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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?"
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.
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!