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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?"
Maybe they decided to do this instead of charge people for exceeding ridiculously low monthly bandwidth caps...
-- V
While everyone will shout and scream "I don't want AT&T to maintain my cable modem", but when the line gets dropped and AT&T need to diagnose the problem they will apply the first rule of problem resolution
"The user is a moron, the fault is at their end"
This involves them doing the standard, is your modem turned on, is it working, is the green light flashing.... you don't have a green light, oh its your own modem, so how do you tell if thats working ?
So it does cost them money in terms of call and tech support. They have to have special call centre scripts, new diagnosis procedures etc etc.
And your cable modem might have a bug which buggers their network.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
ATT Cable internet hasn't been available in my area of Pittsburgh yet, and last year they claimed to make it available by January this year. January came, they said February. February came, they said March. March came, they said never. May rolls around and I see ATT trucks putting up new fiber everywhere and can't wait to find out if it's for cable internet. $35/month was a really good value (even if you need a $200 modem), I'm not so sure I want to pay $42/month. Buying a $200 modem doesn't seem cost efficient if I'm going to be paying $42 as opposed to $45 to lease the damned thing.
Now that a major US provider is changing the rules, it'll be interesting to see how Slashdot readers take the news when it affects them a bit closer to home.
This is a problem that affects us all.
DD.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
Cable modems got cheaper so the difference between
those who own c modem and those who don't should be
smaller - down to $5. This means that overall
this is a rise for everybody - just for
those who don't own cable modems the rise is
compensated by the fall of cable modem prices.
When the modem is leased from the provider, they have more control on everything. They can be more prepared for customer oriented oddities, failure claims etc resulting in better predictability of incomes and less uncertainties in general.
According to the ZDnet article, the additional charge for renting a cable modem is $10; you're still getting a discount if you own your own cable modem (albeit a very small one).
I considered briefly buying my own cable modem, but for the monthly cost of leasing, it was cheaper in the short term. (I live in an apartment, don't want to buy a cable modem in case I move to an area that doesn't supply that type of service)
That being said, I rather expected this move. In case you haven't noticed, telcos are struggling right now, and any move that can keep them afloat (ok fine, keep the share holders happy) they are going to do. Rather nifty of them to tell anyone, as I am a subscriber, and I didn't receive any information on this. Yeah, of course the rights and all that are subject to change, but enough of running rough-shod over your customers. We are people too, and don't always have the convienence of having a ton of loot sitting around, or customers we can up prices on without telling.
In a similar rant, a lot of these companies do these things without even pausing to consider what the risks are, simply because there (for the most part) ARE NONE. Customers will bitch, a few will change providers (those lucky few that can) and other than that, NOTHING WILL CHANGE. YOU might care enough to drop service, but most people are so apathetic about stuff like this, it's comical. Bitch, moan, give em the money. Hell, it makes business sense to do this. Too bad the customer gets it in the end eh?
Sent from your iPad.
from the article "Customers who lease their modem from AT&T will have their lease fee reduced by $7, paying an additional $3 per month for the modem."
And the customers that own their own modem are having they're bill increased by 7 dollars.... So essentially by owning your own modem, your now helping to subsidize the cost of users who don't want to buy their own modem but lease it.. That seems very wrong to me, hell completely wrong.. why should I have to pay 7 dollars to have my own modem as opposed to 3 dollars to rent it? I smell some lawsuits here..
Glad I have Comcast Cable modem here in PA..
They have increased the price of their service by $7. They are reducing the sting a little by allowing people to rent their cable modems for free. People who have their own modem can still take advantage of this offer. People who do not will not be paying more. They simply will not be paying less.
What we really need is more competition in the marketplace. We need at least a dozen different services, then one of them would relaise the good niche market of people with their own cable modems.
Essentially what AT&T has done is imposed an ownership tax that penalizes its users for owning their own equipment. The folks there probably just saw the latest reports and saw cable modem leasing was down. And of course AT&T prefers that the money is in their own hands, not the cable modem manufacturers'.
I'm surprised AT&T hasn't made their own cable modem yet and FORCED users to buy it. That wouldn't surprise me. This does.
-Evan
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.
...have to deal with different brnads of modems all the time. It's called Life, and AT&T should get over it.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
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
I love that they say it reflects the change in the costs of Cable Modems. 100/3 On that rate it will take 33 months to break even on buying your own modem!
Personally, I think they would prefer people didn't own there own modems for management reasons.. If this is the case why not just say that.
