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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?"
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
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..
This way they still have the option of "charging people for exceeding ridiculously low monthly bandwidth caps". You can {have,eat} the cake, after all.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
I was lucky when I signed up for AT&T Broadband, I got free installation. That makes a huge cost difference, and even makes up for the fact that I rent their cable modem. However, the good thing about renting is that eventually, I'm going to want to upgrade my connection, maybe to satellite (if it becomes cheaper and faster), fiber to the home (they're offering that in Lansing, MI, which is only about fifty miles away from me), or something else even faster when it comes out (powerline networking, possibly?). I don't know when, but when I do upgrade, I'd hate to have a $200 cable modem sitting around, which probably will not be worth a dime.
Look at it this way: If you buy a cable modem, it costs you approximately $200 (with taxes) on the spot, and saves you $3 a month for as long as you have the connection. In roughly five and a half years (66 2/3 months), it will pay for itself. Do you see yourself staying with AT&T Broadband service for five and a half years? If not, then rent, it will save you money. If yes, then buy, it will save you money. For me, I couldn't see the benefit of buying even when it saved $10 a month, that's 20 months I have to keep the service to get my money back! What if I want to switch to DSL when it becomes available (which it just did, about two months ago)?
Just do the math.
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*
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 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).
"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.
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!