.
I've been a telocity customer for over half a year now. While my initial install was horrific. Bad wiring in my building combined with an incompetent installer left me calling tech support for a month and a half before they would send someone out to re-check the install. However once a new (competent) installer was sent out I was fixed immediately as he found my problem instantly and spent a lot of time wondering what the other installer was doing. After that my gateway hasn't gone down once and I'm running a few hundred days uptime on the gateway.
BTW the $500 charge thing is listed pretty clearly a lot of places if you bothered to read any of their documentation.
Umm... sorry, but it DOES have to be spelled out, very explicitly, that the box remains theirs.
It was explicitly spelled out in my agreement. they have every right to ask for it back in that situation. If you were "switched over" from another service, and they sent you a telocity DSL modem (people who are "switched over" might not be), then I imagine they notified you somewhere that it was still theirs.
OK, so I'm getting the idea how to start a DSL service - buy some black boxes with flashing LEDs (does Radio Shack still sell those 'Goofy Light' kits?) send them out as DSL modems, wait a month, go broke and wait 6 months till the customers throw the black box away... THEN tell the customers to send the modem back or send $500. That's about $495 profit. I like it!!!
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
yeah freaked the hell out of me since at the time I was using my computer, and all of a sudden smoke is coming out the top of my desk.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
Speakeasy is almost too good to be true. They provide actual service, installed roughly when promised. They bill me accurately. They have people to answer the phone who, after a longer-than-I-would-like delay, actually know what they are talking about.
;-)
Their failure must be inevitable
Yeah, I agree. What the hell is the matter with these people?
"Your Rights Online"? Seriously they can't think their rights are being violated. Is there a right to steal?
You said:
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
Hold on a moment, here is the ACTUAL quote:
"I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots," Bush said during an August 27, 1988 press conference, according to an American Atheists spokesman.
So first off, this is the elder Bush, not the current President, whom many folks would assume the quote is attributed to.
Secondly, this is an alleged remark made during a press conference 13 years ago that nobody has any recollection of, other than the President of American Atheists. The former President Bush apparently denies it, and nobody can substantiate that the comment was even made.
I'm no Bush apologist (I voted Libertarian for lack of better options), but the way you present that quote in your sig is bound to incite someone to rail againt George W. Bush for it.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
I've been off Telocity for 4 months now and still have this thing sitting next to my desk in it's original package. I had to jump though hoops to get them to "cancel" my service since they never did truely contact me about a new provider. I had to send them an email about leaving, I had to then call them back 3 times, I then had to wait and I continue to wait for the airbill. I'm not worried about them charging me $500 becuase the only credit card number I gave them is now closed.
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
Sure this will stop them from charging you, but it won't stop them from reporting you to a credit bureau!!! I'm sure the last thing any of you want is to mess up your credit rating. Having a poor credit rating can affect a lot of things down the road, such as your ability to buy a car, a house, etc. And even if you still qualify for these loans, your interest rates will likely be much, much higher as a result of the lower credit rating.
Think twice before just canceling your credit card and not dealing with the actual problem.
---
While I do agree that the bureaus do often make mistakes with your report, I do not agree that it is not worth "bothering" with. Like it or not, credit reports are used to determine if you should get a loan, get a phone, get a specific service, get an appartment, etc. If you don't bother with keeping your credit report clean, nobody else will.
And if you really want to stay on top of things, you should request a copy of your credit report on a (semi)-annual basis and check for errors. If you find them, then you should have them fixed right then. Yes it is a PITA, but it is much easier to do it this way than to have to deal with it when you are sitting in front of the loan officer that tells you "sorry, your credit sucks, we can't give you that loan you want."
---
Rats...I guess that means that I have to give back all my Christmas presents, too...
I have AT&T @Home, I had a modem start emitting sparks and their tech. reps were still not sure if my connectivity problems might be modem related.
A full log of my adventures is at my website at http://www.hockley.net/att.
I'm a former ReFlex customer and I have one of their little boxes, a Tut Systems LR100T but it's not really DSL, it's proprietary. I don't really have much use for it, but then again it might be worth something to someone.
Also, the apartment complexes where they installed the services have (I understand) a pretty setup in a rack somewhere on the property. Anyone know what happened to that?
There's a nice little thread a FuckedCompany
I got on Telocity in September 2000, and I received excellent service. I had no problem signing on, I received my modem within 2 weeks of requesting the service, and they gave me a great price with no contract.
Then, in about March, after having less than 30 minutes downtime from Sept-Feb, they started having routine DNS problems. About twice every week between then and May, I had difficulty connecting. Plus, my maximum transfer rate dropped from ~150kbps to ~110kbps. I called them about this, spent forever waiting, and finally they said they could do nothing about it, that the problem belonged to BellSouth (long distance folks here). That was uncool, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
Well, I canceled service in early June. It is taking me forever to return my gateway. It took them about 3 weeks to send me my return airbill; I called them before I got it to ask if they were gonna send me one, and they said yes, it would be sent to me within the next couple weeks. Well, it turns out that they had already sent the thing, but they sent it to the wrong address--this happened after I told them 3 times on 3 different occassions where they should send it. Now I've been trying to call them to tell them it's not gonna be sent there on time because I did not receive it at the correct address, but I've spent over 30 minutes on the phone twice and have never talked to anybody. Nevermind that I spent >30 minutes waiting on the phone to tell them I wanted to cancel service, and that they would not prorate my bill for the month of June.
This is stinky service, to say the least. Has anybody else had these problems or noticed the gradual downfall of service? I would've sworn by Telocity's service the first 4 months, but ever since, they have been nothing but a hassle. Any Telocity/Directtv folks out there that can explain this?
w|f
Yeah, the IRS can get a bit fussy. The cost is amortized over 5? years unless it is sold or scrapped. Abandoned is a bit dubious.
It would be interesting to get the reaction to an offer of something reasonable, say 2 or 5 dollars, to buy it outright.
I had telocity for 6 months in 2000.
;-)
Aside from paying for the gateway shipping cost $25 bucks to ship it to me. They never charged me for service during that whole time. And the service worked fine.
I moved, I cancelled, got the shipping box to send it back 3 weeks later, and sent their damn gateway back. And I still never got charged. Even now, I'll killed that old credit card that it was on, so they could never charge me. So yeah, I guess I lucked out.
And thankfully they don't take any info like Socials ecurity numbers, so they can't tack anything on my credit report.
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
If you look at the structure of a TCP/IP packet, you will see two things that can identify you. Your IP address AND your hardware (MAC) address.
Rubbish!
MAC addresses are in things like Ethernet frames. There are no MAC addresses in TCP packets or other IP packets.
As soon as a packet goes through a router it will not have the MAC address of the original computer attached to it, unless it's using some sort of ethernet-over-IP tunnel or something similar.
-- Wodin
Now, I'm not claiming to be perfect, but I do like to think I would have noticed a clause saying I owe them $500 for anything! I tend to read contracts pretty carefully.
Then you're blind. Here's the TOS that's burned into the telocity modem and you have to read when you set up the service initially: http://www.xarph.net/archive/tech/telocitytos/
-Lx?
I never SIGNED a contract (has anyone ever had to sign a DSL contract?) And what obligation do I have to a company that I had a year contract with which they in turn canceled. If I had ever seen a contract perhaps I would read it and see what it said about their ability to cancel service at will. I am not terribly inclined to adhere to a contract that was canceled.
