…and if you wanted to let the FCC know what these guys are doing to YOUR account:
https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=38824
AT&T tried this trick on me, but the odd phrasing of the customer service rep led me to ask more questions. If I hadn’t, I would have ended up with a bill that was $8 more per month when I originally called to remove a service that was costing me $10. When I called her out on it, she said it was a better value because I’d be getting all the Sports channels (which I’d already told her I never watch), 150 additional channels (which I’d never watch), plus HBO and Cinemax (I only watch Game of Thrones on those). This crap will keep happening as long as these companies have so little competition in each market.
I dunno, they kicked it right back to Crapcast to “investigate” the last time I lodged a complaint. Utter BS expecting a shady business to objectively investigate itself.
On a slightly related note…
When is someone going to call out the telecoms over the bullshit data roaming charges? I travel to West Africa regularly and can buy international data for a few cents what the Bell and Telus charge us $100s of dollars for. My guess is that the true cost of providing international data is much closer to the “few cents” than the “hundreds of dollars”. This sort of distortion is surely prima facie evidence of collusion at worst or anti-competitive behaviour at best.
This makes no sense. Comcast is nice. I saw a little video with some cornfields and kids and assembly-line workers…
don’t forget the puppies, kittens and unicorns farting rainbows!
Being in an area with no competition, it makes me so mad to read these stories that my teeth start clenching and I think I’m going to bust a blood vessel. I once had a co-worker hilariously describe this state as having “anger-sharks swimming in my head.”
They’ll charge whatever the market will bear. The system works.
Not quite. There is effectively no efficient market in play due to the entrenched positions and extremely high barriers to entry for true competitors (re-sellers of bandwidth and infrastructure access are not true competitors of the underlying owners). If the market was competitive, the price would be somewhat related to costs as the providers would compete against one another for the business. I know our company is sensitive to these costs (we do a lot of international travel) and would choose a service provider that offered a better deal. But neither do. They are both identical and outrageously expensive, with their (anti-trust appeasing?) alternatives like buying “roaming packages” similarly outrageous in price, and confusing to boot. There is no way that they are effectively competing against each other. They appear to have a tacit understanding that they will use their entrenched position to maintain artificially high prices by not undercutting each other.
My ISP has overcharged me twice so far (only by about $2, though, so not bad). Each time I’ve called in and it was fixed pretty quickly. Last month I called up and asked if I could take advantage of their new customer pricing plan and went through the whole “well, I can just cancel and sign back up to become a new customer” and they gave in. On this month’s bill, the charge was $12 for 30mbps / 5mbps vs the $30 I was expecting. At this point, I think my ISP is just incompetent.
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