Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/03/we-dont-have-to-care-2.html
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Cable companies, and to a large extent ISPs have monopolies in local areas. I’ve worked with ISPs and actually had an ISP employee friend brag to me that he would make up a bogus fee every so often to bilk an extra dollar a month from the subscribers. With millions of subs, that money adds up. Not sure if it was to limit liability or what, but they’d switch out the imaginary fees every year or so.
Either their infrastructure needs to be opened up to competition, seized by the state or regulated. #1 is probably best, but complicated. #2 won’t fly and is probably worse. #3 is what we’re left with but crony Ajit Pai and the corrupt Republicans don’t care about consumers (read Americans).
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What’s the name of this Rich Son of Texas?
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Verizon gave us the router for free. And then every 3 years they replace it at no extra cost.
Now, I can argue that hidden somewhere in the monthly bill is certainly the cost of that thing, and I can also argue that better models are available on the market. But we’ve rarely had cause for complaint.
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I have Verizon and I don’t even use their crappy router. It’s nothing special, just a cheap router and a MOCA bridge bolted together. It doesn’t have any special sauce of note.
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I was using my own router with RCN, and they were perfectly happy with that, but now I’m renting an Eero system from them that they’ll upgrade as new versions come out. Given the cost of a new Eero setup, it’s a good deal for a mesh network.
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That may make it worth it.
Comcast had upped their fee to $8/month when I finally bought my own modem. When I could buy a new modem every year and still pay less money than the rental fee that was it. It has lasted 5 years now with no issues.
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but but…it’s a QUANTUM gateway!!!
Agreed, there is absolutely nothing special about it, but then again…it works fine. We all game in my house, 2 macs, 1 pc, 2 xbox, plus everyone is on the wifi with phones. Rarely if ever is there a slow down or issue. So…my attitude is “It was free and it works. Good enough for me.”
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If you drop us, we’ll charge you a termination fee. Even if it’s because you died, we’ll still charge you a termination fee. If you always pay your bill on time, we’ll charge you a fee to make up for the late fees we’re losing out on. However, if you vote Republican (and we have ways of knowing), we’ll drop the fees. Also, if you’re wealthy (and, again, we know) we’ll drop all fees and give you tons of free stuff instead. Because, hey, that’s just the way things work in the 21st century.
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This is like my phone company 20 years ago (last time I had a landline). They charged a fee to have long distance. They would charge a different fee if you DIDN’T have long distance.
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For me I want to be able to inspect traffic on a per-device level to figure out which devices are calling back to the mothership and get an idea of what they’re doing. The Craptontec had nothing that would let me do that. Not even a primitive netflow service.
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Whether its phones, cable, water or electricity or sewer, it always blows me away that there is a service charge for starting service. Like, your entire business model is to have customers, who by nature have to start service somtime How is that not just baked into the cost of doing business monthly fee?
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The MOCA bridge is actually the special sauce and why I use the verizon router. But, I’m probably an edge case where I want the MOCA network.
Do the Verizon cable boxes need the MOCA support too? I thought that was how they worked. I don’t have a cable box to know.
In the old days, that support let you put the router wherever you had a coax jack, connecting to the ONT that way. But, these days with the faster speeds, you need the ethernet connection to the ONT anyway.
You can buy off the shelf MOCA bridges if you really want that PPV content. I thought Verizon’s PPV offering were badly overpriced so it was never a concern for me. The guide data still works. I ditched Verizon’s TV service several years ago but I doubt much has changed in the meantime.
I use it for a TiVo and TiVo mini where I have coax handy but not ethernet. That’s why I wasn’t sure if the boxes needed it or not, like a DVR type box from them. With the TiVo, all I have is one cablecard and no boxes at all.
I could have done the MOCA independent from the router, but by the time I put all the parts together, it wasn’t any cheaper or easier to manage then their router.
Don’t know what area you’re in, but every place I’ve lived, the cable monopolies required folks pay rental fees (clearly labeled as such on the bill) for the routers they provide. When it hit $10 a month, I bought my own router. So that’s a sweet deal for you, and certainly I can understand why you’re fine with that.
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Are you running coax to multiple rooms and riding off that as your internal network?
To be clear (as far as I recall): all cable boxes that connect ethernet devices in your home to an external coax network have a MoCA bridge. It’s required for interconnecting the two types of hardware. But you can always establish a MoCA network in a house over coax run to each room. Super fast for folks who want to bother with that or need the internal speed, but wifi generally works well enough these days.
in New England. Maybe its because we hopped on FIOS when it first came around? Maybe it’s just been the standard? but yeah, no rental fees for the router or modem and they’ve come and upgraded them every 3 years or so.
The cable box and remote however are a different story. We pay the monthly rental for the box and the remote you buy for $10 (the tech gave us 4 remotes as spares actually for free). We only have one TV on cable itself…so there is the $10 or so a month for the DVR thing. But the internet stuff downstairs…nope. free to us.
MOCA bridges seem a bit extravagant for a TiVo. I’d just connect it to the Wifi if it’s not convenient to run an Ethernet cable. I only say that because the bridges tend to cost around $70 and I think TiVos come with built-in Wifi these days.
Existing coax already installed in the house. (We moved recently, but did this in both the old and new houses.)
Using it specifically for the TiVo. They all have a MOCA adapters built in.
I have looked at adding a dedicated MOCA to ethernet adapter, just to get a hardwire to one remote room, but WiFi has been working OK for the computer up there so far.
Back in MA, instead of upgrading our router, they told us it was old with the option to buy one or pay a $5 monthly fee to support the old free router. Because we were moving soon, I just paid the fee. In the new house in MD, there wasn’t an option, you had to buy the router. The MD speed is way faster though.
They messed up our install too, and ended up giving us a credit larger than the router price to make up for it.
The bridge is built into the TiVo, and the mini (at least my older one) doesn’t have WiFi. The main unit will create the MOCA network if one isn’t present and bridge to the ethernet assuming it’s hooked to both. The only thing I bought was the router, then just plugged in everything.
If there was a TV near an ethernet location, the router wouldn’t matter and the TiVos would do the MOCA on their own. But, since there isn’t, I don’t have any of them near ethernet drops.
I did run one ethernet drop in the new house, to change where the ethernet drop from the ONT was vs where I wanted the router, and my main office location. It was a straight shot and easy enough. But, adding ethernet to all the locations that already have coax would be a huge pain for no gain.
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