When the service was installed, it would not function until the telocity box they sent you phoned home. The box would not do so until you had seen and acknowledged this, which contains all the AUP and termination fees and shit.
-Lx?
Telocity's TOS that is burned into the modem and must be read to activate IP service:
That's because the circumstances of the law defend the company. Ever hear of an AUP or TOS? Neither is my cable box, but the company that is renting it to me says it is. They are the only ones who matter. 14. Equipment. Telocity will provide you a "gateway" or certain hardware and software that will allow you to access the Service and any additional services that you may order in the future (all equipment provided by Telocity will be referred to as the "Equipment"). You agree that this does not give you any ownership interest in or title to the Equipment or its accompanying software. You also agree that Telocity may upgrade the equipment and/or software from time to time by providing the upgrade to you. In that event, Telocity will provide you a means of returning the replaced Equipment. You agree to facilitate the upgrades and return the equipment. At the end of the term of your Service, you agree to return the Equipment in the manner described by Telocity. In either case, if you fail to return the Equipment to Telocity as instructed, within thirty (30) days, then a $499 "Equipment Fee" will apply and will be charged to you in the manner described in Section 3. You agree to return the modem the instant the termination takes effect. There is no time limit. I'm surprised they don't turn things over to a collections agency after 1 month.. This will result in Hughes Electronics' lawyers laughing at you and either turning you over to a collections agency or drag you into court or arbitration. -Lx?The contract/TOS/AUP is contained in the modem ROM and is shown before any account setup can commence. The modem physically does not allow any traffic until that TOS is agreed to and the setup procedure begins.
-Lx?
has anyone ever had to sign a DSL contract?
Yup. When I signed on with concentric (now XO) last year, they sent me their terms of service and whatnot in a pdf file. i printed, signed and faxed back.
I too am a customer of Telocity/DirectTV.
Have been since around February, 2001.
Had some minor problems in the Atlanta area, they built up some vlans to minimize fallout into other circuits if one goes down, or has latency issues. Other than a couple of weeks in April (prior to the network upgrades), the service has been very good. Customer support actually knows what Linux is, and if you ask, you can find one who can help you trouble shoot it if you need it. Here they used a bellsouth circuit, so no worries about covad dying off or something.
Only took them 10 days from the day I placed the order to have the circuit in and running.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
XO claims that we owe them $499 for accumulated service. The interesting thing, is that we have NEVER been an XO customer. An isdn ISP we were with, and left nearly 3 years ago, was bought by concentric/xo. XO has been sending us a $49 bill each month for almost a year now. Call to talk to them, you have to go through some "account cancellation" proceedure. Um, hello? We were NEVER a customer. I'm waiting till its over $500 this coming month, then filing a suit against them for false billing by mail, violation of local collection law. Wonder if they will settle.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Want to buy our connect and protect plan?
sweet, exra IPS?
No, its nat at the gateway
Unlimited internal address'?
No, only 5 extra.
Hrm, no thank you, think I'll just drop my linux router behind your gateway.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
What, I'm going to reverse-engineer a gateway box and somehow threaten an ISP?
If you could really reverse-engineer the old cable modem to compete with the provider, then they'd probably be sticking you with waaaaay more than $300©
My guess is so they scare people into returning it© They probably don't want to waste time providing tech support for people who didn't read the notice about upgrading©
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
some cauliflower should do the trick, maybe dipped in milk (highest fat-content you can get.. tastes best when fresh, smells worst when it isn't)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Telocity never went bankrupt -- they were acquired by DirectTV back in December.
I've been with Telocity for 16 months now, with no major complaints. Sure, their customer service sucks, but that's true of most companies nowadays.
Then, just as I got the disconnect fee taken care of, out comes a $500 modem fee
Sometimes when dealing with a Shady Company like this, where large amounts of money was involved, I cancel the associated Credit Card first, and then call Shady Company to cancel the expensive service. (Be careful though, some companies like Wells Fargo keep your CCard account active for months after you 'cancel' your Card).
This way you are protected from unnecessary fees. Shady Company can't automatically charge any CCard account, so they send you a bill, which puts you in a totally different negotiation position ("Sure, you can have the modem back, but first you need to show me the contract with my signature on it, and then you need to reverse this 'Cancelation fee'" or whatever).
I don't use my CCards very often, so cancelling one CCard isn't a big inconvenience for me.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
they're a business - they've figured out that lots of people tossed the useless modem and they've found a great way to squeeze money out of EX-customers (customers who've already decided they're scum because of their crap service and so they don't take any risk by reoffending)
You are absolutely correct...this story would have been of no use readers of ./
/. instead.
./ only had one submission pending.
./'s submission queue is monitored by reptiles while /.'s submission queue is monitored by mammals .
I should have submitted it to
I wondered why the submission queue at
I also should have noticed that
Thanks for showing me the error of my ways!
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
HAH! That sounds almost exactly like the conversation I had with the sales person!
:-)
I think I even said...
"What's stopping me from just putting up a router on the inside and calling it done?"
They said "Nothing, in fact, we don't mind that at all. But our technical support staff won't help you with it, you'll be on your own."
"How cool."
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
It may not be detectable or stoppable, but it's still possible for them to put it in their terms of service....no matter how stupid a restriction like that is....
Advanced users are users too!
I do like to think I would have noticed a clause saying I owe them $500 for anything! I tend to read contracts pretty carefully.
well.... was there a clause or not?
Sheesh. Not only should you read contracts... keep them too. Im keeping my equipment till they pry it from my [knock knock] oops they're here.... shit.
Actually, the more likely scenario is that to receive tax breaks for capital losses incurred they'de need to prove that they had 'X' number of devices that they physically destroyed and could not resell or capitalize on in the future. I believe this was the line of thinking when Motorola announced that they'de be burning up the Iridium satellite system by de-orbiting them.
It wasn't a case of 'If we can't use this, we'll be damned if anybody does' - but it's value on paper was likely being amortized over it's lifespan - so shorten it's lifespan drastically.
//ct
Like many others here, I was a telocity customer for a month. It took them a month to set up the service. Since I moved after a month, I terminated the service. But I still have the gateway. And guess what, I was charged $50 for this month also even though I had explicitly asked them to remove my service. When I called (waited for about an hour or so on the phone), I was told that since I didn't call 10 days before my billing cycle, I would be charged for this month also. Now I can't even use this box as I have a different phone number. I am using it as a pedestal for my laptop.
:-(
I do hope that they send the airbill soon enough that I don't have to pay $499 (only)
It's not so much stopping NAT as detecting NAT and then demanding that you stop using it. How do they detect it?
- The port numbers that the connections come from are much, much higher (over 10000)
- If you have mixed machines, and they have a transparent proxy server - for instance, you normally wouldn't see a Linux version and a Windows version of Netscape running on the same IP within seconds of each other.
WEll I had flashcom/northpoint then telocity/northpoint. I had telocity for less than 20 days before northpoint kicked the bucket. To the point, telocity does not charge a fee for the equipment, it is part or the rental agreement like a cable modem is. So it still belongs to telocity, be happy they are not charging you to ship it back as it says you must do in the tos. The one I clicked yes to said I had to pay 25 to ship it back to them, But alas I still have it sitting in a box somewhere.
.sigs suck, thus nothing here.
