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Comcast Failed To Install Internet, Then Demanded $60,000 In Fees (arstechnica.com)
Earthquake Retrofit writes: A Silicon Valley startup called SmartCar in Mountain View, California signed up for Comcast Internet service. After hearing Comcast excuses for months, company owner Katta finally got fed up and decided that he would find a new office building once his 12-month lease expires on April 20 of this year. Katta told Comcast he wanted to 'cancel' his nonexistent service and get a refund for a $2,100 deposit he had paid. Instead, Comcast told him he'd have to pay more than $60,000 to get out of his contract with the company. Comcast eventually waived the fee—but only after being contacted by Ars Technica about the case.
Not that I'm making excuses for the most loathed company in the United States, but California is the most backwards state in the Union when it comes to building and permitting, and it is not only plausible, but quite likely that they actually *were* stuck in the permitting queue that they claimed.
Lesson to business owners: There are some critical questions you should have answered before you purchase or lease a building if you aren't constructing it yourself.
-Does it have utilities?
-Does it have a parking lot?
-Does it have deployed fiber or wiring for internet and phone service?
-Do the doors have locks?
-What are the zoning laws around you?
And a dozen more. C'mon.
I mean seriously, this is par for the course. And you know what, you guys deserve it.
Time and time again you elect officials who go out of their way to protect the incumbent ISPs and other special interests even though it is expressly against your own interests. And then everyone makes noise about it and then every does fuck all about it.
So, what the hell do you think the end result will be? You have Comcast literally writing laws to outlaw competition for F's sake!
Then in the next election cycle, the same asshats are voted back into office. I have no sympathy at all regarding the currently political landscape in the US.
He also could have cobbling together a few lines (DSL, 4G LTE) with a multi-WAN router would have helped solve the startup's internet problem. Probably add Google's Wifi network available at their site and they could have had another WAN. Another option would have been sluggish T-1 line with SLA. None of these are ideal, but there are solutions that are cheaper than $1000/month for 100/100 fiber service.
Could have asked his neighbors. Could have gotten something in writing. Could have....demonstrated competency when choosing a location to host your business. Or if you didn't know what to look for, gotten help. Assuming he's funding his startup with VC money, they definitely would have given advice or consultation on cost outlays - especially one as big as a lease/location.
To be fair, everything indicated they would be able to get Comcast internet before they moved in, it wasn't until they signed the lease for the office space that they found out, no no they could not. And they did have internet of a sorts, AT&T dsl, which was at least as good if not better for their purposes than satellite internet would have been (not to say that DSL in this case is 'good' just that it's better than satellite).
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
Comcast expends too much evil energy fucking people over with their business "contracts". Terms for early termination is 75% of monthly rate over the entire term of the contract and it fucking evergreens yearly after that with a requirement for month in advance notification to terminate without penalty.
Of course their sales people go out of their way to not mention any of this, lie out of their ass if you'll sign and bury basic facts because they are scum. Treating customers like total shit is what Comcast does best.
I suspect that without providing him a service, a court would rule, and quite quickly, that there was no consideration, thus no valid contract.
Clause n ) In an event where in due to unforeseen circumstances comcast is unable to provide service , the consumer should be bound to the contract till comcast is able to provide service. Premature termination will attract a fine of $60000.
I agree to all the above terms and conditions
Yes they can be expected to foot the bill. Commercial contracts have SLA. If they fail to even connect they can hardly claim you have 99.9% availability. That is why you pay so much more for commercial contracts. Both sides have more on the line.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
The most shocking part is that not every place in Silicon Valley already comes with a fast internet access, for a reasonable price. Even if Comcast had been able to provide internet, it would have cost $189.90 a month for 100/20 Mbps! In other parts of the world, that's becoming a standard domestic speed, sold for a fraction of that price, available in a few days after you order it.
Have you ever been in a comcast customer service center? That place is depressing. I'm not surprised by this at all.
SLA still have an up time requirement. Not connected is not connected and would count. Also all of these contracts have a "commencement date" or some such thing. There is no way in hell even standard boilerplate contract wouldn't have minimum times for connection of service . These contracts have good lawyers on both sides typically and well i wouldn't be surprised if comsat tried to just pull one over the guy wihtout any legal position.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Something similar happened to someone else who had Time Warner in Manhattan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
They did sign up for AT&T DSL and got 5Mbps down, better than normal ADSL but not quite VDSL.
