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Comcast's Incompetence, Lack of Broadband May Force Developer To Sell Home
BUL2294 writes Consumerist has an article about a homeowner in Kitsap County, Washington who is unable to get broadband service. Due to inaccurate broadband availability websites, Comcast's corporate incompetence, CenturyLink's refusal to add new customers in his area, and Washington state's restrictions on municipal broadband, the owner may be left with no option but to sell his house 2 months after he bought it, since he works from home as a software developer. To add insult to injury, BroadbandMaps.gov says he has 10 broadband options in his zip code, some of which are not applicable to his address, have exorbitant costs (e.g. wireless), or are for municipal providers that are prevented from doing business with him by state law. Yet, Comcast insists in filings that "the broadband marketplace is more competitive than ever." As someone who had Comcast call to cancel on the day of my closing (two days before my scheduled install) because they didn't offer service to my house after all, I can sympathize.
It's http://broadbandmap.gov/ (singular)
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
I think that we should lobby to break the cable(and other incumbent monopolistic ISPs) companies.
For example, state(and lower) prohibitions on municiple broadband systems should 'go away', and every time a cable company refuses service to a customer they should be hit with a $1k(or more) fine.
Especially with the federal government declaring it a utility.
I don't read AC A human right
Before I bought my house, I went down to the Comcast office to confirm that I would be able to get broadband there. Multiple people told me yes, but I still wanted to speak to a manger, just to be sure. And they did assure me, over and over again. So I bought the house, moved in, and then they finally told me it wasn't available yet.
Since I was doing software consulting from home, at the time, I made it clear to them that I wasn't going to move there if I couldn't get it. I ended up going over a year before they decided to turn it on (the wiring was all there, it was a new development). It really hurt my business, at the time. I'm still bitter about it to this day. I couldn't have been any more thorough in checking before moving in. They are absolutely incompetent.
Why are they still in business? Oh, because there's no competition. That's why. As a friend of mine once said "yeah it's unfair and they suck, but c'mon I still have to do work, so they get my money." If there were competition Comcast and their ilk (I'm talking about the telco ILEC like AT&T (really SBC) and Verizon) would have long gone bankrupt or bought out. But they are in control because their lobbyists are writing the laws for them and there's little we could do about it besides hearing fud from these clowns.
I was expecting this to be a homeowner fail, but:
Q: Why Didn’t you check this before you moved?
A: Oh, but I did. Having broadband of some kind was an absolute requirement for our new home. Before we even made an offer, I placed two separate phone calls; one to Comcast Business, and one to Xfinity. Both sales agents told me that service was available at the address. The Comcast Business agent even told me that a previous resident had already had service. So I believed them.
He explored that solution, and it turned out to be a huge pain in the neck. Quoting Consmerist (first link in the OP):
I could see his employer saying "no," and $600/month for 1.5 mbps is highway robbery.
Finding God in a Dog
... and this guy doesn't need to sell his house.
You can buy point-to-point wireless internet solutions which will give you up to 5km of range and around 50mb/s of bandwidth for $300 or so per end, so $600 total.
If that is his house, he has a bunch of trees around it which will block line of sight so he needs a tower-type antenna mount which he can buy for about $1000.
So all he needs to do is make arrangements with someone to be the other endpoint and he is in business. For less than $3000.
I'm not making this up. I managed to do this in a remote part of Washington state (where I still do not have a landline phone, the last time I checked CenturyLink wanted more than 25 grand to put in the phone service, even after I pointed out that I had put in extra copper wires they could use when I put in power to my home site) over sixteen years ago. My out-of-pocket costs were less than five grand.
Having googled around to find his address ( I was hoping to find out the antenna location for the microwave internet provider, to see who's blocking the signal ), I can tell you that he chose a house smack dab in the middle of nowhere.
The photo makes it look like a run of the mill driveway to a house, but really it's a small paved area that leads into the woods (which surround the house on all sides - I'd be surprised if line-of-sight solutions actually worked because there is no line of sight to anything but trees), exits lord knows where onto a single-vehicle-wide apparent dirt road that finally exits onto a double-lane road that is still only a secondary road.