Not a whole lot here now is there? How do we know this guy didn't just make the thing up? Why am I not surprised to see that this was posted by Timothy? *sigh*
Anyhow, this makes no sense. If he read his contracts and there was no such clause, and he was getting ready to do something with the gateway, why did he send it back? He called them to tell them he was sending it back, but he couldn't be bothered to first call and ask them precisely where in the contract this supposed clause was? Odd. Dumb. True? Who knows. Next.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Why would you deliberately break it? You'd be lowering yourself to (erm, I don't know whether your provider is actually 'evil') Microsoft Ethics[tm]!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Like this?
You should be able to charge rent for the sq ft it occupies in your apartment.
Actually, with proper notice, I believe you can infact do just that. But figuring out what you need to do vs what is a reasonable cost to store something the size of a modem would seem to be a waste of time.
Your state may also have a statute about when these kind of things become "abandoned." You are not obliged to hold onto it indefinitely. At some point, if they fail to facilitate its return, it should become yours. You might have to tell them, in writing that you're gonna keep it if they don't pick it up in X # of days.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I doubt it too. If you moved to the US your TV would be useless. Should the BBC compensate you for this?
I also doubt they'll let the next occupant of the flat reconnect it.
Why? All they specify is "you will need a cable modem compatible with our service". You don't buy it from them.
Go to this link:
http://www.fcc.gov/cib/
Click the Consumer Complaint Form button on top right. Fill in your complaint. Remember to keep it brief.
You can also contact your local Public Service Commission. Check on the web for the address. Most state laws give about two weeks for the company to respond.
I just wanted to brag that I had speakeasy sdsl installed in my new apartment within 48 hours of moving in. It would have been 24 hours, but there was a miscommunication between Covad and Speakeasy.
please return to your flaming of Telocity.
NEWSFLASH! Company wants to enforce its contract! Film at 11.
Sheesh...
--
[insert witty quote here]
One word: depreciation. It's a well known fact that pencil pushers can force company employees to retain hardware for years past its useful life cycle just to depreciate what's "on loan". I've been trying to get rid of some sparc 5's (they're spoken for) and 486's for two years now.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
Telocity's(Now DIRECTV Broadband, Inc) contract has mentioned a $499 charge since the beginning. So you obviously never read the contract, just went ya ya. sounds good hook me up.
Telocity (as well as any other broadband service provider) has 3 basic choices it can make:
Sell a $300-500 broadband "modem" to the customer. that will be worthless once the company goes out of business or the customer terminates the contract.
Charge the customer a great deal more to try so the company can "eat" the cost of the modem. (tough to be competive in this one. and typically you end up having to require a contract for a certain period. 6 months to 3 years, depending on your margins)
Loan the customer a device for a period of time equal to thier term of service. Once there term is up the modem is returned (and RECYCLED!).. of course one would have to give the customer incentive for this.
I dunno about you, but I agree with Telocity that having to sign a contract to use thier service for X years kinda sucks. I personally like to try before I buy. If you don't want to have to deal with helping a company recycle thier equipment, then perhaps you should've signed up with a different company that made you buy the device up front and wouldn't even buy it back form you, making you throw it away. (I had to do that with sprint broadband once I moved out of thier service area)
Moral of the story: Read The F*cking Contract
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's not powerful enough to be worth reverse engineering. All it knows how to do is route packets between ethernet, parallel port or usb to dsl(adsl or sdsl). It's not like it's running linux+bash and has gcc installed on it:P
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Well that still doesn't mean you get to keep the modem. Afaik Telocity is just letting you use the modem, just like you can't rip the meter the electric company loaned you off your house and sell it on ebay. It's not your meter, even though it's attached to your house. (It's not your meter mostly because a big company paid for it and never in anyway agreed to give up ownership of it. Which is how ownership works, usually.)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Nope. Nothing complicated like that, Mr. Smarty-Pants. Telocity/DIRECTV Broadband, Inc. just spruces up thier modem (sometimes new case, new stickers, latest firmware release, etc). DTV BB basically has a huge inventory of "loaner modems". They just keep moving them around as people terminated thier service and new people sign up for service. (luckily for them, a lot more people sign up than terminate. which is why you don't see that many "old" modems floating around yet). Basically it's economics in the fact that if it still works, don't throw it away! DTV BB does not have huge airfields full of 2nd hand gateways. They simply have a tiny warehouse with a few palettes of used modems ready to be wrapped up and shipped out to new customers.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Well. some companies have actually sent out "bricks" to the customer. To meet quartly goals. Basically an empty shell, sometimes with a weight in it. It's call a brick because Apple once used real bricks for the weights. Now how do you meet your quartly goals this way? Well you've shipped the product and the customer has recieved it, and then you just classify it as "broken" and try to make it up next quarter. Hopefully this time having more reasonable quartly goals.
Capitialism is sick I tell you!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I have 3 gateways from telocity and since my sloppy ass house mate decided when we got the new gateways(first modem was fried by a rolling black out and no APC, second was intermitant and then died, 3rd one was a replacement for the the 2nd.) he would rip the boxes to pieces so he could get on the internet and not care about returning the broken hard.
But to the main point, i have 2 dead gateways and 1 functional one and they have yet to send me more boxes to ship these things back. and a friend who works their said to not even worry about them, they are broken so toss them in the can. wonder what telocity thinks, the fuckers.
Privacy? Not in this lifetime.
Out of 100 Dell monitors, 5 just burst into flames one day, then, not long after, I hear that Dell has the same problems with Monitors, Power supplies, Laptops, et al. I suggest anyone without a steel room to put their PCs in avoid Dell all together.
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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Telocity acquired Phoenix DSL, and at that time Phoenix DSL & the Telocity Migration page said you could keep the router. I can't find the page now, unfortunately. I would be willing to sin an affidavit to that effect (that they had a stated policy on their website allowing people to keep the Northpoint modems), if anyone needs it.
Not strictly computer-related, but there is some truly strange stuff involved when you "lease" equipment sometimes.
I "lease" a number of Pepsi-Cola coolers and vending machines and whatnot. Well, sort-of. I get the machines "free" as long as I purchase Pepsi products to put into them.
The strange part of this "lease" is that if one of the machines breaks down and I call Pepsi Service to come and repair it, I have to pay a per-hour labour charge plus a call-out fee. They don't charge me for parts, but still - why do I have to pay Pepsi to repair THEIR machine?
A couple of years ago, when my contract with Pepsi was up for renewal, I checked with Coca-Cola to see what their policy is. (Hey, I'm not married to Pepsi - if Coke will give me a better deal.) Coke does the same thing.
And I still don't know why I have to pay for repairs due to normal wear-and-tear when I don't own the machines. Vandalism or some sort of abuse, maybe I could understand paying for that. But normal wear?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Wait a sec, you're not the grammar nazi! I wonder where he is.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
Step one in dealing with a former broadband provider should be reporting the credit card which they were billing as lost or closing the account all together. It makes it much more difficult for them to continue to charge monthly service, charge for return equipment and so on.
Ha! I kill me!
Send back a brick. It weighs about the same. They probably don't even open the boxes. They probably just count 'em and crush 'em. The hardware MIGHT end up at a surplus place like HSC, but chances are, they are reclaiming them to account for depreciation, to satisfy auditors or other bean counters. Since they are most likely claimed by the company as capital equipment, such a deduction is some sort of possesion during the fiscal year. If they are resold, then the deduction is recaptured (bad move since the IRS will take ALL of the proceeds up to the amount depreciated), hence they are likely destroyed, which depreciates them 100%. Realise though; the company doing the crushing is not going to like the brick much, since it isn't metal, and cannot be recycled! Worse case, you will have to pay for the gateway AND the cost of shipping that brick! But, if you are actually using the gateway, you are probably getting some value out of it.
