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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
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.
then Charter's customers will want to avoid the fee by owning their modem instead of leasing it.
Some will. Others will be happy to lease, since any connectivity problems are then with company equipment.
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.
Charter doesn't want customer-owned DOCSIS 1 or 2 modems on their network messing things up / slowing things down for other people. I owned my own modem at the time of the switch, and they sent me a new modem without changing my monthly rate. Before that, they only charged a rental fee to modem-renters.
The Cisco modem they sent is not a very good one, however - for a while it required a reboot every few weeks to fix a "lack" of signal. But it still did better than my DOCSIS 2 that I was too cheap to upgrade.
Yeah, but because they don't tell you (as a separate line item), the cost of renting the cable modem, you're unable to determine whether or not it's a good deal.
I mean, okay, my cable modem is from Time Warner. I honestly couldn't tell you how much the rent on it is, because the internet service is bundled into the rent I pay.
But let's say I did have the bill for that. A mid-range cable modem costs, what, $100? $150? (Newegg lists some going up to $200.) Let's go with $150.
If the bill says my monthly cable modem rental is $5 a month, it would take 30 months before I've saved money by buying my own. If it's $10 a month, it would take 15 months before I've started saving money.
There's other factors, like how often do you need to replace a cable modem because of age or damage, or whatnot. If you're renting the cable modem, the company should replace it if it breaks, right? Maybe there's an extra fee involved in that, maybe there isn't. Maybe it depends on how often you need the cable modem replaced. If it's your modem, and it starts going south on you, you have to pay the replacement cost. So, that has to be taken into consideration.
But if you don't know these things, because the ISP is hiding them from you, you can't make an informed decision.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
They said that when they issued them initially in most markets, but I think they've backtracked on that since then.
That's kinda the point of the FCC policy.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
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".
While I was stuck with Comcast for a few years, I decided to buy my own modem and avoid their rental fee, which I think was $6 a month.
It was a great plan until they changed which docsis standard they were using and my modem was rendered useless, and along with it any savings I might have realized over the next few years.
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.
Pure bullshit.
Docsis is backwards compatable. You didn't HAVE TO change anything.
Huh??? DOCSIS requires backwards compatibility, both for the head end and the modems themselves. Any DOCSIS n hardware is compatible with n+k and n-k for all values of k. There's absolutely no reason for your cable company's head end to not negotiate a connection with your existing cable modem. You just won't get the faster speeds provided by the newer standard.
Besides, at $6 a month, it doesn't take years to recover the cost. It takes just a few months. Unless you're doing something special, a cable modem typically costs only forty or fifty bucks. That's only about seven or eight months of service. Unless your cable company requires you to rent one (e.g. Comcast when using multiple static IPs), you're a chump if you rent from the cable company. The break-even point is probably about a dollar a month.
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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.
Charter doesn't want customer-owned DOCSIS 1 or 2 modems on their network messing things up / slowing things down for other people.
Comcast, which allows customer-owned modems, handles this problem quite well with notifications that a customer-owned modem will be obsolete in a year or so, and then has follow-up notices. Additionally, Comcast will start refusing to activate a modem when it has hit EOL. You can find out what modems are EOL here.
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While Comcast is not my favorite company, imo, they handle customer-owned modems well.
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.
What do you mean by random device?
I'm on TWC (for now, at least) and you have to buy a modem off a very specific (and short) list if you are going to connect it to their network and expect them to provision it for you.
And - Comcast has such a list too.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Maybe that's true, the same thing happened to me: alleged backwards compatibility didn't stop Comcast from causing my DOCSIS 2.0 (Linksys BEFC-MU10) modem to stop being able to connect. The DOCSIS 3.0 replacement (Zoom 6341j) I bought worked.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Comcast intentionally configured their network to reject connections from DOCSIS 2.0 modems even if they were supposed to still work, in hopes that some people who owned modems would start renting (or just to punish people for having the audacity not to rent). It's just the kind of thing those criminal, corrupt fuckers would do.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It's entirely possible for that to be a lie anyway.
