Comcast blasted for seeking “loopholes” in rule requiring disclosure of all fees.
If your billing is too complicated to be accurately described to your customers, then you may have put yourself in a situation where you are incapable of being honest with your customers. That’s on you.
It’s the job of regulators to ensure that you are honest with your customers; therefore, they can reasonably forbid you from having billing so complicated that it cannot be described accurately.
It’s funny, my local ISP tells me I owe X dollars a month and that’s what I pay. How on earth do they do that? Comcast is telling us it can’t possibly be that simple
The airlines managed to figure it out, weirdly enough. Calculating the price of an airline seat is Turing-complete, and at least one airline software service, ITA, needed the runtime compilation feature of Common Lisp to do it efficiently. Yes, when a user asked for a ticket price, their systems wrote and compiled a piece of code to determine the answer.
Oml thats actually insane and incredible. My goodness wow
Many companies, specially telcos, have a complex scheme of paid plans to confuse the users so that they become fed up and say “ok, so how much do I have to pay”. This is their exact objective.
My local ISP (not a part of some huge elite ISP) is similar to yours. Pay X and you get unlimited internet for a month at Y Mbps uplink/downlink. Somehow it’s too complex for Comcast.
Heck, my ISP, which is a huge elite ISP, has a simple number too. You know why? There is competition in this market. I pay $80 a month for 1000/1000 fiber. That includes free HBO Max. Not as good as Sonic, but it’s a simple number.
mine even manages to do it for the price they advertise. and without a data cap. and without having to have a comcrap router in order to pay more to not have a data cap. i had my own router i didnt want to use theirs mine was better. but the only way i could find to pay to not deal with the cap was to have their router. fuck that.
Yeah, but are they making their faceless shareholders insane profits? I say this as a joke, but I do feel like that’s a large reason why Comcast and the like are so terrible to their customers.
I’d love to have a local option. We get spectrum or wind stream, which means spectrum. They charge whatever they want because they have a pseudo monopoly.
“We don’t know what they are until we charge you.”
Boohoo Comcast. Hopefully the FCC tells them to get wrecked.
If the FCC is anything like the SEC/DOJ I wouldn’t hold my breath. All of these regulatory agencies are regulatory captured via the revolving door.
Comcast: “But I am le tired.”
(This reference goes back a few years, kids!)Then have a nap… AND THEN POST ZE FEES!
F$cking Kangaroos!! …can we curse on here??
This is the internet, you can say whatever the fuck you want.
Fuck yeah!
Oh god now I feel both nostalgic and old at the same time. “Australia’s like wtf mate” 😂
I thought the end of the world and “I JUST WANT BANG BANG BANG” was the funniest shit ever back then.
Blast from the past woooow
Man do I ever get sick of corpo bullshit
Too hard to disclose fees but easy to charge them huh
Can’t wait to try this during tax season next year
lol, my thoughts exactly
It’s a simple solution, Comcast. Don’t charge any fee you aren’t willing to spend the effort to disclose.
That’s some straight up gaslighting shit. If they can figure out to charge it, they can print it on a bill.
Typical corporate lawyer speak.
FCC stahp, I can only get so hard.
They need to do a reset of their pricing them. Figure it out again from the ground up.
I pay exactly what my isp advertises never a cent more.
I live in a third world country.
So do they
If it is too hard/difficult for a company to itemize all their fees, they are charging way too many fees.
I’m so glad I don’t have to use Comcast any more. A small local ISP (Sonic) expanded to cover my area last year and offers 10Gbps symmetric fiber for $40/month - half the price I was paying Comcast for 1.2Gbps down / 35Mbps up.
I’m super jealous. At least I’m moving to a new apartment with fiber from CenturyLink at it, but even they are running $70/mo for gigabit. I’m living the T-Mobile 5G home internet life right now because CL only has DSL at my current place, and fuck Comcast in general.
Even worse is, the new place has honest-to-God fiber from Comcast to the unit–sadly paired with an RFoG converter, so despite it being more than capable of symmetrical gigabit, they still only offer 35Mbps up there. Leave it to Comcast to make FTTP suck.
Leave it to Comcast to make FTTP suck.
Wow, that’s bad. I didn’t know they did that.
Comcast have a legit fiber network where I live (San Francisco Bay Area). It’s not even GPON or XGS-PON or anything like that where multiple houses share bandwidth; with Comcast’s version you get a dedicated fiber run from your house all the way to the headend, no multiplexing.
You do pay a premium for it though. It was originally 2Gbps symmetric for $300/month, now it’s 6Gbps for the same price (with 10Gbps coming soon).
Even worse is that RFoG is compatible with the various PON standards (it’s just the entirety of the coax cable plant, just mirrored over light), so there’s zero reason why FTTP locations can’t have standard fiber configurations and it be shared with the copper plant backbone that was the original reason for RFoG.
Comcast (and the rest of their cableco pals at Charter, Cox, et al, with the exception of Altice) are bascially addicted to copper. My parents had a new house built last year in a greenfield community, and, you guessed it, Comcast ran coax to the houses instead of FTTP like CenturyLink did. I do not understand why brand new copper plant is being buried and installed in 2023, it’s obscene.
Jeez, and I thought I was getting a good deal with Ziply Fiber. 30/30 for $50/month. Jealous!
They’re also pro net neutrality, anti-throttling and anti-blocking (https://www.sonic.com/transparency). A perfect ISP :)
They will just have to create a fee to “cover the costs” of having to tell you what they are going to charge you.
Funny, it was never too hard when they billed me.
I think that’s the point?
Nonono it’s simple when we bill you, just too hard to list it upfront.