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!
Those are gifts. Under USian contract law, you own a gift if you receive it; no consideration is required.
They seem to be marketing themselves towards geeks rather than simple consumers. We got them because they didn't have any problem with us doing masq'ing or running a firewall on our end, running our own mail, DNS, etc. I even have an extra IP for my Dreamcast with a BBA.
There's nothing quite like deathmatching while simultaneously downloading kernel sources let me tell you :) :)
I am an NTL customer. When I got my cable modem, NTL did *NOT* lease modems. They insisted that you had to buy them.
In some *real* research, I rang NTL up. They told me that they might be able to reconnect a cable modem to a different customer, but I'd need to write them a letter saying I'd handed the cable modem over to them. There was also a big list of do's and don'ts, regarding exactly how the service could be handed over.
The overall impression that I got was that they would make it enough of a pain in the arse to reconnect an old modem, that it would be easier leasing.
There's a note in the contract that says they want the cable box back when I'm done with it. That's fine, no problem there.
But... when I got my cable modem, I had to buy the cable modem outright ("Oh, and you'll need a network card!" "Got one thanks...") for £150. I wonder what will happen when I move out of this flat, into an area that doesn't have NTL cable?
I seriously doubt I'll get my £150 back. I also doubt they'll let the next occupant of the flat reconnect it.
Perhaps I'll phone them and find out some time...
cf. Simpson, Homer; Flanders, Ned :-)
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
I'm not really suprised this story got posted, he sounds very convincing but he's just trying to bash Telocity, who have provided me with excellent service in the Atlanta area. I am hesitant to see how they are now that they have become DirecTV DSL but we'll see if the quality decreases or stays good. I just see this article as FUD.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
Now, I don't think it's useful if you don't have DSL anymore, but they don't have any right to take it back.
Better go read your contract, you might find that you do own it after all. However, since it's useless, it was probably best that you give it back.
You didn't ask for it and they mailed it to you? According to the post office, it's yours.
...that relentlessly uses a lame remake of a lame song (Bachman Turner Overdrive's "You ain't seen nothing yet") in their radio commercials.
If they don't have any taste, how can you expect them to have a sense of humor?
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
Why are they able to ask for this back... I thought when a company or person went bankrupt they gave up all rights to theyre financual assets?
It is possible to block NAT, if the ISP themselves are using NAT for all the customers already. (Yes, it has been done, ISP's are greedy when it comes to giving out expensive IP's.)
> they allow NAT (doesn't cost extra) What are you talking about? How could an ISP not allow NAT? That's not detectable or stoppable from their end. I use (S)NAT at my house, and there's certainly no way ANYBODY is gonna charge me extra for it.
We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked.
~
First, I must say that I AM a Telocity customer. I have been using Telocity for just over 7 months now.
I too can say I never had to sign any sort of contract or agreement... and the only contract I had was a conversation with a lady over the phone. I would later joke about how that meant they weren't actually obligated to provide any sort of service.
Back to the story... our first month of DSL service was absolutely flawless without a single outage.
Then something happend.
Our service became incredibly unreliable. There were lots of what we came to call micro-outages where the net would go out for five minutes at a time every half hour or so (sometimes we could still get to the telocity mail server so it wasn't our end). Sometimes the net would go out for days at a time.
I must have initiated 3 or 4 trouble tickets with them from which I basically never heard back from. They'd always say "we don't see anything wrong." Five minutes later the evil green lights on the modem would start blinking again.
After a while I figured maybe if I fed them a record of our problems they'd do something about it. At the peak of the problems, the net was down about 10%-15% of the time and that's a lot more than it sounds like.
In Telocity's defence, my service has improved substantially (strangely since the DirectTV takeover)... although I still had to take an online final (test) using a dial up modem.
...be able to connect to a competitor with their old hardware.
The same seems to be the case with Telocity.
Anyway, what really bugged me is the snide claim that a Palm is merely a status symbol. I use it every day as:
Calendar and time piece
Scientific calculator
Address book
Portable game device
Seems like a pretty cost-effective and useful device. Maybe that is why I bought one.
Jato simply disappeared from our back in Jan. Got almost 6 hours notice that they were shutting down and haven't heard from them since. I have a nice Netopia 8 port gateway that I haven't gotten around to doing anywhing with yet...
this is getting old and so are you
blog
A good thing to do with your gateway rather than return it is set it up in DHCP mode and hide it on your enemy's network.
Muahahaha.
Arker is correct. This story is false. Timothy and I are working on a plan to build a mid size Beowulf cluster. It's not the ISP that is asking for the servers back, it is us acting as the company telling ppl to send US the machines. Timothy is a great thinker, and decided if he posted this story, none (or few) of you would call the company and ask about the contract. Also, the extra $499 thing was going to help pay for the switches and stuff that we would need. It was a great idea, but Arker saw through the whole thing. damn! I hate you arker... foiled again.
TEN
If you look at the structure of a TCP/IP packet, you will see two things that can identify you. Your IP address AND your hardware (MAC) address. NAT boxes use your hardware address to determine where the incomming packets go. All an ISP would have to do is detect and log the IP and MAC address of the first packet and only allow subsequent packets that only have the matching IP and MAC addresses.
To me thats different then renting, loaning, leasing etc. As far as I know my bill doesn't cover leasing the unit from them.
Or maybe there was some phone number thing i cant remember, but I'm pretty sure there was no contract or even service agreement, and I am absolutly positive i have never signed anything.
Also it seems like when I started the account one of the reasons I went with telocity was FREE HARDWARE and FREE INSTALLATION, of course they never showed up to install it.
BTW their service has been outstanding.I have had very few network problems.Once the modem quit working they had a replacement sitting on my front poarch the next day.
>I submitted this story to ./ over a week ago with no success, but it did get posted at K5.
/., not ./!
Well, there's your problem right there! You should have submitted it to
It was immediately obvious to me that the Gateway was a loaner and would have to be returned. The wording on the website, the sales people, and the service agreement all made this perfectly clear at the time. This was one of the reasons I chose not to use their service.
Telocity is NOT bankrupt.
..
"We should have a right to modify this equipment that we have paid money for"
You did not pay for that piece of hardware, it was leased to you.
"It's mine now"
I wonder if you try to argue things like that when you are at Blockbuster or other rental places
Ever had any luck with them , arguing for "your now" stuff ?
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
You are acting like 11 years old ...
Is there any chance you will ever grow up and start acting like a responsible adult?
Assholes like you make everything more expensive for all of us.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
Shut the fuck up - man know as "maxwell".
How fucking heroic of you asshole.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
I don't think they are offering such hot deals. I believe we got our 1U Dell boxes for about the same price as their "going out of server selling" sale. I was considering picking up on of their boxes but when I considered a) that they weren't offering any great deal andb) who's going to give me support when the thing blows up... I think I will just go with a Dell box.
"Press any key to begin."
"Press any key to begin."
"AnyKey? Where's the AnyKey?" - Homer J. Simpson
I think I see your problem. You submitted the story to "./" while this is obviously "/."
