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ATT Raises Prices for Cable Modem Owners
MBCook writes: "It appears that AT&T broadband doesn't like it when customers own their own cable modem. According to this article at ZDNet, ATT will be 'changing' their prices for all users. If you own your own cable modem, your bill is going up $7. If you lease your cable modem, you end up paying the same ammount you were before. I guess AT&T likes to milk it's customers. If I don't have a long distance service with any phone company, I have to pay for the privilage of not depending on them. Now I'll have to pay for the privilage of not depending on AT&T for a modem?"
According to this AT&T aren't doing so good. Could it be that they've decided to try and make some money? Yeah it's crap for those of you who have to pay an extra $7 a month or whatever but at the end of the day big companies are always gonna try and make money. I guess cable modem users are just an easy target.
I've had ATT cable for about 3 months now. I've been leasing a modem from them as well. This is the first time I've had cable, so I wanted to test it out before paying the 100 bucks for a modem that I may never use again.
/. breaks it too. go figure. click, preview, argh, click, preview, argh!
Once I reach the upstream cap (300) the connection dies completely. If I upload a file to an ftp site the connection is broken until I stop the transfer. If I start loading a few webpages, or have several ssh sessions opened to different servers, it dies until i can close all the windows, and power cycle the modem. I've seen this happen while watching tcpdump and getting 100-150 arp requests every second for about 5 minutes, the modem sits and crunches while I'm getting 75% packet loss to their router.
From mailing list archives the general feeling is that when this happens your modem is faulty. Well I've been trying for 2 months to get a new modem, and I've gotten nowhere. With that information, and the fact that it powercycles itself about 4-5 times every 8 hours, I've decided that it is the modem.
There definately isn't any perks to paying them monthly for a modem. I'd rather be able to take the damn thing back to Best Buy and exchange it. I think I'd rather have my own modem just for that reason, even if I'm only saving 3 bucks a month.
oh yeah, posting comments on
In order to hook up a modem, you had to get a special Data Access Arrangement from them, for which the monthly charge was more than you'd pay for a modem today.
Eternal vigilance, etc.
You are a retard. Read the article.
Base fee (now): $35.95
Cable modem surcharge (now): $10.00
Total bill to lease the modem: $45.95
Total bill w/o the modem: $35.95
Base fee (June): $42.95
Cable modem surcharge (June) $3.00
Total bill to lease the modem: $45.95
Total bill w/o the modem: $42.95
Everyone is paying $7.00 more per month for the service. The difference is that people who lease their modem will not notice the difference because the lease fee has dropped.
As often happens, the headline is not accurate, and no one else bothers to read the original article.
There is no subsidy. Cable modems used to be $300. At $10.00/mo, the lease paid for the modem in 30 months. Now that cable modems are $100, dropping the lease to $3.00/month means that it is paid off in 33 months.
The metrics are basically the same. You're just dumb.
If you live in an apartment building, development, or neighborhood of any kind then get together with your neighbors and form a buying association. Tell AT&T if they don't waive the fee then 50 of you are going to a competitor. 50 not enough? Organize your town. At some point, the pricing equation will swing your way and they won't be able to afford to say no.
Or talk to your town or borough council about setting up a Metropolitan Area Network. God knows there have been enough Slashdot posts about how to do it.
They are raising the price of the service itself $7, lowering the modem lease by $7. So if you lease no diff, but if you own, that $10 savings from owning becomes $3.
Word is that they will mail out six(6) $7 dollar coupons to modem owners to cover the first 6 monthes of the hike
The "No PIC" (Presubscribed Interexchange Carrier) charge is mandated by the FCC (although each telco can choose whether or not to pass the cost on to coonsumers). Check out Verizon's explanation:. The fact that ATTB is charging their customers for not using THEIR modems is just a way for them to make an extra buck and screw the consumer. It's ridiculous.
I got really pissed when my $.05 a minute IDT service was costing me $7.00 a month in minimum usage charges, fees and taxes. $7.00/0 minutes is INFINITE cents per minute.
I changed my local lines to NO LONG DISTANCE.