Run own cable? Where to? There's certainly other businesses well within 2500 feet - I wonder if they have internet. Or his neighbors (as others have mentioned). But certainly any remotely densely populated area is more than 'a few blocks' away, not to mention that you'd probably have to lay it all weird (no straight line through the woods for you) if the county has any say in it.
Hopefully some of the people who contacted him can hook him up, 'cos the end-run he's been given is deplorable, regardless of the choice of location.
Yes.
Having worked for Comcast as a phone rep THREE TIMES (it's complicated and just as stupid as you're imagining) I can tell you that their shit is jacked.
Their order system is so complicated that it's almost impossible to complete an order without fucking it up.
DSL might very well be available there but for "new development", there is a trick you have to do in order to get it.
When i moved into my new house a few years ago, I was told that there is no DSL service in my area. I told them that it was BS since the CO is less then a mile from my house (i pass it going to and from work each day) and the dang pedistal was in my front yard. Over and over again..."Sir we don't serve your address/area and have no plans on doing so." Each time i respond..."You put a new pedistal in my subdivision when the road/utilities were layed....want the number off the pedistal?" Them..."No sir since we have no service there...." This went on for three damn months threw 3! different support levels.
Finally, i realized that by law, they HAVE to hook me up if i requested standard POTS phone service. I called, gave them the address, they told me they don't have service there and would have to set up a service man to survey and figure out how to get me phone service where i live. The next day the guy came out and said..."Well this is easier then i thought....you just need a line buried from the ped to the house (50ft). He was done in 10 min. I then asked if DSL was available here. He told me yea, it's just down the road, want me to turn that on too and add it to your bill, i have a new modem in my truck. 20 minutes later....i had 12Mbits DSL service to my house.
I then asked why in the world i could not get this done MONTHS ago. He said that if a address never had regular home phone service, as far as ATT was concerned, DSL was not and never would be available. There system was incapable of turning up dsl before phone service....the computer system would just plain not even allow it.
The next day...i canceled my home phone and kept the DSL
So my advice to you is that get the mandated by law to provide POTS phone line, and then see if magically you can get DSL service now. I would not be surprised if you can now get it. When I told all my neighbors (who have been trying to months like me) how to do it, BAM!, a few weeks straight of ATT trucks at all the houses, and a whole lot of very thankful neighbors.
Telephone and electricity wires cost money to run as well. We mandated that the utilities provide service to all and they used to simply spread the cost over the entire customer base. As long as you're profitable in the large it doesn't really matter if each customer turns a profit. However, if a company is not required to do so, they will, of course, focus only on profitable customers.
We chose to subsidize services that were viewed as vital, such as phone and electricity. Cable TV is not a necessity but internet access may be.
It's only expensive because you were paying for it. The cable companies employ people to run cables, which makes those employees basically a sunk cost. They have to have those people to do repairs on an ongoing basis. When they aren't doing repairs, it costs the cable nothing to have them run lines to new houses, beyond the cost of the wire, which I suspect is somewhere between a third and a sixth of what you paid. (Over the long term, this isn't true, but when it comes to short-term variation, it is.)
Moreover, it costs $200 to rent a trenching machine for a day, and probably less than that to hire someone for a day to run the thing. So basically, even by the most conservative estimate, you overpaid for your installation by about $1,600, all of which went into the pockets of middlemen. Cable companies don't pay middlemen; they pay workers. So even in the worst case scenario, where all their workers were fully booked so that they had to hire new people to handle running your cable, they'd still pay less than half what you paid.
So at your price, it would have been about an 8-year payoff. At half that price, it would be a 4-year payoff. In the telecom world, a four-year payoff is amazingly quick, from what I've read. Your cable company just couldn't be bothered. It had nothing to do with cost, or if it did have something to do with cost, it was only because they were pushing the high up-front cost onto you as a means of ensuring that you could actually afford the service. Either that or they are nearly bankrupt and couldn't afford the $3,000, in which case you probably just wasted your money. Hard to say which.
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Kitsap County gets 49 inches a year, and averages 153 sunny days. So it's fair to say most of the time the weather is crappy, and from what I understand that tends to kill wireless performance.
I'm going to clear the air here.