I am a Northpoint victom, and I never asked for Telocity service, in fact I tried 3 times to cancel Telocity service. They shipped me a modem anyway. If I never signed any agreement, and even told them I wanted to cancel, can they really make me pay for anything if I keep it? (And turn it into my mp3 server :-)
This is done with cars, in the U.K. there is a huge airfield just filled with second hand cars bought by the car companies. When I say a big airfield, there are literally cars for miles around.
There are a couple on Ebay. You can always buy the replacement there.
Are Telocity/DirecTVDSL still using the same boxes for existing new customers? If so, they are probably going to send them out to new customers. I've gotten cable boxes that obviously weren't brand new, so what's the difference?
Besides, there is a clause in the service agreement stating that the box is their equipment and the user will be charged $500 if it is not returned. Again, not any different than what the cable companies do. Why are people getting so mad about this?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
They aren't giving it to you. There is a clause in their terms of service that states that the gateway is theirs and they will charge you $500 if it's not returned when your service is terminated. Unfortunately, hardly anyone reads these agreements. If they did, this wouldn't be a shock.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
One of the good bits in that service agreement is the HTML comment near the top by (I infer) the chap whose job it was to take the lawyer-generated Word document and turn it into HTML sufficiently terse as not to waste great gobs-o-flash with the wretched HTML conversion Word does. Not that it's terribly clever, but it's amusing to see something of that sort flashed into DSL routers everywhere atop a lengthy wodge of legalese.
(the same comment was in the service agreement on my telocity modem; I came across it while looking for the proper URL to avoid actually clicking an "I Agree" button)
Goes thusly:
<!--
This document was cleaned by hand, with much tender loving care, by MojoFreem.
I would like to thank the following, for giving me the courage to clean this dirty HTML,
wrongfully generated with numerous style "issues" using \/\/0r|) by the Evil Empire.
* hairless cats
* midgets
* Lorne Greene (he rocks!)
* Everyone named Corky
* Short Yellow Bus drivers
* The beings of Omicron Persiai VIII
* All those fat people on "Sweatin to the oldies"
* That guy who does that thing in that place
* People who smell like cabbage
* Donkeys
"I'm amazed that you managed to write so legibly on your own butt." - Lisa, Simpsons
"That's my Smith & Wesson. If you're gonna play with it, be careful, 'cuz it's loaded." - Grandpa, Simpsons
"Where am I now?" - Professor, Futurama
"Rectum? Damn near killed em!" - MojoFreem, Telocity
-->
If you see unitron without an email address appended as a bidder or seller name on eBay, by the way, that's not me, somebody beat me to it by the time I got interested in auctions. Apparently an abandoned account, no reply to my e-mail.
In my case it's short for University Electronics.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I suspect that most of the ACs are in the continental US which would mean GMT would be 5 or more hours off from the AC's local time and that would probably lead to even more AC whining.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
There is some down side to being an AC. F'rinstance, you can't go to your preferences page and check which time zone you want used when times get plugged into the mix. So you get the default and they don't have to remember to reset the time on the server twice a year (and put up with a hundred whiney posts if they're a second or two late doing it, though I can't imagine what else they could possibly rather be doing at 1 or 2 am on a Saturday night then messing with the server).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
places who charged you for the modem/gateway over the course of your first contract period. But it sounds as if they are well within their rights to ask for their equipment back. I've been on 2 cable providers and 2 DSL providers over the last 3 years, and they've all amortized the cost of the equipment into my term contract.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Well, I can't even actually remember if I ever got a modem from Telocity, I'd have to look through my DSL modem pile.
You never paid for that box, so you don't get to keep it.
I am a telocity customer and I don't recall ever being confused about the ownership of the gateway. I think the company made it rather clear that the equipment would have to be returned upon termination of service.
I know this sucks for you guys, but it doesn't take much effort to know the facts. It wasn't even in fine print...
-k
Why were they going to charge me $300 for something that's essentially garbage?
Because it's worth $300 to them if you *don't* send it back. Ten dollars of packing material and a prepaid label (which they probably don't have to pay for if you don't return it) is a small investment if one out of 10 dosn't bother to return it.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
If someone just gives something to you, then you own it. Unless some other agreement has been made.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Right, but as recent legal procedings have shown, a license you don't have to read (or arn't even aware of) isn't legaly binding.
Many people were given service without signing anything. Just because the TOS is up there now dosn't mean that it always was (duh)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Except they never claimed that they were loaning it to many of the people. They just handed it to them. If no agreement has been spelled out, then the customer most certanly would own the equipment.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I think you might be missing the gist of the complaint. How long after the company stops providing the service do you need to wait before you can safely dispose of the doorstop? The poster said he had not had contact for three months. Is that long enough? Six months? Ten years? I think the gist of the objection was the delay involved, not that they wanted the hardware back.
Holy shite man, all you had to say was "they don't want customers reusing their equipment with competitors' services". I knew what you meant after the first paragraph. An MBA must really teach you to bloat up what is otherwise straightforward.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
My apartment has countless devices in it that are patented, but none of the patent holders have any claim to them.
Once a patent holder/licensee sells a device protected by patent, they surrender control of that unit to the purchaser.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
in order to make a few extra bucks on the off chance that you were a geek and tooled with it.
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
Also note that Kuro5hin has talked about this issue, too.
As a Telocity (now DirectTV) customer, I have had zero problems with them. The contract makes it perfectly clear that they are providing you with a modem for use with their service without a rental fee (you did have to pay shipping and handling though...strange). I consider the modem a loaner without any monthly fee. And, I expect that I have to give it back if and when I terminate my contract with them.
When you lease a car, tv or whatever or borrow it from a neighbor, you are expected to return it when allotted time is up. Or, you are expected to pay for it if you want to keep it. Possession is not 9/10s of the law when a contract exists between the parties (oral or written).
Well considering they claim that certain features of their DSL modem are patented (or are they patent pending), one can understand why they want their stuff back.
At the very least, it is proprietary hardware and they have the right to protect that.
RD
Ummmm....first, when you sign up, they tell the terms...in my case, it as $49.95/mo with the first two months at 1/2 price. They also tell you that they will be shipping you the modem and that they will charge you 24.95 for shipping and handling.
Then, they following it all up with a barrage of e-mails (if you have an e-mail account) or send you written notification (I got both).
Now, when you get your credit card bill, you have the opportunity to dispute the charges. If you don't, then there is an implied contract as you accept the charge and paid for it.
As for you them sending you something that you didn't request...that's BS...as you know you need the device to use their service and have already authorized the charges.
Sorry...you don't own it.
It --IS-- possible that the first time I used my browser to view the Online Status of the Gateway it may have made me click an "I AGREE" button. I've been wondering about that, but I don't remember seeing one, and even if I had I normally do at least skim over the sub-section titles. I think I would have remembered something about ownership of the Gateway. But I won't deny them ownership of their precious little Gateway, as long as they keep feeding me this DSL! RAAA!
Yes...you had to click on a button to accept the terms of their contract when you first started to use the gateway. That's the contract. Question is, how many people actually read those things in their entirety? Probably not many.
Personally, I've received a fair amount of information from them. It mostly came via e-mail to another account I already possessed. All of my configuration info came via e-mail. Sales info came via mail. But, if you didn't have an e-mail account to send to, I suspect they'd send it to you via snail mail.
And, like you, I was suprised to find a $24.95 overcharge and called them on it. Why was I suprised...mainly because I forgot about the S&H and wanted to make sure I was getting my 2 months at 1/2 price. Stupid me.
Anyway, I wish you luck with their service. Like I've said before, my experience has been a relatively good one.
