Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/24/internet-is-a-human-right.html
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Only $1.50? hell it was up to $6 when I said nope to that and bought my own. $1.50 is well okay but if it breaks they just swap it out with no problems which had happened. But at $6+ forget it. I could buy a new modem every year and still pay less.
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“Comcast, Fox and Frontier…”
ITYM Cox
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I think they meant they’re raising it by $1.50/month, not to $1.50/month. I don’t know what it was before.
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Fair point. Still buy your own as I stated you can buy a new one every year and still pay less.
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Seems likely to me that they count on a lot of people not figuring that out, or on thinking that going to get their own isn’t worth the bother.
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So about like how AOL stayed afloat?
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Just received my surprise 2nd price increase in less than a year … I’m now 20% over what I used to pay for unlimited Internet with Suddenlink.
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Comcast will charge each of its subscribers an extra $1.50/month…
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You have to be crazy to rent a modem from Comcast. For one thing, they use them to create public hotspots, letting random people onto the internet connection that you’re (over)paying for.
A nice one is $50 new. Renting for $10 per month? What a racket.
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When my great aunt died not all that long ago my mother discovered she had been paying to rent her dial phone all along.
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So 2018 will be pretty much the same as the last 10 years. Around then I switched to cable from DSL. The promotional rate was something like 14 a month for 12 months, then it went to regular price, which was $18. Except that before the year was up that got bumped to 22. Then a year later… and another year or two later… you know the drill. This was that “starter” package above, which is now 35?!
End the local monopolies. This is a solved problem. End the local monopolies and soooooo much of this bullshit goes away.
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Time Warner make that tough - at least a couple of times a year I wind up on the phone with several levels of tech support because they’ve deauthorized my modem’s MAC address - and claim it’s the modem’s fault.
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Can I Purchase my own modem for ATT uverse? AT&T equipment is required whether the fee is listed or it’s rolled into your monthly bill. An additional router can be added if needed to get faster speeds or better wifi coverage. But you have to use the equipment provided by AT&T.
Many providers require their equipment and would charge you the fee regardless.
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I have an idea.
Why don’t we just give our entire salaries to the cable companies and ISPs (direct deposit, of course).
Then, let the ISPs decide how much money to give back.
It would save time.
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Comcast has been sending me dire emails warning my docsis 2 modem, whose bitrate is above the 25 mb service level, will cease to function on their system on January 25th. God I hate them. Time for a FIOS teaser plan.
Can someone confirm my suspicion this service is really worth no more than $30? The Duopoly charges whatever they want. Both Comcast & Verizon are swimming in cash looking to buy up shit.
In Lithuania, you can get 1 Gbit/s service (both up and down, unlimited bandwidth) for about 20€ per month. And when an ISP updates its plans, it’s usually just the speed that increases, not the price. It’s a product of late adoption of internet at home (meaning that in many places the first connections were already fiber optic), catering to pirates as the primary customers (hence UL speed generally matching DL, and bandwidth limits being unheard of), and a healthy competition between ISPs.
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Are these price increases related at all to the FCC net neutrality decision? I don’t really see how they’re connected (except, I suppose, that the FCC net neutrality decision may signaled to ISPs that they’re dealing with a friendly regulator).
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exactly. when have these companies not hiked prices annually in the last decade? this is a symptom of them having monopolies or duopolies in most areas, and nothing whatsoever to do with net neutrality. guess he accidentally grabbed the wrong foil hat? 
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