Wireless effects signals in the 10GHz and above range, primarily. You might see .25dB per loss of mile in a torrential downpour with hurricane force winds on 5GHz, but a properly engineered link is going to have 20-30dB of fade margin built in for just this kind of thing.
We are currently providing internet to ~1600 subscribers, many schools, hospitals, and remote locations... IN ALASKA, and have been doing so for over 10 years.
Signed,
CIO of an Alaska W/ISP
Kitsap County gets 49 inches a year, and averages 153 sunny days. So it's fair to say most of the time the weather is crappy, and from what I understand that tends to kill wireless performance.
I'm going to clear the air here.
Wireless effects signals in the 10GHz and above range, primarily. You might see .25dB per loss of mile in a torrential downpour with hurricane force winds on 5GHz, but a properly engineered link is going to have 20-30dB of fade margin built in for just this kind of thing.
We are currently providing internet to ~1600 subscribers, many schools, hospitals, and remote locations... IN ALASKA, and have been doing so for over 10 years.
Signed,
CIO of an Alaska W/ISP
s/wireless/rain/g in the above sentence, sorry :)
On another note, Ubiquiti's AF5X should be hitting the distros within another week or two. That's 500Mbps over a 50MHz wide channel, and is connectorized for whatever dish you want to use... in couple be a 2dBi patch, 5dBi omni, or 12ft dish if you want to.
Wrong. They contract most stuff out. They only pay for actual lines put in the ground and hookups. When they dont' need anybody, they don't have anybody. All their installers are 'independent contractors'. They aren't paying for anything they don't absolutely need.
You have no concept of what it takes to put a cable in the ground.
First, all Comcast construction is done by contractors for liability reasons. This isn't negotiable for a large company, a single improper process for a contractor digging a utility in could bankrupt even a company of Comcast's size if their employee's were directly involved in the right incident.
Second, though it may only cost $200 a day to rent it's rather irrelevant because Comcast pays the going Contract rate for installations.
Third, if you think digging the cable in is the only cost you have no concept. There is the planning and engineering costs, the utility mapping, the right-of-way access, the coordination with the local city and the compliance with the local building codes, the insurance costs, the contract management costs, the inspection costs, the quality control and quality assurance. Pulling and splicing cables through the conduits, power and other interconnection costs, splicing the cables, testing and validation, and plant hookup.
Verizon's pass cost (the cost to put a cable in front of the house) was about $1500 per house in a typical suburban environment. It probably costs about another $500-$1000 to dig the cable to the house install the ONT and pull the cable to the jack.
May I suggest you not comment about such subjects in the future. Leave construction and estimating how hard something is to the people that actually know.
I live in Kitsap County and I looked up his address, and I can't say I'm surprised. He lives in a very low density area, and given current land use restrictions, that's not going to change. There's no money to be had in expanding capacity.
No, welcome to the "edge case" of living in a very low density area outside of town rather than in a suburb.
He doesn't live in a subdivision - he lives in the woods outside the built up area of town.
Seriously, I've said it three different ways but I'll repeat it a fourth time because it's important to grasp - he lives in very low residential density area outside of town. He doesn't live in the suburbs or a subdivision. I give and grant that Comcast is incompetent - but his options are narrowed and/or blocked as much by the fact of where he chose to live as by any law or regulation. The north end isn't Palo Alto or Mountain View.
Well, then he simply needs to sue the company for the cost of relocating him to another home of equal value in an area where they do provide service, plus court costs, time and expenses and mental anguish.
I certainly believe this could happen. I once signed up for a long distance plan with AT&T and month later I got a bill for $600. It turns out that they did not offer that plan in my area, despite the fact that their representative sold it to me. Apparently after having determined that the plan was not available, they did not call and discuss other options with me but just defaulted me to "no plan" with charges approximately 10 times the amount of the plan that I had purchased from them. Not only would they not honor the contract which I and they had signed, but they would not even retroact the first month to that plan, and would only agree to reducing the bill by half. I told them I would only pay what the plan that I had purchased would cost and they said that would be fine and they would report the difference to the credit agencies and send the bill to collections. They claimed no responsibility for what the agent under their employ and trained by them had sold me and apparently it was entirely MY responsibility to figure out what plans AT&T offered in my area, despite the fact that finding that out would have also broken computer hacking laws.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The folks digging up our street were Comcast employees (or at least contractors working for Comcast, not some installer company). They drove Comcast trucks. They ran underground pipes that were manufactured specifically for Comcast, with their name printed every few inches all the way down the length of the tubing. Maybe you don't realize just how big a company we're talking about here.