If he didn't have a contract, then why in the world would he give them his credit card number in the first place. Generally, you give your payment (cash, credit, whatever) when you agree to the terms of the sale or service.
Maybe he's interested in some swamp land in Florida or some prime wetlands in the middle of the Sahara desert. Anybody of someone willing to sell it to him him?
How about a little dirtball who thinks its okay to sign up for a service, dissect the device, figure out how to hack it, use it for purposes other than agreed to and then whine when they ask for it back. It doesn't need to be a major corporation...now does it?
And, it is "proprietary" hardware not just their fscking "property". The software/firmware is proprietary to their device and is not in other similar devices on the market. They spent a lot of effort and money to develop the device and they are entitled to protect it and ask for it back when the contract is breached or terminated.
I submitted this story to ./ over a week ago with no success, but it did get posted at K5.
It seems like the bottom line is that we probably should send the gateways back to Telocity.
However, I'm thinking that mine doesn't necessarily have to work when I send it back.
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
Telocity/Directvdsl has a online click through sign-up agreement, which includes the terms of returning the gateway. Thus a contract is established, like it or not.
What good is this supposed Click-Through sign-up agreement when people like me were never forced to see it, much less click through it?
Not that I care too much. I love the service I'm getting from Telocity and as such don't plan to get rid of it anytime soon!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
If he didn't have a contract, then why in the world would he give them his credit card number in the first place.
The verbal agreement, simply stated, was that I would give my CC# and get Telocity service.
As someone else mentioned, yes, I knew I would be recieving the Telocity Gateway. It was never discussed whether or not I would own it. Personally, as I said before, I do not care. It's hooked up to my line on one end and hooked up to my router on the other.
The DSL is awesome, and for what little verbal exchange was made between me and the sales person on the phone, both obligations have been met.
They provide me with service, and I pay them $49 per month.
EXACTING details such as who owns the Gateway were never discussed, though as someone else did mention I WAS told I would be charged $24 for shipping of the Gateway, which I considered more than fair.
I do also remember being told I would receive something in the mail concerning further details, but alas it's now one month later and nothing of the sort has arrived.
As long as the service remains good and as long as they don't do something funky (like overcharge me) then I believe I will be more than happy to continue paying them the $49 per month.
With that in mind, who owns the Gateway doesn't matter. If I ever discontinue service, they can have the bloody thing back. I can't think of any use I would have for it, to be honest.
I was simply pointing out that the aforementioned "contract", which apparently exists since so many people have claimed to have seen it, should be shown more obviously to the end user.
Since I've never signed any agreement... I'm pointing out that someone out there who was bold enough might could try to dispute paying the $500 if it came down to it. Who would bother, though?
It --IS-- possible that the first time I used my browser to view the Online Status of the Gateway it may have made me click an "I AGREE" button. I've been wondering about that, but I don't remember seeing one, and even if I had I normally do at least skim over the sub-section titles. I think I would have remembered something about ownership of the Gateway. But I won't deny them ownership of their precious little Gateway, as long as they keep feeding me this DSL! RAAA!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I believe this was the line of thinking when Motorola announced that they'de be burning up the Iridium satellite system by de-orbiting them.
I don't think so. I believe it was part of the agreement that gave them the orbital space that they de-orbit if they went out of business. That's because there's a huge (and growing) problem of space junk. 66 extra dead birds were not going to be allowed.
This de-orbiting requirement is common across all civilian satellites. It's just that no one ever came close to abandoning 66 satellites before, so it made the news.
A contract doesn't give you a right to sue. All you need to sue is enough money to pay the filing fees. A contract would give them grounds for a suit, perhaps.
Anyway, the situation described is not so black and white - comply or be sued. The situation as described is that of receiving a fraudulent bill. And yes, you can be sued for refusing to pay a fraudulent bill. You can be sued for anything. But there are plenty of intermediate steps before going to court.
The first thing you should do if you receive a fraudulent bill is contact the billing party. It could be an honest mistake. Even if it's not, when you call up and say "I got this bill, it says X, and X isn't true, I have Y right here and I checked it" you put the ball back in their court. If they can't back up their claim, but they still want to pursue it, they are in the weak position, not you. They are the ones that have to pay the filing fees, and the lawyers fees, and have you served, all before you even need to worry about it again. I've gotten dozens of incorrect bills , and I haven't paid one of them, and guess what? I haven't been sued. Not once.
Now maybe the bill isn't fraudulent. This pitiful excuse for an article doesn't even give us enough to make an educated guess on that subject really, but the source definately claims it is fraudulent, so let's take him at his word for a moment.
Do you really think one should pay a fraudulent bill reflexively, without even attempting to challenge it? At this time I'd like to bill you $500 for reading this post. The contract you signed for your internet service said that you would pay this bill. Really it did. Don't dispute the bill, don't doublecheck your contract, just mail me the check like a nice little sheep, k?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Just because you read it on K5 that means it's true? Now, I like K5 and all, but that doesn't follow.
Anyhow, whether it's true or not, it's a damn shoddy attempt at a slashdot story, which was the point I was making. The editors (at least some of them) are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish from the phirst post weenies.
The K5 article is here btw, and provides a hell of a lot more information than Timothy provided here.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
If the features were pantented then theoretically they should not care, as the details of how to make a similar device should be registered with the USPTO...
take the cover off and put something gross in it,
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I've been a Telocity customer for a few years now... I *distinctly* remember the clause about paying for the modem if you don't return it.
The clause has always been there. Why would a company give you a DSL modem for free and then let you keep it? The fact is that the modem is a loaner.
I got automatically switched to Telocity when my previous ISP, PhoenixDSL, was bought out. Since I had IDSL, I didn't get Telocity's fancy gateway, they told me to continue to use my old 3com IDSL box (which I owned). I was with Telocity for 2 weeks when Northpoint died, and Telocity told me there was no other IDSL providor at my location (actually, there was, but none that would sell the service for 49.95/mth). I have since switched to a Rhythmns business idsl line through a different ISP, but kept getting my credit card billed by Telocity (of course, I disputed each charge with my credit card company, so I didn't have to pay them). Also, Telocity keeps contacting me wanting their gateway back (remember, my idsl line didn't get their gateway, so I don't have it to give back to them). I have since canceled the credit card I used with them to keep from getting a supprise charge, and hadn't heard from them for three months now.
Second, what purpose does it serve to retain their equipment? Force them to raise rates for remaining customers? Force another DSL isp into bankruptcy?
I prefer having the option of a decent alternate ISP, whom doesn't impose the requirement of wasteful PPPoE protocol stack, allows servers, and gives out public static IP addresses.
Right now, I will admit, I am in the last stages of signing up with telocity/directvdsl. Modem will arrive this coming monday. In the past I have set up friends with a Telocity account, and I am glad that steered them away from AT&T/RR. I've been tortured for last 2.5 years, by M1/RR/AT&T cable modem service, (50+ outages lasting over a day, News, DNS, Routing loops, Oversubscribing, RF problems, etc.) plus mostly low brow tech support. (The most recent outage affecting 50,000+ customers, lasted for over a week, starting June 17. The suspected problem, routing loops/misconfigured network, 30 to 40% packet loss during peak hours, 4 to 5% middle(4am) of the night.).
I am pleased, that their still exists at least ONE decent national DSL provider. Note: The incubant Bell South's DSL service, forced PPPoE usage, no server policies is a non-starter.