As for asking, given that most of their neighbors are either tech or internet enabled companies and the landlord never mentioned anything, they probably assumed that was internet available. It's sort of like finding our your 20 person office space doesn't have any toilets.
if comcast promised with an end date of 120 days then there is a breach of contract, thats about it, the thing is that it stand his words against comcast if it said only oral
The Comcast spokesperson acknowledged that the company should not have demanded reimbursement of construction fees from Katta, since Comcast wasn’t able to fulfill its obligation within the original 90-day timeframe. The spokesperson also said Comcast’s website should be updated to make it clear that statements about availability at specific addresses aren’t necessarily accurate.
120 DAYS! Yea who the hell would sign that? Unless you really didn't need the internet or something and the service was super cheap.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Unless you really didn't need the internet or something and the service was super cheap.
It was $190/month for 100/20 Mbps. That's not super cheap. That's very expensive.
If comcast fires any staff member, they should pay them
$60k for premature termination of service.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
This is comcast. Their lawyers would argue that his service level has been constant throughout.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Actually the commercial contract SLA would split both ways my friend. Customer is required to pay a good faith payment if they decide to opt out once comcast has begun working, comcast HAS to being working by a set date or customer can walk away without a fee, comcast must complete work to an agreed level of service on a specific date or face penalty. This is how SLAs work. Running fiber isn't cheap, and if comcast wasn't careful, they could lose a ridiculous amount of money and man hours getting half way into a fiber deployment only to have the company walk away. It's comcast, so we already know they are the devil, but without some fine details regarding the actual agreement, and what work was actually done so far, I'm not willing to say comcast is in the wrong here.
30 days to run new fiber? Yeah, if the rep said that comcast is kind of fucked.
So he's building a "cloud platform" for cars and he didn't bother checking to see if fast internet was available BEFORE purchasing the lease? Then his next braintard was to go out and get Crapcast? I'm more than certain that in Mountain View, there are plenty of other options. This company won't be going places.
I work in this (general) field and we run into this all the time.
First, there is no financial incentive for any provider to pre-qualify all buildings. It would cost so much to do all those surveys and assess all that data, without any revenue from it, that no one does it.
What you saw Comcast use was; looking at the financial model for coax delivery of service, they can't justify the build. But looking at the financial model for fiber delivery of service, you can justify it. Why? Their fiber-based service is 5X the price of coax.
I have seen 'business-class' Comcast coax installed by a technician just feeding cable thru an open window. I've seen it where the tech drilled a hole in an openable wooden window frame and pushed it thru. They will puncture any external wall and just shoot a little caulk at it later. In fairness, they generally do a better job of the physical install of fiber than coax. For fiber installs, they generally use the same methods as a LEC or other major provider would use (conduit, weatherheads, etc.)
I am still mystified as to why business people order Comcast coax service, get crappy performance and outages, then can't understand how Comcast can do that. They can do that because people keep buying their products/services. I know they are usually the cheapest game in town - I guess you get what you pay for.
So many business people say that their business is fully dependent on having Internet access, but they don't want to pay much more than residential rates for it. The nature of all residential service is based on consumers being pain-tolerant but not price-tolerant. So you make compromises on residential service to keep the cost as low as possible. With business-class service, there is a much lower tolerance of pain (outages, slow speeds), so you make fewer compromises (to maintain quality), which drives the costs for delivering services up.
I pay over $1500/month for 100/100. And THAT was after leaving my old carrier at $4000 for 10/10.
Uhh... congratulations on getting really raped on prices?
You should be proud that you're so much better at being taken advantage of than the other people here?
You've shown us all how to really fail at negotiation?
Go you?
Please tell me where you can get 100mbps up and down business class POP for less than $1500 a month...
I can SATURATE a 100/100 connection 24/7 without problems and I don't slow down after 6pm when all the kiddies get online to play call of duty. Consumer grade will not do that.
I am guessing you dont know anything at all about business or commercial grade connections... I'm guessing you will also thing people are getting raped for the $2200 router used....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Commercial contracts have SLA. If they fail to even connect they can hardly claim you have 99.9% availability.
SLA does not apply until after service is turned up and you are being billed for service.
After you commit but before turnup, there are no service bills to pay, except possibly advance payment of installation costs, and you cannot claim a SLA violation.
The only way you can back out fine-free after the provider starts incurring installation costs; is if your contract for service has a backout clause or dead date, and provider fails to meet that date.
The provider will not have allowed a way for you to just cancel at will. Even if they miss the date; if the delay is due to permitting, government, issues with your site, unexpected construction obstacles, or the weather, for example, the agreements will still bar the customer from cancelling fee-free, and the provider gets to make that decision.....
Katta forgot to use the Comcast unsubscribe hammer.
Today Justin Playfair would battle the cable company rather than the phone company.
Of course, the PHONE COPS are still tracking down Dr. Johnny Fever, because he's a delusional burnt-out ex-hippy.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The CEO runs a connected, Internet-based company and moves his company - his entire workforce - to an office with an unreliable and iffy Internet connection? Is the guy totally out of his mind?