As for liability, there's a little thing called liability insurance. Companies doing that sort of work have to have it, and if they hire a company to do the work, the company they hire has to have it. It is usually required by law. Whether Comcast pays that cost directly or indirectly is irrelevant; they're still paying the cost of that insurance. Comcast chooses to use contractors in some places because they don't have enough work to keep full-time staff occupied, and/or because it confers tax advantages to use contractors instead of employees. The liability claim is just something they tell contractors so they don't realize how badly they're getting screwed.
Think about this: You're a contracting company that specializes in pulling cables. You have two options:
Which one would you choose? Most contracting companies would choose B, knowing that they'll still be able to pay their employees the same wages, but the company as a whole will be more immune to market fluctuations.
Maybe you didn't read the original post. This was about a rural installation. In my experience, that usually means bare coax cables in the ground (no conduit, and probably not fiber), minimal utility mapping (relatively few houses with taps from the power and phone lines), minimal planning and engineering. I mean yes, you do have to do utility mapping, but it's a whole lot easier to map a rural street with a straight wire that parallels the road than it is to map a suburban street that has wires going in random directions from transformers to houses every fifty or one hundred feet.
The cable company would have to comply with the local building codes no matter what. I doubt there's a huge difference there between a rural install and an urban install. If anything, the rural install is probably more laid back, less rigorous, and has lower overall compliance cost. A building code inspector isn't likely to inspect the entire length of wire, but rather the termini, so that cost should be about the same for a 1,000-foot run as for a 50-foot run, assuming it doesn't require them to install any boosters along the way (and if it did, he/she wouldn't have gotten satisfac
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The last time Comcast tried to pull that kind of shit with me, I got the Better Business Bureau involved... and won.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
My realtor didn't like it because it was an "unusual" offer, but I said it was a contract and I could put any conditions in it I wanted - the seller just had to agree (and did).
Fwiw with real estate this is tricky; not every contract rider is allowed in every jurisdiction, and some may be allowed but cause complexities. Not saying this particular one wasn't allowed in yours, but you can't generally assume that you can write anything you want into a real-estate transaction and not end up with problems.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Maybe so, but if so, they're playing a very dangerous game. The legal term that comes to mind here is "agency by estoppel." Briefly put, that term means that if a company authorizes you to act on their behalf, and if they allow you to look and act like an agent of a company, then the company can be held liable for your actions.
As long as Comcast's name is on those trucks, if they screw up, Comcast is almost guaranteed to be held liable in court, regardless of whether the workers are employees or independent contractors. That legal risk is the reason that most contracts these days contain clauses that forbid you from representing yourself as being a partner of or an agent of that company.
Admittedly, I've only seen cables being buried for cable companies in rural areas, but they were A. coax, and B. not in any sort of conduit whatsoever. That was only a few years ago, and I doubt that practice has changed much except in areas that have gone to fiber. Mind you, that practice does vary widely from place to place, so if you live in a city (or even within twenty or thirty miles of a large city), I can understand why you would not have seen it. That doesn't mean it isn't common practice in truly rural areas.
It's easier, but the distance is also longer. The cost is higher in rural areas, because fewer houses can be served by a single line or set of lines. However, it isn't as much higher as the distance implies, because you don't have to bore under a driveway or sidewalk every fifty feet (and/or dig up and re-build sidewalks and driveways). Building the infrastructure while you're putting in a neighborhood is much cheaper than building it later for the same reason. The less crap you have to work around, the less it costs to put lines in. That statement is amazingly straightforward, and I would challenge you do prove it wrong.
I'm not speculating. The person in question did the installation. There were no boosters, no multi-million-dollar fiber huts. The person paid to have someone trench and run a cable. The cable company lit the cable. End of story. Therefore, I do know that none of those things were necessary, and none of the things you're talking about are even slightly relevant in this case. Clearly the cost was not a million dollars. In fact, it was about $3,000. It is safe to sa
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