So, think twice before ripping off your ex-ISP. They aren't the only one hurt by your actions, you may be encouraging the remaining broadband ISP's to provide even less service. The grass isn't always greener, on the otherside of the fence.
I work for a big ISP and we do this too. When customers RENT equipment from us, they have to give it back if they disconnect. If they BUY it from us, then they can do whatever the fsck they want with it. Customers who disconnect also can buy it, if they want to (most don't).
Your Rights Online indeed! At least with Napster nobody loses the original when you download copies.
sulli
RTFJ.
I love these corporate shell games. I had an ISP go under after prepaying for a year of service, losing about half of that. Someone else bought the domain, customer list, data, etc. and allowed us the privalege of paying for the same service over again, at an even higher rate! KEEEEEEEEWWWWL! All the benefits and none of the liabilities of the old co.
IANAL, and all that....
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Please explain to me why "needed" is not in your opinion synonymous with "necessary". If I need something, it is needed by me, and if it is a skill which anyone needs in real life then it is "a needed skill in real life." Is it wrong to say I need a skill? Why don't you object to the idiom "real life" instead, since what is real is not life (there is, after all, no "false life") but rather the "use" (since there is a false use, being that use which is theoretical and contrary to how methodology is applied actually.)
~
You are a childish little fuck, aren't you? Pretty stupid, too. Why don't you just go back to playing your Nintendo and having mom drive you to soccer practice?
Telstra hasn't shut down (hehe), however they recently added a 3Gb limit to their 'Freedom' (a.k.a. "unlimited") plans. /. has done some articles.
My friend Louis deserves the credit for this link to A UTS student's personal page where he liberates the hardware that they may want back someday. *smile*
There's more of a revenge angle here, as opposed to utilising it as a web server.
- The gateway is almost certainly not worth $500
- The company does not appear to have given actual notice or even constructive notice of the return requirement
- The company unilaterally terminated the service contract
- The company waited to long to request the return of the gateway
The other somewhat odd argument concerns billing of credit cards. If the company does attempt to bill for the gateways the chances are that there will be a large number of complaints, each of which costs the merchant approx $50 and if the number of complaints rises above about 3% is likely to lead to the termination of the merchant agreement.I don't see any reason to keep the gateway, but if it had already been lost, thrown out, turned into a linux box etc. I would certainly not be planning to pay $500 as a result.
Best plan of attack is to send a registered letter to the CEO of Telocity at his home address (from the SEC documents) setting out the circumstances. Don't forget to mention that you will bring suit against him personally should the company trouble you again.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Umm... sorry, but it DOES have to be spelled out, very explicitly, that the box remains theirs. Many services come with free goodies/hardware/whatever, and the consumer does not by default have to assume that everything sent to them belongs to the service provider. That's kinda what the contract is for in the first place - to itemize who owns what.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I hear that. I was a Telocity customer (worst mistake of my life). When I terminated, they tried to charge me a $300 disconnect fee. Took me about 4 months to finally get that cleared off my credit card.
Then, just as I got the disconnect fee taken care of, out comes a $500 modem fee. They never asked for the modem back, no letter, nothing. This was now 4 months after I canceled.
It took some work, but I managed to find the modem and send it back. However, they claimed to have not received it, go figure. Finally, after yet another month, I was able to talk to someone on the phone who had a clue. I told him that they had in fact received it, I told him who signed for it when it arrived. He apologized and refunded me an extra $50 for my troubles.
So for about 5 months of fighting their bs charges, I eventually got $50. I would have rather just not had to fight...
My DSL equipment belongs to me, even though I didn't pay a cent for it: the contract with my provider gave me a discount equal to the purchase price for signing up for a year.
But if you actually own the device, you can use it and modify it. So, basically, you have a limited license to the patented invention.
Well, if there is no express or implied purchase contract for the box, you don't own it. So, it would seem sensible for them to be able to get it back eventually.
does it have a patent. I find it VERY HARD to accept that a solid state electronic device IS OK, when snoking....If this was my device I'd drop it in a metal box and let it run 7*24 until if vaporized, then I'd sue the hell out of them for supplying a faulty device. On the other hand maybe is it a GWB special, and it burns crude oil or diesel to save on electricity :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
They should be able to provide it, showing your signature on the contract.
This is quite common. If someone leaves a piece of "valuable" property at your place under your care. You are obliged to take reasonable care of it. You should be able to charge rent for the sq ft it occupies in your apartment. In some cases, you might be safe to guard it and insure it. You might even consider adding on some dog food and insurance costs to the storage bill.
Also, it wasn't clear from the post whether Telocity wants ALL their gateways back, regardless of whether you are a current customer of now DirectTV, or whether you've since switched to some other ISP. Which, upon reading the heading initially, sent me into a panick. But then I realized that it only applied to people who are no longer subscribed. So, a clarification for the anwary may be in order. Max
It's not the user's responsibility to spend his time, money, and phone bill trying to track down where to send a DSL gateway that was left at his house after Telocity yanked his service! Maybe your time is valueless, but other people's time is not. If I had signed up for DSL through Telocity and they yanked it, keeping their friggin' gateway would not even come close to paying for my time and aggravation to find another broadband provider.
And just because you are too much of a dumb-fuck to be able to find a use for a gateway (which you ignorantly refer to as a "modem"), does not mean that everyone is.
Now, pretend you're a man and post with your name rather than Anonymous Coward.
Attack of the poorly written writeups!
/. without going ballistic. Go ahead, moderate me down so nobody has to learn to write correctly. It's not like that is a needed skill in real life...)
"...Telobity customer..."
"...Telovity, now DirectTV DSL..."
"...from Telocity."
Which is it?
And one of my favorites,
"...I wonder if their mad?"
No, not theirs, but mine. My mad. My mad at people who can't write/proofread!
(Sorry, I sometimes hit my quota of bad writeups I can read on
Posted from the wireless couch.
Oh, that's nothing.
I called Telocity in February 2000 about getting DSL to my apartment. Signed up, gave them a credit card number, they were supposed to get back to me in a few days about a service appointment.
I called them back several times and each time they were unsure as to why I hadn't been contacted. Nobody came by, no gateway unit sent, not a peep out of them. In late May I called them and told them to forget it.
In August, I received this same letter, demanding the immediate return of the gateway unit I had never received! I called them up, waited about an hour on hold, explained the situation -- I am not and never have been a Telocity customer, you never even called me back, etc. I never sent them anything and they never charged me.
I considered sending them a consulting bill for the 3-4 hours I wasted on the phone throughout the ordeal.
I came to the conclusion that apart from leaving a bunch of people without their DSL service, Telocity and Rhythms are bad companies that deserved to tank or get bought out. But they're still better than Ameritech. I'm now a Speakeasy.net customer, and dealing with them has been a joy so far.
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
Just curious. My cable provider upgraded it's adapters several times in the first year of service threatening huge charges if the old hardware wasn't returned. When I went to the office to turn it in and asked what was happening to my old adapter they said "Oh, it will be destroyed."
Why were they going to charge me $300 for something that's essentially garbage?
When I cancelled they told me they would be sending me a box to return the gateway, no problem. A month passed, I called to ask where the box to ship it back was since I didn't want to be charged for this piece of crap modem. THey said well you just cancelled and it take 6 to 8 weeks to get the box out to you. So I was like no big deal. Well its been three months still no box. But I've been holding on to the modem in the event they send me a box and try and get $300 out of me or something.