You have to be careful what you say because the local telco rep is not allowed to recommend or influence your LD carrier decsision in any way. The sleezeball long distance companies have registered words like "whatever" and "I don't care" so may you get Fast Eddie's Ripoff telco if you say that.
I bought an AT&T calling card at Sams Club that was $39.00 for 1000 minutes. No more fees to pay. I just gotta dial a lot of numbers the few times I call long distance.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I'm with Time Warner Road Runner Cable Internet service, and I think the way they do it is pretty fair. The service is $45 or so a month, which includes rental of the cable modem. If you choose to use your own, obviously they aren't going to support it, and you don't get a special discount or anything. Perfectly legal. Sort of like when you go to McDonald's and ask for a no mayo. They don't refund you the money for the mayo.
I don't understand why they would need to charge extra for someone not using a cable modem. They are saving them money, since that cable modem can used by someone else. Support? They don't have to support the cable modem/router itself, only the cable line in this case. Sort of like when you have to pay extra to NOT be in the phone book.
What?
This is a rate increase, pure and simple. Let's face it. This has nothing to do with the cost of supporting modems. I lease my modem. I first got it when I started with Highway1, the name that preceeded MediaOne. They have simply found it easier to raise rates by couching it in terms of "lowered cost of equipment". In my view it's part of a trend that continues to provide me with lower services at an increased price.
I'm only glad that at the moment this price increase does not affect me. There are other things that bug me a whole lot more.
My top ten pet peeves with AT&T Broadband:
10. Playing with the pricing structure so much that it's starting to resemble the price structure for Cable TV. That means it's going to end up being nothing short of confusing.
9. Being moved from only 3 hops to a backbone to 7 hops. A move that now forces *all* of my IP traffic to go to new york instead of cambridge. I have a lot of traffic that ends up at POP's in Cambridge.
8. Elimination of "vanity" hostnames. Soon we will all have hostnames like h000102030405.ne.client2.attbi.com instead of nice names like vanity.mediaone.net. I suppose it helps them to discorouge people from running services on their machines.
7. Having my upstream bandwidth reduce by 15% because the @Home folks only had 256KBps so now we all have to. Why not give the @Home folks a little bandwidth boost rather than punish the rest of us?
6. Having to deal with Teir 1 Tech Support. I remember the days when you got to talk to a knowledgable person immediately. You didn't have to wrestle with someone verbally for 20 minutes before they would let you talk to a real network admin.
5. Getting all those calls from AT&T trying to cross sell other services such as Broadband Telephony. For a while I didn't even qualify for Digital Voice yet I still would keep getting the calls for it. Go figure.
4. All the changes in added services such as e-mail and personal pages. I enjoy improvements in these services but do they really need to be "improved" on a yearly basis. It seems that everything has to totally change each time this happens.
3. The confusion and fingerpointing everytime my broadband service is sold to or merged with someone else. I really miss the days when you could just pick a good service provider and know that they would always be there for you.
2. Having to print new busniess cards and notify *all* my contacts that my e-mail address has changed from "mediaone.net" to "attbi.com". (I tell them that the attbi stands for AT&T's Big Inconvenience.)
1. The voice menu "from hell" system. I think Jon Katz could write another popular column on this one. Heck he could probably write three columns. It's so convoluted it want's to make you scream. To top it off you can no longer pretend you have a rotary phone and jump straight to a person. It now has voice recognition. Arrggghhh!
The FCC doesn't prevent competitors from stepping in to your local market. Anybody is welcome to set up shop.
However, the numbers are *not* working out. The nat'l average for broadband usage is something like 15%, and is expected to stagnate until prices come down. If you already have one broadband option, a new entrant can expect to split that with the existing incumbant, so they might expect to wire up 7.5% of the homes. Is that worth the investment to build the infrastructure? No way.
If the new entrant thinks that broadband might reach something like 40% of the homes, and their take might be 20%, then that starts to make some sense. However, that's "bubble math" - there's no way you'll see 40% penetration until prices either come down, or there's some new demand for broadband (like Napster is legal and free).
Unfortunately, this is a waiting game....