I can saturate my consumer grade 100/33 for 24/7 without problems too, and I pay less than $50 for that. Sure, I suffer from occasional outages (about 1 per month for a few minutes), but that could be fixed by adding some redundancy, such as extra VDSL wire pair, and a cable connection for a total of $150, giving me 300/100 for 99% of the time, and at least 100/33 for 99.99% of the time.
Does that sound like someone read the fine print? A Comcast rep promised me? Seriously?
Though often very hard to prove, verbal contracts have every bit as much legal validity as written ones.
If they promised service within 120 days and failed to do so, they breached their side of the contract, simple as that.
"This call may be recorded for quality assurance."
I'd like to subpoena some quality, please.
If Comcast actually spent money on construction and started the permit process, they were materially invested in upholding their end of the bargain. That makes fraud seem rather unlikely.
It is reasonable to have an option to terminate a contract when delivery is so slow---but slow delivery doesn't constitute fraud unless the contract specified a delivery timeframe and Comcast knew in advance they couldn't fulfill it. Fraud is intentional, so there must be evidence that they knew they couldn't deliver on a contract before they entered it.
Plus, Comcast claimed that their Business Server Order Agreement is not a legally binding contract. If this is true, then they can't be liable for breaching it.
The guy with the best lawyers wins, especially if he plans ahead.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
First, the person I responded to did not specify that they were getting a point of presence for the prices quoted, just upload/download speeds.
Second, I suspect you don't really know what a Point of Presence is if you think that commercial grade internet service piped into your home or business equates to having a PoP. Unlike you, I don't have to guess that you don't know much about business and commercial grade connections because you've proven it.
Third, getting back to upload/download speeds (which is what I was responding to):
http://www.verizon.com/smallbu...
500 mb/s up and down, $360/month.
Fourth, don't even start whining about how FIOS isn't available to you. You want to know what's available in your area, do your own search. It's not my fault that you were too lazy to look for a better provider and wound up paying out the ass for sub-par service like the person I responded to.
He should have had AT&T sales reps in the conference room with him, working out a deal for "commercial" service, not their DSL crap. Sure, it would have cost more, but the speed and binding agreements for performance and up-time are on paper, signed by both parties. And AT&T has done duties to bury fiber for more than a few clients wanting the service and willing to pay the coin for it.
Smartcar tried to go cheap and got bitten on the a$$ for it.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Sorry, I have to reject this. If the rep promised something, the judge should hold the company to account regardless of the wording of the contract. This is a scam operation.
A couple of incidents, and lying companies will clean up their acts. The only real issue would be proving what the rep said.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
These days few of us need a PoP. We just pay for rack space and that is all part of the deal. And to be honest you can get quite good rates. Even better it can be where your customers are and even in a different country. My office need nothing much better than domestic internet with a up time guarantee.
And back on topic there is no indication that this was a PoP setup in the first place.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
As long as they accept that my offer to pay for the service may not be accurate.
If, as Comcast claimed, they were still doing permitting, they weren't digging anything and hadn't committed any equipment to the process at all.
Should have done more due diligence when they chose their office building. I have Cox service here at home and it's 100 megabit and 20 mega bit upstream. I'm happy as a clam with it. The phone company, frontier (used to be AT&T) advertises that they have "high speed internet available." I look into it and it's only 3 megabit. The long short is the phone company does not want to spend money for a local click on my street. If this guy was the only customer then it looks like Comcast does not want to spend the investment when they might never break even. What needs to happen is you need to go to your town council and to your state dept. Utility control commission and let them know that you as a consumer are being left behind because these companies that provide utilities are refusing to bring good and appropriate service to your business or household. The town and state are the ones that can hold their feet to the fire on this.
Paul E. Bahre
Is that like the typical American service center with the bare poorly painted echoey walls, the cold atmosphere , the long lineups and dirty coffee machines with stale donuts and a "cafe" around the corner that sells "fish and chips" withf fried department store type frozen fish sticks and a *bag* of salt and vinegar chips! ?
Is that like the typical American service center with the bare poorly painted echoey walls, the cold atmosphere , the long lineups and dirty coffee machines with stale donuts and a "cafe" around the corner that sells "fish and chips" withf fried department store type frozen fish sticks and a *bag* of salt and vinegar chips! ?
You know.. like a greyhound bus terminal ...
1. Get contract.
2. Drill hole in customer wall.
3. Collect $60,000.00
Did you drop a zero? I haven't read the article, but $190/mo for 100/20 is super-cheap and not at all what I would expect for a commercial service. 'Round these parts, that kind of service would run you over $2,000/mo.
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