James
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.
And don't forgot the D.C. Appeals Court decision from last week. This is part of the "competition" to DSL that is sufficient to let the phone companies not line-share.
Notice how the "competition" is driving prices down?
Ummmm....
I'm on Rogers, and they raised prices. I know Bell Sympatico raised prices. All companies are doing this because of the small percentage of people sucking up a huge amount of bandwidth. It's costing them too much money.
but what the hell... deal with it.
Thats right, get over it. The precedent in slashdot was set when a lot of posters told us Aussie to get over our shitty cable modems.
The businesses are going to keep sending up prices, and finding new ways to tax the consumer. It would be half-acceptable if they bought it down again in times of growth, but they don't. So first of all, if you don't want to get reamed, don't get cable.
But if you want cable, there are a few options. First of all, contact you industry ombudsman, if you have one. Also lobby the nearest democrat member of congress and the senate, make sure your complaints about this discrimination reaches someone who could possibly give a shit, and do something about it.
In other words, if you cannot change from AT&T to another cable server or adsl, make sure yo fight dirty (a.k.a political). What is another option is to publicly shame AT&T, perhaps with a few letters to the editor of you local newspaper. So instead of bitching about it, get over it, and do something about it. The more people that give a shit, the more people that read about it, the more bad publicity the company will get, and that WILL get their shareholders pissed.
(Recent example of bad publicity at work, our biggest bank in Aus (NAB) were making a drastic change to their reward scheme. Quite a few people got pissed, and they half-reversed the scheme just as quickly as they had announced it. Bad publicity works, and it starts with their own customers.)
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
Some days ago, users in Australia had their broadband access severely limited [slashdot.org] as the major providers changed the rules [slashdot.org]. There were many Slashdot posts effectively telling these users to 'get over it'.
- contracts (even those with obscure clauses, or that get rewritten by the vendor after they have your money) posts. This whole meme that businesses have as their sole responsibility to make money, and ethics, much less their customers' satisfaction, be damned is nonsense from start to finish, doubly so when you're dealing with telco type situations (of which cable companies are an example) where there is an effectively monopoly (or duopoly) on your choices.
... perhaps we should end that sufference in a couple of high-profile cases and the other behometh's will fall in line. That presupposes, of course, that our democracy isn't so far gone, and our leaders so profoundly corrupt, that the people can still have a voice politically. The jury is definitely still out on that, but it would certainly be worth a try.
[...]
Now that a major US provider is changing the rules, it'll be interesting to see how Slashdot readers take the news when it affects them a bit closer to home.
A-fucking-men. I get so utterly sick of these Randian libertarianesque businesses-can-do-no-wrong every-consumer-should-be-an-expert-at-deciphering
Most homes can only get cable/cable-modem service from one providor, or local telephone service from one providor (in both cases, the company that owns the last mile of copper going to your house), so telling people to "vote with their feet" is literally tantamount to telling them to physically move to a new community or do without what is becoming an increasingly vital service.
It is utter crap when these self-styled free marketeers (who apparently can't recognize a limited, non-free market when it hits them in the face) tell folks in Australia that sort of nonsense, and it will be equal crap when they do so in this thread.
It is past time that people and consumers organize once again and restore some social responsibility to these businesses. Businesses and corporations exist at the sufferance of the people
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Ownership isn't the problem but what the true mission statement is.
:)
In a world that says look after the profit and the social consequences will look after themselves then the user/providers interface is one of conflict.
Maybe if we were in a world that was dedicated to providing the best telecoms per user then we'd easily have fider to the door by now.
In the UK we had to sit gnashing teeth while BT made 93 GBP profit per second the dividends of which were going to private pockets rather than infastructure investment.
By breaking the UK telecoms we now have 2 struggling cable providers [:ntl & telewest] and one profit slurping behemoth [Bt]. A BT that sends a cease and desist notices if you actually use the service ['You have been using the flat-rate service too much - up to 16 hours per day - in violation of our T&Cs]. As a small but rich country we could have been world leaders in domestic telecoms, instead the users are being squeezed.
oh well, I get mine for free anyway
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Free Market? Excuse me? I have one choice for Cable -- AT&T. I have one choice for local phone service -- SBC. I have one choice for Broadband Cable -- AT&T. I have no choices for DSL. How exactly is this a free market when the FCC limits which companies can offer service in my area? If you want a real free market, get the FCC to either enforce the rules of the 1996 telecom act requiring local providers to open their markets or have Congress rewrite the rules. Me, I won't hold my breath. Political contributions from Fortune 500 companies always win out over the desire of the people.