For example, when I had basic cable TV through Comcast (which I accepted solely because they refused to give me a lower internet-only rate than they would offer for the bundle), I was issued "free" cable box ("free" because it was the first one on the account). I later decided that if I'm forced to buy the service then I might as well use it and had them issue me a CableCard instead. When I got my next bill, I saw a line item subtracting the rental fee for the "free" cable box and another line item adding the rental fee for the CableCard. The CableCard fee was cheaper, so the total net cost actually dropped something like $2.50 below the advertised rate that I had been paying before.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Did you read the same comment that I did, because I didn't see anyone complaining or blaming. Just someone telling a story.
Yes, that's precisely what happened.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Comcast intentionally configured their network to reject connections from DOCSIS 2.0 modems even if they were supposed to still work, in hopes that some people who owned modems would start renting (or just to punish people for having the audacity not to rent). It's just the kind of thing those criminal, corrupt fuckers would do.
They pull the same crap if you try to get a static IP, too. They insist that they can only issue static IPs to modems that they own, even though they are completely capable of managing and pushing configurations to any connected modem (which they regularly do, as you can see in the modem's logs) and you can buy the same model of modem that they rent out.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
The static IP thing has to do with how static IPs are managed. The modem needs to be configured to participate in routing (RIPv2). That configuration includes a shared secret key, that the cable company can't share with customers for security reasons. Keep on hating though.. And to comment on the bring your own modem thing, the cable company must do frequent software upgrades to it's CMTSs just in order to keep up with the ever increasing demand for bandwidth. Those upgrades should be lab tested ahead of time. Having a large population of XYZ brand modems to test against causes that testing process to be much more complicated, or even impossible. This lack of testability, and lack of relationship with the modem vendor (cable company didn't but the piece of shit, you did), often results in the experience of "that damn greedy cable company broke my modem". Keep on hating though. What the cable company doesn't want to happen, is for their software/hardware upgrades to make their phone ring. It costs them plenty to answer the calls - 3 or 4 calls to their call center costs roughly the same as they would pay for a modem.
Yeah, I'm sure it's just people hating on the poor cable companies and nothing that they're doing. Comcast specifically lists which devices they support and to what extent. You can buy the exact same model of modem that Comcast rents for about six months worth of rental fees and you the owner of the modem have the exact same amount of control over secret keys and configuration and whatnot as the rental modems (ie none). They can and do push configuration and firmware updates to your privately owned modem just as they would their own.
But I'm sure it's all just me hating on poor Comcast and none of these actual facts instead. Fucking shill.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
The router portion (second device inside the same box as the modem) is not configured via the TFTP transfer of the DOCSIS config files today. Hoping to see that kind of firmware become available from the vendors some day soon! I do work in the industry, but nobody pays me to share my opinions on slashdot = not a shill.
Your continual use of, "Keep on hating though", to try to dismiss my reasonable complaints as the emotional product of a "hater" is what made you sound like a shill. The fact that you're trying to deflect any responsibility from your industry to the end users as just "hating" is pretty shill-like behavior, you must admit.
From my point of view, I have absolutely no control of my router at all from the configuration pages, but I can see from the logs that stuff is pushed from Comcast. I bought the router from Comcast and it appears identical to the one I was renting before, down to the model number printed on the sticker. They could give me a static IP with the rented modem (remotely, without requiring physical contact with the modem), but not with the modem that they sold me and I need to start paying them $120/year (on top of the static IPs) to have that functionality back. It's a business account and the (surprisingly knowledgeable and helpful) phone techs claim that the policy of requiring a leased modem is an issue of policy and not a technical issue.
But you'll jump in to defend your industry without knowing any of the specifics of this case and call me a hater instead of politely explaining why everything I've observed is not actually true.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Haters comment wasn't directed at the individual poster, but all those piling onto the conspiracy side of things. We are better, in technology and attitude, than any traditional ma-bell telco is my position, and that is it. Now, I hope, we are back to the point that you must have exactly the right hardware, because 3rd party hardware is a nightmare. Buying millions of modems from a certain vendor gives a cable company a certain leverage. This isn't bad for the customer experience, and, in theory, saves some money somewhere. If that savings reaches the customer or the shareholder, is a function of the marketplace. How's that for shill language?
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