What can I do about Comcast?

Hardware Hub Networking
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I read an Ars Technica article about Comcast charging new customers a “setup” fee for customers who did self-installs or customers who reactivated their account that already had comcast. Here is the link to the article: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/comcast-charges-90-install-fee-at-homes-that-already-have-comcast-installed/

So, of course, this caused me to check my Comcast account, and I had noticed they were charging me $80 a month for 250 down/10 up. I was FURIOUS! They had been doing this to me for 2 months now, so I called them up, spent 20 minutes on the phone with them explaining that $80 is a lot of money for garbage internet speeds, and that for that price, I could just buy an unlimited data plan from AT&T for my entire family, and just use wireless tether, and get pretty much the same garbage upload speeds I’m getting from Comcast through my phone. They “apologized”, and offered to lower my bill to $50 a month, but only for a year as a “promotion”, and that I told them this would be a band-aid because I’m not going to pay full price, at the end of the promotion I’m probably just going to get AT&T then, you’re just delaying the inevitable.

After this, I fired off an angry tweet, expected nothing of it, and Comcast actually replied with their Comcast cares account. Here is the tweet: https://twitter.com/gir489/status/998975924669440001

After the conversation with probably a robot, what ended up happening is that they could basically give me “gigabit” internet, for 985 down, and 35 up. Which is still COMPLETE garbage. Here is a link to my tweet about it, and a screenshot of me ranting to them, that they completly ignored: https://twitter.com/gir489/status/999343648729911296

They basically said Comcast doesn’t offer more upload because “Download speeds are generally considered more important than upload speeds because the downstream signal path is and will be heavily used by web browsing.” I don’t know how the downstream affects the QPSK upstream, but sure whatever.

What can I do about this? Is my only options really just 56K, DSL from AT&T, 4G (potentially 5G at the end of the year?) cellphone internet, or Comcast?

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Your options are BBB, Attorney General, FCC, FTC, small claims

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Small claims, as in suing Comcast?

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4

You forgot the best. Start your own ISP and force yourself into all the areas with only one to create competition

But on a serious note, moving geographically or what net and yourself said is basically all you can do

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I’d spend $80 per month on 250/10 in a heartbeat.

You can call and complain or switch providers. But just as a reminder internet speeds aren’t a right, so you’ll be at their mercy regardless of company.

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This has always pissed me off too. Unfortunately, it’s either Comcast or AT&T where I live, and they both basically offer the same services. We stick with Comcast because we had AT&T before and we were only getting about 1/4 of the advertised download speeds and after sending people out a few times to “fix” it, they basically told us that was within the acceptable threshold and there was nothing they could do about it. With Comcast we consistently get near advertised speeds, sometimes more. But upload speeds are still retarded (literally). Apparently they don’t realize that some people like to upload to YouTube, cloud services, etc. When I was testing out different cloud storage options I had to basically do it all at work because it would have taken weeks to back it up at home.

Basically this, as far as I know. As annoying as it is, there’s not really anything we can do about it besides move somewhere where there are decent options.

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This is exactly what stirred the pot this time, because I just signed up for OneDrive, and I’m trying to shove almost a TB of data down its throat, and at the current rate of 10Mbps, it will take almost a week.

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ikr… $65 a month for like 25 down at peak… And I’d rather not talk about my up speeds…

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How about $60 for 5 down / .75 up? In an area with essentially one option, so no incentive to improve. And 30 miles from a major metropolitan area.

I’d pay $80 for 250/10 in a heartbeat.

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I am a rare US citizen with two reasonable ISP choices. Since there’s competition in my area, I’m sitting pretty.

Spectrum advertises $60/month (plus fees, without a doubt) for 940 down / 35 up, and Verizon FIOS charges me exactly $72.48/month for 940 down / 880 up. Very happy with my FIOS.

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I used to have FiOS when I lived in Maryland, and I was extreemly happy with it. However, when they were building the apartments in 2016 that I live in now, Verizon was on strike, and they were forced to use Comcast to lay the fiber.

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It doesn’t really matter which ISPs you can choose between as long as the number is >1. Verizon is every bit as evil as Comcast and Spectrum. Competition leads to dramatically better, cheaper, service.

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Um, what? Unless you are running download servers I dont see why you are so wound up about that.

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The upload is garbage. I’m used to 250 down/250 up.

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It is expected, that those who need more upload speed are businesses.

Average consumers get the shaft because Comcast model does not account for us users with large amounts of data.

Frustration: There’s never a Power User Tier. Just average joe who downloads/streams a lot, and business which will rape your wallet.

Where I live its either Northland or AT&T.

Northlad: I pay $105/month for 100/10 circuit.
AT&T: ~$60 for 25/2.

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Christ, I’d give my left nut to have these speeds.

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Speedtest.net gives me a chubby every time.

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Like @Dynamic_Gravity stated, you need to upgrade to business due. Where ever you were before was create but welcome to the rest of the USA.

Currently I have DSL with 6Mbit down and .75Mbit up. I have Comcast, Wave, and Frontier in my area.

I chose Frontier because Comcast is evil here and my service always sucked. Especially on the weekends when every one is streaming, gaming and downloading. the would throttle my streaming services to the point where they would not work. Whe YT or Hulu or Netflix state that you connection is too slow to use the services for SD content when you have 35Mbit up and 15Mbit down, seriously? Then they made me get a cable box and basic cable to keep my Internet rate low. I was paying 85US for that. After cable Box, I was paying 100USD. IF I had not done that, I would have had to pay 125USD for internet. Total shake down. Oh if you use our YT app on Xfinity or use our on demand services, we can deliver better quality. They admitted to not adhering to net neutrality back in 2012 before it blew up into the thing it is now.

Wave has insanely low data caps. When you pay for more bandwidth and then pay the fees to increase data caps, they are move expensive than Comcast. I only pay 40USD but I would happily pay your prices for your speeds as long as I did not have to pay extra for data caps and deal with selective throttling.

We are also in a unique situation where we have Whidbey Telcom on the south end of the island that offers 1Gbit for 80-105USD per month but they cannot offer it in our area because Comcast has the monopoly and we have “competition”. WT only services part of our island, Camano Island, and Point Roberts (The USA side). They were here before the other providers moved in. Comcast and CentruryLink has some really horrible monopolies in Washington State.

**I’ll just stop here. I am ranting now.

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You guys are right, I think I took Comcast for granted, considering up until a few days ago, their service had been near perfect. After calling, I’ve started to get intermittent issues with the modem cutting out, but I brought it up with the Comcast agent, and they said they’re aware of it. I forgot that 8 million Americans still use dial-up, mostly because that’s all they have in the area. I’d know, because I work for GlobalPops, one of two remaining dial-up aggrigators in the US. All that aside, I think Comcast is more than fair in charging $80 for 250/10. They’ve been more than fair reducing the price to $50, and I think at the end of the promotion, if FiOS still isn’t the area (i’m not holding my breath) and I’m still in Pittsburgh, I’ll probably just let it roll back in to $80 a month and pay it.

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Nah, don’t settle and don’t rollover. It looks like you got a better perspective of your position and how fortunate you are to get decent service, but that doesn’t mean you should accept the will of your ISP overlords. Perhaps you don’t need to quite raise the hell you did this time around. Once your promotion comes to a close, shop around again, weigh your options, call and negotiate with Comcast and see if you can’t hop on another promotion. It is a pain in the butt, but a 10 minute conversation to save even $10 a month may just be worth it.

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