On a side note, the first modem I had from them started to billow smoke at one point, I called them up and told them it had started to smoke and that they needed to send me a new one. To which the woman replied "Was it just a few puffs of smoke or was it continuous, because sometimes the modems will let off a few puffs of smoke and they are still ok." Sorry, but my equipement smoking shouldn't be 'normal'. From then on I never left there modem on when I left to go to work out of fear of it burning down my house.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
Some posters have asked why companies would want to have their boxes back. My suspicion is that like all good potential monopolists, they want to destroy the secondary market. To help explain the economics, bear with me as I go through some MBAthink.
... err ... status symbol (cough*Palm*cough). Thus to convince people to adopt (google bridging the chasm), they tend to create loss leaders or subsidised on-ramps (cf bundled plans for mobile phones) to convince the potential users that the price is really affordable. Now as any hacker with half a clue realises, any electronic device with an unsecure interface (cough*cuecat*cough), can be refactored into something more practical and thus useful. So the combination of refactorable loss-leaders and a savvy user population tends to create parasitic markets where you cannabalise sales from one segment into a lower-margin one. Hence the desire to eliminate competition for themselves by offering closed devices, dumbing the user base (by hiding stuff or increasing complexity), as well as the standard retail devices of deliberately having a short shelf-life and guaranteed obsolescence.
... err erata) rather than allowing students to resell their textbooks to other hardup students. IBM was the classic case of a monopolist that deliberately leased their gear to prevent a secondary market (google Amdahl/IBM marketing practices). If you read any standard MBA handbook, you realise the mind-boggling sales tactics at work which is naturally anthema to any self-respecting engineer who wants to look under the hood before buying ... alas engineers are not a majority of the sheeple population.
2 58&cid=66).
Basically the real value of any capital good is the price that the *next* buyer is willing to pay, ie the resale value. It doesn't matter if the house you bought at auction cost you $1M if the next person (given a free choice) is only willing to pay $500K. This disconnect between (sunk) cost and (future) value has been the downfall of many speculators (cough*dot con shares*cough).
Now for a good/service/title to accurately priced, there must be enough instances around so that potential future buyers can evaluate their utility and alternative factors of consumption. Thus for something like land, it could be zoned for residential, business, recreation, mixed, etc and different people would value each according to their needs. The secondary commercial leasing market allows much more flexilibility than just risking a big lump sum on a potentially unsuitable structure.
Another reason the secondary market arises when primary purchasors want liquidity, ie they find that they wish to redeploy capital (e.g. second mortgage for startup business). So even if you bought that house but can't make much use of it due to excessing work hours, you can lease it out. The biggest example is the share market which was originally a mechanism for the investment banks / underwriters to offload risk of being caught with an investment that was going downhill (after of course getting the best profits for themselves due to insider information, etc). Secondary markets are important in the sense that if they are large enough, they actually give very good price signals (cf efficient market hypothesis, random walks, etc).
Now how does this apply to the consumer services model? Basically the problem (from the business point of view) of computers (hardware) is that they can be used for anything and everything (software). Unfortunately the issue with any new technology is convincing users that they have a need for that junk
Now the incentives for destroying the secondary market is that people don't have a chance to properly value/price the alternative uses and that liquidity is removed increasing barriers to competitors, allowing the corporation to get away with a higher priced primary market (and the all important profits, options and return to shareholders). This can be seen most clearly in things like the technical textbook market where the Doctrine of First Sale means that publishers prefer coming out with new editions (and incompatibilities
Now applying this impromptu MBA lesson shows that from a business point of view, it is easier to sell future goods/services if you can eliminate the infrastructure for any competitors (the so-called deep entry moat). Hence convincing the customer that *the firm* owns the gear (despite using the retail system) and thus can exercise control over recall (naturally at their convenience). Obviously with electronic stuff this is a problem because people think of it as a manufactured *good* (aka appliance) rather than on-going *service* (maintenance). Hence the serious pricing problems since when you outright buy a good, you usually do so if the price (present value) is less than the value of all the future services you expect out of it. This disconnect is going to cause a lot of sustainability problems in the long-term as the accounting rules for capital items and software don't really reflect the real cost of services (software stability, interoperability quality, service level), just like inefficient market for medical pricing results in invisibile costs such as long waiting lists.
At least with open source you know exactly what you are getting up-front, the right that your contribution will be reflected and amplified in future iterations and refinements of the software. This is not the case with commercial providers that vary the terms of usage at their whim (see the Sexual Practices of Licenses at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/06/21/1810
LL
First, I must say that I AM a Telocity customer. I have been using Telocity for just over a month now as DSL just became available in my area.
I called Telocity one week before the date that Bell-South claimed to have DSL ready, and by either luck (for me) or quick the quick action of Telocity, they had my DSL Gateway to me the very day DSL was supposed to be available. I plugged it in, turned it on, connected it to my router, and wham. It just worked.
It was a very pleasant experience, my connection is pretty quick and I have absolutely NO COMPLAINTS about the DSL service at all (knock on wood).
But it's been over one month since I signed up and you know what? I haven't signed anything!
I haven't so much as received a letter from them, much less signed anything. I've signed no such "terms of agreement."
A friend of mine asked "So, do you get to keep this thing if you drop their service?" So I specifically dug around for some terms on the Telocity web-site (note: one month ago the Telocity web-site WAS Telocity, and just in recent weeks changed to DirectTV DSL). I found no such statements. The fact is when I called to get the service, it was never expressed to me, neither verbally nor in writing, that when I cease to be a Telocity customer that they will get their Gateway back.
Does that mean I didn't suspect they would want it back? Nah, I figured they probably would. It probably wouldn't do me a lot of good anyway, since if I switch DSL providers they'll likely provide me with one. Besides, I already have a couple of pretty good routers.
The point is though, if someone really wanted to fight the $500 charge, I see sufficient cause for them to do so. The fact is quite clear. Those terms were never expressed to the customer, and some customers have never signed any single document.
Just one last thing -- When I called to get DSL service, it took less than 5 minutes on the phone and I gave my Credit Card Number to be billed monthly. The conversation was short and simple and mostly involved me giving my street address, phone number, CC#, and listening to the sales person try to convince me to go for the $59 package instead of the $49.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
It is your right and DESTINY to keep rented equipment after the contract, and convert it into whatever you want (taco would convert his into a "sweet little mp3 server", like he does everything else). Fight the power!! Write your congressman! Donate to the EFF!!!
For those of you who haven't bothered to check, sending the Telocity gateway back when the service is over is right in their service agreement:
http://www.directvdsl.com/products/agreement.asp
If you say you couldn't find it on their web site, then you must not have been looking hard; I found it in under 30 seconds.
I've been a Telocity customer for a few years now, and I've been mostly pleased with their service. I *distinctly* remember the clause about paying for the modem if you don't return it. Read your contracts more clearly. There have been a few blips now and then, but all in all:
- they support linux (I got a RedHat engineer on the phone from tech support when I had problems DHCPing to my Telocity Gateway)
- they allow NAT (doesn't cost extra)
- they allow you to run servers (sshd, etc.)
- in some places (like Louisville, KY), you get a fixed IP
How can you argue with that?
If I had been a Telocity customer, I would demand that Telocity pay storage fees on the hardware that they abandoned at my home for the last few months. The contract you signed may have said you would return it, but it didn't say that you would store and protect it for free for weeks or months after they cut off your service.