So, what's the bandwidth of the prices described in the link?
PS: In Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain) a 300 kbps cable modem is about $38. 256 kbps ADSL about the same, taxes included.
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Chances are if you're the kind of person who would want to own your own cable modem, you're the kind of person they'd really rather leave anyway. It probably means you're more technically inclined and not willing to simply be a "consumer" -- you probably want to run some services, perhaps use some VPN tools to get to work, and all that other stuff that really pisses them off. They really just want customers who might browse the web for a couple of hours a night or send an E-mail to grandma. Once customers actually start really using the internet for serious applications, their revenue model gets all screwed up.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This might lower the prices on cable modems?
For people signing on to AT&T Broadband, it is obvious that buying a cable modem isn't such a great benefit anymore, and it would actually be more cost effective in the long run to rent. Won't cable modem manufacturers lower their prices to try to encourage people to buy?
The speed of time is one second per second.
This doesn't come as a shock for those 'senior' citizens who never looked at their bill that was once an AT&T customer.
AT&T used to bill senior citizens, and still do in some part of the country, for renting out their 'touch-tone' phones. Not that I am trying to bash on senior citizens or anything, but many individuals who never looked at their bills for years and knew their rates were remaining fairly constant never knew that they were being billed for a phone that they had in their home that was actually installed and owned by AT&T.
There was a news report done on this where an individual took care of his mom and when he started to do her bills, he had noticed that she was getting charged for having an 'AT&T' phone. The funny thng is when he found ou that for years his mom was paying for the rental of the phone, he rushed right out to the nearest store and bought her a simple $9.99 phone with big buttons (so she could see). Called AT&T and told them to remove the phone.
This may not be the oldest form of AT&T milking their customers, but it certainly is one of the most interesting ones that I have heard. Fleecing of America (especially our senior citizens). *sigh*
I once asked about this. The telco said it is a surcharge (about USD 3, last I checked) just for having access to those various 1-900, 1-876, etc., toll call numbers. ATandT charges I believe USD 6 just for being listed in their books.
I use an internet calling card exclusively and was looking to drop long distance on the land line altogether. The fact is, you CANNOT, unless you go to the extreme of having NO land line. In the age of wireless communications this is of course possible, but I don't know of a cellular phone contract that works out to being less expensive than a land line.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
obvious. Cancel your service. Call them up, explain to them why you are canceling (and yell at them for good measure, especially if you can get a manager on the phone) and when they offer you the half-assed deal to keep you on, cancel anyway. And threaten to cancel your phone service if you have access to another provider. I did this to bellsouth with great results, but you have to be willing to step down to 56k land.
But geeks are suckers, they can't be without their broad-band fix. And as long as people are willing to pay, companies are willing to charge. Stand up and let them know how much the service is worth. (And go outside.) Or you can continue to be a sucker and pay $7 more per month.
This sig is false.
The fee would be taken by your local provider. Some local providers ate the charge themselves, so you might not have seen it.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
About a year ago, I got my dad set up with @home. At the time, you could save about $10 a month off your @home bill by buying your own cable modem. Cable modems then cost about $170, so we figured buying one was a no-brainer, as it would pay for itself in less than two years.
Then @home went down the toilet and my dad's service was taken over by AT&T. Now it looks like our decision to buy wasn't so smart after all. My take-home lesson from this: never bet your own money on the assumption that your cable provider won't change the rules of the game.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
The wife and I tried just that in our new house. No land line and two cell phones with shared minutes (Verizon, if you care). We were told that we were in the middle of a very strong area of signal. Of course, to get that signal, you had to stand by the front window in the dining room and not move more than two feet away from there. We were then told that we needed to wait for a new cell tower going up nearby. How long to wait? "Oh, sometime this year" was the reply. Certainly not an ideal answer. So, after two months the "great cell experiment" was a failure. We now have a land line and MCI long distance. There's no way in hell that I ever, evne under duress, deal directly with AT&T. They make Micro$oft look like the Girl Scouts when it comes to being a predatory monopoly. Thank god I'm getting Verizon DSL soon and can dump cable altogether. Well, only if the idiots at the satallite company can get me local channels.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
It's possible in my area at least -- I have a land line from Bell South but no long distance carrier.
