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Charter Fights FCC's Attempt To Uncover 'Hidden' Cable Modem Fees (arstechnica.com)
Charter is trying to convince the Federal Communications Commission to backtrack on a plan that would force cable providers to charge a separate fee for cable modems, an anonymous writes, citing an ArsTechnica report. From the article: Charter is unusual compared to other cable companies in that it doesn't tack on a cable modem rental fee when offering Internet service. But FCC officials don't think that's good for consumers, because the price of Charter Internet service is the same whether a customer uses a Charter modem or buys their own. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's latest proposal for new cable box rules would require companies to list fees for equipment used to access video. The FCC is clearly hoping that Charter will create a separate fee for cable modems and lower the base price of Internet service by a corresponding amount, thus letting customers save money in the long run by purchasing their own modems. (Separately from modems, Charter already charges monthly fees for the use of its TV set-top boxes.) "As part of the proposal, all pay-TV providers are required to be fully transparent about the cost consumers pay for leased equipment used to access video programming," an FCC spokesperson told Ars. "The goal is to uncover hidden fees and give consumers the ability to make informed choices. If a consumer chooses to purchase their own equipment at retail, our rules would require they no long have to pay for the built-in cost on their bill. We look forward to input from the Commissioners on this aspect of the proposal."
She'll make this problem go away
Charter customers pay for the modem, Charter is not in the charity business. Charter doesn't put the modem fee on a the bill as a separate line item because then Charter's customers will want to avoid the fee by owning their modem instead of leasing it.
If I were Charter, I would embrace this. I would make the base internet price the current price, then tack on $10/month to renters of cable modems. I would include a letter in the bill that says, "The FCC has mandated that we start charging for the rental of your cable modem...yada yada, it's the government's fault your rate just went up."
They'll make a killing and not really lose many customers. The FCC is creating a golden opportunity for them.
Business Class With Static IP Force you to rent. The FCC needs to stop that and let you buy the same one that used at home that you can buy.
Let's force Charter to charge $0.01 for cable modem rentals. That will solve everything.
problem solved - no fucking boxes.
Make cable user friendly again.
I don't have cable anymore and haven't for had it for over 12 years, and yes, boxes have a little to do with it.
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Free.fr, a french ISP notorious for bringing low cost internet doesn't charge a rental fee for its "boxes" and using any other hardware is not supported.
In a lawsuit related to the non-disclosure of some open source components, they argued that the freebox (that's the name of the modem) is part of their network and that the customer has nothing to do with it. IIRC, they lost, but I can see Charter pulling the same argument.
I don't want Hillary anywhere near my scrote, but charter can lick my pubes!
Charter won't let you use your own modem in my area.
With Comcast you can buy an approved DOCSIS 3.x modem for ~$70. In 10 months it pays for itself.
I'm surprised Charter gets away with over-charging the customer. Oh wait, this is the cable industry -- everything they do is over-charging the customer. :-/
I work for a very small ISP, and personally, I'd side with Charter on this one. We provide a modem to customers as part of the basic service and guarantee internet will work with the provider modem. If our modem goes bad, we supply a replacement no questions asked. Customers who are technically adept may use their own equipment, but we won't support it beyond providing normal configuration settings. If any Tom, Dick, or Harry can use whatever they want, then the ISP is on the hook for supporting possibly damaged or outdated equipment. I can't think of another industry that makes the original provider responsible for customer modifications.
My monthly bill from charter has a $9 fee for "Modem lease".
Done. This accurately itemizes what Charter is currently charging, since they charge the same amount with or without the cable modem. I appreciate people whining about government mandating this or that, but sometimes when you take it to an extreme, it makes you look like an idiot.
What's the advantage of this policy? It looks like a fixed fee without charging separate rental fees would encourage all customers to rent, else they're paying for someone else's modem. That the modem rental cost to you is essentially a $2 fraction of your bill instead of a $10 line-item only occurs because 80% of users are paying that $2 but not renting a modem; so why wouldn't you? On the other hand, if the modem rental is a separate fee, everyone gets to avoid it by buying an $80 modem... except poor people, who can't take the outlay, and have to pay the extra $10/month. The good news is those poor people would probably pay that $10/month anyway, since everyone would take advantage of modem rental, so there's no difference at the bottom end.
In other words: this proposed FCC policy does no harm to the poorest, but helps the less-poor. Okay, I'll buy it.
We've been universally bad at good consumer policy, in general, which is easily pointed out by Federal cell phone fees.
