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?"

Comments

Maintainance costs of the different people...

[MosesJones]

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.

Re:Maintainance costs of the different people...

[flatrock]

Cable modem service went up $7 for everyone regardles of if they own the modem or not. Modem prices haved dropped to 1/3 of what they were, and AT&T dropped the cost of leasing the modem accordingly. You aren't paying an extra $7 for using your own modem, you just are only saving $3 a month instead of $10. AT&T obviously structured the price increase so that their customers that lease modems wouldn't notice, but it really isn't fair to expect those that lease their modems to subsidize the costs for those who use their own. The price of modems has dropped, the price of leasing them should drop accordingly. This was a price increase for the service that just happends to be masked for many subscribers by a decrease in the cost of leasing the equipment.

A Global problem!

[DuranDuran]

Some days ago, users in Australia had their broadband access severely limited as the major providers changed the rules. There were many Slashdot posts effectively telling these users to 'get over it'. We were told to 'vote with our feet' and choose a provider that didn't take their bat and ball and go home when the game wasn't swinging their way. In effect, we were told to 'grow up' with regard to this apparently global technology.

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.

Well, cable modems got cheaper

[kubusja]

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.

Small correction

[awptic]

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).

glad I don't own my own...

[Em Emalb]

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?

Re:glad I don't own my own...

[Zathrus]

Customers will bitch, a few will change providers (those lucky few that can)

That's the real issue. Change providers? To who? Cable is an unregulated monopoly in the US, so you can't just change cable companies and get different service. And the FCC and Congress decided that allowing customers to choose their ISP on cable/DSL was unimportant, so you are stuck with AT&T/Charter/Time Warner/whoever for what you do have. DSL is going down the same path now, if you can even get it.

What other options are there really? Partial T1 tends to be too expensive, even in major cities with heavy telecomm systems.

The rule is simple - when there is no competition then the companies have all of the cards. Traditionally the consumer has the ultimate power in the form of voting with their wallet. However when there is a monopoly that sole ability is removed, because the consumer has no place else to go.

It's sad, really... the Telecomm Act of 1996 was supposed to fix all this. All it's done is move us backwards 50 years AND removed government oversight. Happy happy, joy joy.

Or another way of looking at it...

[91degrees]

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.

How quickly we forget.

[drxyzzy]

There was a time when the Phone Company would only let you connect their phones to your local loop. And you heard a lot about how dangerous it would be to allow a person to hook up any third party equipment instead of bona fide Ma Bell telephones.

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.

Re:This is wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Amen

[FreeUser]

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'.

[...]

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- 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.

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 ... 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.

Re:Amen

[Hard_Code]

"Guess what...I'm not playing that game."

Great. Now do that with:

* the food you eat (unless of course you are explicitly sactioning Monsanta et al., big agribusiness)
* the clothes you wear (unless of course you are explicitly sactioning the sweatshop labor that goes into most imported clothing)
* the air you breath, the land you use (unless of course you are explicitly sactioning the gross malfeasance and greed that results in the polluting of our public land)
* every fucking product or service you use in any concievable way

I support the notion, but in a world that is so highly specialized that we completely isolated from the origins of the products and services we use and for which we come to depend on society (and its big black box of tangled interactions), it is just not practical, fair or even possible to expect everybody person become an expert on all economic chains they participate in as a consumer. In reality, it is *also* a company's responsibility to behave ethically and shoulder half the burden, and we enforce this by laws and regulation. There should not be a double standard where people have to behave ethically but companies can behave like assholes just "because". Maybe we should just abolish the Bill of Rights and have people "vote with their bats"?

Re:Amen

[ZoneGray]

self-styled free marketeers (who apparently can't recognize a limited, non-free market when it hits them in the face)

Well, a real free-market thinker would understand that cable ISP's aren't even close to being a free market. In the US anyway, each cable company is granted a legislated monopoly in a given town. Only one company can run a cable to your house. Same for phone companies. So... service sucks and prices are too high.

restore some social responsibility to these businesses

An easy platitude to utter, but exactly what are you proposing? Brainwash the management? Throw 'em in jail as an example? Pass a law that says they have to be nice? I mean, how do you make a company more responsive to consumers, other than open it up to some good old free-market competition? Get rid of the last-mile monopolies, and you'll see the benefits of the free market.... the same greedy people will have to treat their customers much better.

To quote the old line, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

Re:Amen

[FreeUser]

restore some social responsibility to these businesses

An easy platitude to utter, but exactly what are you proposing? Brainwash the management? Throw 'em in jail as an example? Pass a law that says they have to be nice?

Don't be silly. Suspend their corporate charter and take away their license to do business for acting against the common interest. If you look at the wording of the laws that allow for coporations to exist, you'll see that they require said corporations serve the public interest.

Indeed, it was very uncommon in the early republic for corporate charters to be granted, and not so terribly uncommon for them to be revoked, essentially putting the offending company out of business. Of course, back then corporations were not considered "real" people like they have been since a particularly bizzar (and unprecedented) California court case some eighty years ago that turned everything on its ear and granted corporations all the rights and priveleges of real, breathing, living human beings.

I think one or two revocations of corporate charters would be sufficient to change the behavior of other large corporations, without the need for managerial brainwashing or laws telling people to be nice, don't you?

As for jail time, if someone is managing a company (like, say, Monsanto) that knowingly falsifies FDA test results in order to get dangerous milk hormones approved for public consumption [c.f. Into the Buzzsaw] or knowingly and with premeditation poisons the groundwater of a town in the southern U.S. in the 1990's (and gets caught with the memos discussing how to deal with the political fallout should they ever get caught) [c.f. just about every major American Newspaper, pre 9/11], then yes, I do think the fucking bastards should be put in jail. Perminently, if their behavior, or negligence, has resulted in the loss of human life.

Re:So, private companies can do it too.

[heckman]

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.

Considering the Risk...

[Greyfox]

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.

ATT charges for phone rentals

[kyoko21]

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*

Re:This is wrong...

[Peyna]

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.

Erosion

[bihoy]

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!

Re:Erosion

[bihoy]

Actually I decided to register a .org domain name with e-mail forwarding. Now I don't give out my attbi e-mail address anymore. This does add 20 bucks a year to the cost but I like having complete control.