I do pay a surcharge though, 5 USD, described on the bill thus: "FCC Charge -- A charge to recover costs associated with connecting to the interstate telecommunications service providers network. This includes the cost of equipment and facilities maintenance. Customers are billed one FCC charge per-line each month."
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
Maybe they're trying to make up for agressive pricing in other divisions?
Example: We have the "AT&T Ultimate" long distance plan - for $20/month we can call anyone for $0.07/minute except other AT&T customers - those calls are FREE. That cut our average LD phone bill by an order of magnitude. (Not kidding - wife + sister-in-law + mother-in-law talk several times a day for at least an hour. Don't ask me what they talk about, they won't tell me and I'm certain I really don't want to know.)
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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
"People who own their modems are pretty much locked in to staying with AT&T," Kersey said. "It's a way to extract a little more money out of a small percentage of people. That's a fairly politically smart thing to do because it doesn't affect the vast majority of customers."
/Spicole from Fast times at ridgemont high
You DICK!!
/Spicole off
Sounds like a good plan:
Charge more to the people who invested in the technology, are your best/longest customers and probably sold your service to *other* people before you fscked it up and capped to the point of being useless.
"extract a little more money", eh?
Yeah, the more you tighten your grasp, fsck-head the more your business will slip thru your fingers.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
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!
I never understood why anybody would want to buy a cable modem anyway. Modem prices have come down, but even before AT&T's rate change change, buying your own only saved $10 a month anyway. So that means that if you bought a cable modem for $150, it would be 15 months before you broke even. That's too long a payback time for a technology investment.
Look, this is simple. Bandwidth is expensive, or at least it's not the free resource everyone likes to think that it is. You ever look at the prices for T1 lines? They're expensive for a reason. Some of that is gouging, sure, the bottom line is that *somebody* is paying for crazy-high bandwidth. Cable ISPs started out with cheap prices to attract customers, then the realization hit that they couldn't keep it up forever. This is not a surprise to anyone except college students who are used to having "free" high bandwidth connections in their dorm rooms.
I use an internet calling card exclusively and was looking to drop long distance on the land line altogether. The fact is, you CANNOT, unless you go to the extreme of having NO land line. In the age of wireless communications this is of course possible, but I don't know of a cellular phone contract that works out to being less expensive than a land line.
It's not particularly extreme to have no land line and go with a cellular phone. I've been doing that for over two years. It's cheaper for me to do so. In the past I'd pay Ameritech around $25/month plus long distance for a land line that has an unlisted and unpublished number (not available in the phone book or directory assistance). Invariably my credit card companies or other companies with whom I have done business would sell my number on a telemarketing list or I would begin getting telemarketing calls from them ("Please consider our credit protection insurance policy" kinda crap) and I'd have to pay to change the number. This was a hassle.
On top of that, I'm usually at work all day and out somewhere in the evenings, so I've had wireless since 1995 or so. Any of my friends, family members, or business associates would always call me on my mobile phone because they knew that they could find me quickly. My monthly wireless bill was usually around $40 a month, and I thought that was pretty reasonable.
After a while it got to the point that I never answered my land line, I just let the machine get it (voicemail would have been another additional monthly fee from Ameritech). It was never anybody that I wanted to talk to. After a month or two of this I decided that it was pointless to pay $25/month for a phone line that was only used by people who I didn't want to talk to (or for the occasional long distance call), so I had the land line shut off. I also upgraded my wireless plan to account for the potential of more minutes, and I now pay around $55/month for wireless service. That includes all the minutes that I use, plus free voicemail, call waiting, caller ID, and 3-way calling. Right now I'm looking into plans that offer no roaming and no LD charges too. One of the features that I especially like is that their "411" information service is really information, not just directory assistance. For example, if you call and ask for a number to a movie theatre they'll look up what movies are playing and give you showtimes too. Try getting that from Ma Bell! Plus I don't have to ever worry about my number being listed somewhere for telemarketers to get at.
On that note, I know that telemarketers aren't allowed to solicit you on your mobile phone because it costs you money, but I wonder if they have a list of mobile prefixes for each area code? I've never gotten a telemarketing call on my mobile, even after giving it to my creditors.