The Utility Users Tax for Wireless ($4 per serviced device) costs America over 90,000 jobs. When you factor in the Federal USF Cellular fee, it's almost 113,000 jobs.
These regressive taxes most strongly target the poor and middle-class, as they represent a larger percentage of income for users with lower incomes. An average 2.4-person household with one cellular device per person currently pays $115.20/year; for households with more persons, it's higher, and a two-adult, three-child household with five phones would pay $240/year.
A 0.01638% increase in all Income taxes would draw the same Federal revenue. A median-income household would pay $8.84/year; a minimum-wage household would pay $2.38/year; and a top-1% household would pay $278.46/year.
In terms of income tax, the average 2.4-person household as reflected above, paying $115.20/year, would pay a higher percentage the less income they have. The median-income household currently pays 0.213% of their income in these cell phone taxes; the minimum-wage household pays 0.794%; and the top-1% pays 0.000678%.
So there you have it: Federal wireless fees are equivalent to a higher income tax the lower your income actually is. I'm not saying the FCC's policy here with cable modems is bad, but we should be concerned whenever they start tinkering with fees because this shit happens.
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I rented a cable modem for one month until my own arrived. Comcast provides a long list of modems that work with their system. Registering the new modem was a piece of cake. There was no pressure to keep renting when I returned the original modem. The new modem was paid for in less than a year of not renting.
Back in the day att used to give you the modem as in you own it. Later it was like you pay $99 for it and get an $99 rebate.
Now it's you must rent it or you rent it but the fee is hidden.
I gladly, and knowingly pay the $10 a month rental. I have a closet full of old hardware (anyone want a V.Everything modem?). And if there is a problem they can get into it remotely. A new cable modem with 16x4 and GigE will run about $180 for a new modem with router. That means I will spend about $60 more on my 2 year contract. And when I get done I will not have yet another piece of hardware to put in the closet.
I can only say that among my circle of friends and family that just about all of us have about reached the end of what we're going to pay for TV and internet and I think there's a pretty good chance that $10 extra would be the straw that breaks the camel's back and makes people drop cable TV altogether. Cable TV subscribers are going down every year due to cost. Even Disney had to do something in some negotiations in the past year that most stock market analysts didn't think they would ever do. They were able to keep their channels like ESPN on basic cable packages but they had to agree to lower numbers of subscribers to do it, which does reduce their revenue.
I'm with Charter on this. There's a cost associated with customers that use random equipment instead of your preferred equipment and there's a cost associated with having to plan around customer-owned equipment when making changes to your sytem. It's unlikely this cost is meaningfully less than what charter pays for the equipment it provides customers.
I 100% support requiring charter to allow customers to use their own equipment but if they're already doing that then the FCC should back off.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
approx $8 "network maintenance fee" or something like that. Unavoidable fee. Yet they advertise internet only plans starting at $15, which is obviously a BS price if it actually costs about $8 more before taxes. FTC should bust em.
...they USED to let you buy your own modem to avoid the rental fees. DOCSIS 3.0? Good to go.
A couple years back they notified everyone they'd be forced to use a provided modem, but there would be no addtional fees.
I moved out of that area shortly before the switchover, so I've no idea on the actual price change if any that occured, but previously they did allow you to use your own hardware entirely so it's not even a matter of avoiding fees: You're forced to use whatever piece-of-shit modem they provide.
And while 'Just use ours, we'll replace it any time, no questions asked!' works for smaller places, unfortunately as the overall size of the business grows so does the 'Heisenbug' modems that may pass internal testing but fail in field conditions for any number of random reasons, since you can't exactly throw out a modem that's only been used briefly and passes all the tests you have to see what's broken.
- WolfWings, too lazy to login, blah-blah-blah, etc.
Cry us a river.
Do you know how many different modems an ISP had to support back in the 90s?
There were literally hundreds of different modems with dramatically different characteristics and features. Somehow they were able to keep going (at least until the incumbent phone/cable/aol companies bought/drove them all out of business.)
Given how little those ISPs were charging with far more in monthly equipment and service costs, huge companies like these have no excuse for supporting the comparatively small number of protocol standards and equipment that cable, dsl, or fiber equipment provides today. There are literally an order of magnitude less device models available today compared to then and expending the finances necessary to test and support them is trivial in comparison (especially when you consider what should be a much lower variation in line noise, given that these companies own the line from their distribution centers to the end user, whereas modem ISPs had to guess as to the line quality issues between them and a particular client, especially if crossing local phone providers networks, or substations.)
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'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman