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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.
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?
Don't sign anything unless you have had a lawyer checking it for you.
So, not only do you have to pay top prices for internet, you also need to hire an expensive lawyer to check it. That's just insane. And what are you going to do when the lawyer finds something you don't like ? Ask Comcast nicely to change it ?
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 fires any staff member, they should pay them
$60k for premature termination of service.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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.