At any rate, from my perspective it makes sense to go purely wireless. It ended up saving me around $10/month since I already had wireless service, and it includes far more features than my land line did. I've got several friends and coworkers who've done the same thing after seeing how well I've gotten along without it. If you're afraid of the contract issue, just buy a mobile phone and get a pay-as-you-go plan. Phones have become so inexpensive lately that buying them up-front isn't that big of a deal, especially if you don't need one that does WAP and SMS and all that other garbage. Wireless companies are getting much smarter about this and now offer family packages with shared minutes (great if you're married, but I'd still get a land line for the kids).
AT&T announced this price increase over a year ago, hardly new.
:) ) I have no objection to paying a few more dollars a month for high quality cable modem access.
They are actualy REDUCING the price of the modem rental, granted by just $1 a month but. . . . This is quite fair and I consider it JUSTIFIED and a LOT better then, say, implementing shitty ass bandwidth caps.
Considering the high quality level of their service (they have recently increased the upload speed cap from 16KBP/s to 30KBp/s!!!! YAHOOO!!!!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Is it just me or does this scream out the fact that there's clearly not enough competition in the broadband market these days? I mean AT&T suddenly decides to start charging people an extra $7/month to people who went through the trouble and expense of buying their own hardware. Sounds like a good motivation to get service from a different provider, but then what are your choices really?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Now I'll have to pay for the privilage of not depending on AT&T for a modem?"
-If there is a mistake...well, you should have used the 'Preview' button!-
"but I don't know of a cellular phone contract that works out to being less expensive than a land line"
.. just take any job where your expected to own a cell phone so you can be on call.
Easy
I did the math when I needed internet access at home cable was cheaper than either land line+dialup or DSL.
My sympathy to those using AT&T for broadband internet. It is a fate that I myself narrowly escaped.
Earlier this month, I found myself moving to a new apartment, and needing new internet access. The cable provider monopolizing my new neighborhood? None other than AT&T.
I called up on the 3rd, ordered service, and was told that the cable guy would be out on a Saturday. That Saturday came and went, and of course, the cable guy never showed up. Seems the first person I had spoken to had failed to put in a work order.
Next appointment: Wednesday afternoon. My roommate takes off early from work so he can meet Cable Guy. Cable Guy arrives 10 minutes before my roommate gets there, leaves a note, and disappears.
So, he calls in to set up another appointment, and is told about installation fees. Fees which I was told, just last weekend, wouldn't apply, since I was ordering the 'basic' (do-it-yourself) modem installation. Here's where the fun begins.
I call them up to get a straight answer on the pricing. I get referred to two 'local' 1-800 service numbers. The first is disconnected. The second is for Long Distance (no, I don't want to buy any, thank you!)
I get referred to other phone numbers. Somehow, I end up getting a local broadband support office... on the other end of the country.
Indeed, until I declare my intentions to cancel my order (after the 8th toll-free phone call, and the 10th time on hold), it seems there is not one person in the entire company who can give me a straight answer on pricing. And by then, I've made up my mind to look into DSL and Dish Network. Both of them such good deals in my area that it's a wonder I ever considered AT&T in the first place.
On a side note, I recently heard on the radio that in a survey of satisfaction with the customer support services of various industries, Cable TV ranked at rock-bottom. And the worst of the worst? Charter, Comcast, and AT&T.
Gee, I wonder why.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
I don't know about where you live, but here in Maryland Verizon flat out refused to allow us to use their service without a long distance carrier. They don't care who you use, but they won't let you not use anyone....
Unless the lady on the other end was just lying, as I suspect she was....
The reason that AT&T is doing this is simple. They don't want you to own the modem. It actually saves them money when you use your own modem, they don't have to replace it when it breaks and they don't have to maintain a stock of modems, which is why they tried to encourage people to buy modems. They have changed their minds, because they realized that they cannot control modems that they do not own. There is nothing stopping you from running diffrent firmware on a modem that you own, getting around any speed caps that they may have placed on your account. All of AT&T's traffic shaping takes place at the modem. What you are going to soon see is tired service, pay more to get a faster connection, pay less to get a limited connection. However, the only real diffrence will be the firmware that they send to your modem. Hence, they want to stop the spread of modems that they cannot control.
Maybe it's a state-by-state thing. On my ISDN line, there's no long-distance carrier. I just refused to pick one. They've been sending me a bill for $0.23 for something like three years, every month. I figure at some point, I'll send them a quarter...
Corporations have to make more money this year than last year - no matter what. It doesn't matter how much profit they're making or how large their market share is - they've simply got to make more money this year, or they are letting down their shareholders.
