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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.
Dude lives in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing wrong with Comcast not offering him service, there's something wrong with them claiming they did when they didn't.
Additionally, the homeowner should have been more diligent that his home in the middle of nowhere, with no cable box, would actually have cable.
Internet over 4G really isn't that expensive, and that's what he uses now. I'm surprised that doesn't work for him.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Is there any corporate malfeasance that someone won't try to explain away. How about if Comcast came out and shot the guy? Would you say that was his fault?
The problem are rate rules. The cable company is not allowed to charge more for cable runs to distant customers. Those rate rules mean that they can't charge more to recoup their investment for cable runs that are expensive to put in.
I was about 1000 ft from the nearest cable access after I built my house and the cable company wouldn't build out down my rural road for that reason.
The solution was simply to pay an installer to have my own line run.
It was expensive -- just under $3/foot, and there's no way a cable company is going to pay $3000 to hook up one customer for $30/month internet access. It will take years just to make back that $3000.
I was lucky to get someone at the company that could find a solution for me, but I don't think a typical customer service rep is going to bother.
DSL in his area is CenturyLink. The DSLAM that coves his house is in "Permanent Exhaust" meaning it's oversubscribed so far even CenturyLink won't add more subscribers, and they have made the business decision to NOT increase the bandwidth to the DSLAM cabinet further to be able to support more hardware. I.E. "I'm sorry, we're full. No, we're not adding any more capacity. Ever. Goodbye."
Satellite doesn't work at all for full-time VPN access. Their bandwidth caps/fees are even worse than cell-phones.
And ComCast is flat-out refusing to service his house/area entirely. Full-stop: Since they can't charge him the full line-extension fee ($50-60k) the portion they have to pay by law is too high so they'd rather refuse him service entirely. Welcome to the edge-case downside of regulation preventing the full cost from landing on the end-user.
Point-to-Point wireless no longer covers his area due to a new tall building being built between their regional tower and his subdivision.
Currently he's burning 30GB/month on his Verizon service to stay employed, and if it's a big file transfer he drives into town to use the local StarBucks Coffee or McDonalds wifi.
He did his research, ComCast effectively has a bit flipped in their database: [X] Has had cable service previously at this address.
That single bit has caused all this mess.
- WolfWings, too lazy to login to SlashDot in over a decade now.
They were independent contractors hired by Comcast with a Contract requirement that they badge their trucks and wear Comcast shirts. Comcast supplies the materials, there is an advantage to labeled conduit in that people digging utility test holes can easily identify the owner.
Yes Liability insurance can be purchased, and probably even cover 90% of accidents. Large companies choose to hire independents because if the independent contractor makes a mistake the small company can declare bankruptcy and clear all the liability while Comcast isn't material affected. No for profit company of Comcast's size would EVER dig in a utility with their own forces. It's economic suicide and the insurance they would need to purchase to cover them for all possible incidents would be so prohibitively expensive to basically make it impossible to build anything at all.
I ran into a utility once where the costs for any contractor that dug up and cut the utility were about $46K per minute the line was out of service. This was a cross country fiber with multiple strands. At the time, splicing a single fiber required a clean room standards and about 6 hours of time to cut, polish and splice the strand. The line was literally in the middle of no where, as is frequently the case it's more likely to run into these types of utilities in rural areas. Consider the cost of a break that took out all the strands where the fastest response time would be about 2 hours and that's just to locate the break, determine how bad it is and dispatch the repair crew. Then the repair crew has to dig up the line, make clean cuts, setup a clean room tent around the break and then splice all the fibers. Though communication cables can have some of the highest repair costs there are plenty of other utilities that a break can trigger other catastrophic damage including the loss of life. What does it cost if you cut a gas line and you end up killing an entire family, how about a whole neighborhood of families? What about the costs if you cut a high pressure oil line, kill several people in the process and poison the land and water for several thousand people?
No, Comcast uses contractors for anything that requires digging, and I have no doubt it's company policy. They more than likely use their own forces to pull the cables once the conduit is installed but they do NOT dig anything with their own forces that's not an emergency (and I have big doubts they would even do it in emergency, they retain contracts for emergency work for that just like everyone else).
Actually, poor people can be extremely *profitable* customers, precisely because they have so few options available, they're often forced to obtain goods/services at *profoundly* higher total costs. Being poor is expensive. Someone with a SUV who makes $100k/year can buy Charmin Ultra by the pallet at Sam's Club for a fraction of what someone who lives in a poor neighborhood, doesn't own a car, and has to buy toilet paper by the single roll from 7-11 (because the nearest real grocery store is more than a mile away, and getting there by bus would probably take an hour each way when you factor in waiting times and infrequent service) ends up paying.
Ditto, for things like appliances. You & I can buy appliances somewhere like Costco & haul them home with help from a friend or two in somebody's pickup truck... and probably pay just a few hundred dollars for them. Someone living paycheck to paycheck, by contrast, might end up paying $2,400 for a $500 refrigerator because he can't afford $500 up front, but can (hopefully) scrape $25/week for 8 years (with substantial penalties & additional fees piled on top if his income falters at any point during those 8 years).
Even when you factor bad debt that never officially gets paid in full, the poor are staggeringly profitable because the seller has usually broken even on his hard wholesale costs by the third or fourth month, and everything past that point is pure gravy.