It sounds more or less like a Ponzi scheme to me, but it's capitalism (at least our brand) and it "works" (according to those it works for), so expect more of the same... until the people decide to change what corporations are and what they can do.
I hope you're all happy.
--Blair
AT&T Broadband *increased* upstream transfer rates for many customers. They're making it a flat 256kbps across the board. Funny to see how the articles about bow AT&T Broadband is screwing people make big news, but when they increase the piddly upstream cap that people bitch about constantly, nobody seems to care.
Article here
I'd had AT&T as my interstate and local long distance carrier for many years (having been happier with them than with the alternatives). This year, they started playing games with the monthly service fee -- trying to figure out which fee plan and which rate plan worked best suddenly turned into such a maze that you can't even make a good guess at the best rate. The last straw came when they began charging the monthly fee in advance (which caused me to be charged twice for the month when they made that transition).
My point is, AT&T seems to be playing these games in other areas too, not just with cable modems.
BTW as a direct result of these games, my long distance is now provided thru Costco (lower rate, no monthly fee... take that, AT&T). Too bad cable modem users generally don't have the choice of jumping ship to another provider.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The broadband providers perceive nat as a threat. Several months ago, there were stories here about the broadband industry seeing nat as a kind of theft, where they were missing out on revenues from leasing IP's for each of those machines that without nat, would have real internet IP's.
So their solution is to provide modems with a different protocol which can identify machines behind nat...so that the connection between the ISP and your home is not IP.
Given that those schemes are on their minds, it seems only natural that they would want to discourage the use of a modem they do not control, or can not recall and replace with their new ones. Even if you don't cave in and pay for more IP's (which is ridiculous, you don't pay for additional phones hooked up to the same line/number, even though those numbers are scarce as well) they still get some extra ca$h.
I suggest we coin a term to combat the idea that every net connected device should be paying for an IP, even if behind a firewall/nat. I propose "IP Gouging". I also think people should contact the local public utility commission and explain how shady a practice it is. We pay primarily for bandwidth and connectivity, we only need one IP to make use of the utility.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Here is the real problem coming from this story. When a cost of doing business rises, it is immediatly passed on to the customer. If cable prices had gone up, you bet we would have seen an increase in leasing prices and overall. When the reverse is true, we don't see the change. We should lobby AT&T to pass their modem saving on to us.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Let them ship you their modem. Take it out of the box, examine it, make sure it isn't damaged, and then... put it back in the box and stick it in your closet. Use your own modem. Who's going to know?
If they run tests and decide that you're not using their equipment (either by checking MAC addrs, which, as a practical matter, they really can't keep on file, or by issuing instructions to the modems), what can they do? You're "testing alternatives."
Besides, hey. This way you get a backup modem, in case the spiffy one you bought dies. And you can plug the modem in and turn it on when you're having service problems, if you feel like it, too.
Get off my launchpad!
Cox no longer has any names for their modems. You are a number. Services are explicitly prohibited. Only port 21 is left open to incomming requests because AOL's instant messenger needs it, so you can run ftp in a normal fashion. No, they don't want you to run ftp, but they have yet to cut me off for my little read only site.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The Seattle P-I has a piece this morning about the monopoly aspect of this. Bottom line: In Tacoma, where there's competition for cable and broadband, you pay less; in Seattle, where AT&T has a monopoly, you'll be paying more.
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
"...What we really need is more competition in the marketplace..."
I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, where only 18 months ago (in my neighborhood, at least) there were at least 5 competing broadband providers:
One Large crappy overpriced Telco;
Two DSL CLECs marketed by a dozen resellers;
One (or Two?) satellite 'dish' providers;
One huge national cable company; and
One regional cable company.
One would think, with all this competition, that we would have decent prices and maybe some modicum of customer service. But after the failure of one CLEC, the other hanging on by a thread, and the major cable company gobbled up by another - we had then, and still have, some of the highest cable and broadband prices in the United States. And customer service? I think it must be a law here that telco / cable service must suck or else.
18 months and four email addresses later, I can state that what passes for 'competition' around here sure isn't helping much.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
No, because since the limits from the left and right are different (from left, it approaches negative infinity, from right, it approaches positive infinity), the limit does not exist.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
I'd like to add one more item to my list.
- The loss of dial-up as a backup when my cable modem connectivity is down. This morning it was down for four hours.
In my lengthy discussion with a tech. support "supervisor" I was told that the dial-up numbers were discontinued because a survey revealed that "business people" mostly wanted it to access e-mail while on the road.