Comcast won’t give new speed boost to Internet users who don’t buy TV service

> TV+Internet is cheaper than Internet alone

Not true. Check your bill. TV+Internet might be cheaper when only counting the base rate of TV, but when you get TV you also get tons of fees piled on. FCC fees, Local Cable Access fees, Franchise fees, Cable Box fees, Taxes, etc. It will be different depending on where you live, but when I added up all the fees it added almost $15 extra per month just for basic cable.

It's still cheaper to just pay extra for internet without cable TV and get an OTA antenna.

Same for me. When I said I don't need the TV box, can you just not ship it to me, they were really confused. Said its automated so they can't not ship it.

Its now in my closet still in the box.

I started this way, but I've actually upgraded the line to HD. And I got HBO for an extra $1 a month. I rarely use the actual cable box, but watch everything on the Xfinity TV website.

It doesn't cost much more than subscribing to an online TV service and has a pretty good selection at the basic channel tier.

Just to warn people who might have a different situation, sometimes cable companies say something along the lines of "$19.99 bundle!" And in the small print it says each, so it's actually $60 for phone, internet, and TV.

Return the box, it's billed sperately

In my area, with Cox, they raise the speeds on the upper tiers, but the prices on everything. 10mbps for $43, 30 for $64, 100 for $85, and 300 for $105.

10 is slow enough that I'd have to watch my downloads if my wife or kid were streaming something, and saves just $21/month from the 30 package. When I started using them about 8 years ago, I was single, and my tier was about 15mbps for about $30. I think the lower tier was about 5 for $20. If there were a viable competitor in the area, I'd switch to them for a couple years, then come back to Cox as a new customer and get the discounted rates. No such luck.

My very first Comcast cablemodem gave 10 mbits/sec due to living in the ghetto (no other data subscribers around) and @Home not having figured out how to set a rate limit in the docsis config. They never changed my service as long as I was on the system. When I moved to another system, a different company was managing their data service and I had a 3 mbits limit.

They increased my speed only once in the last 10 years... but they try to increase the price yearly (I usually cancel my service if they don't agree to keep the price the same, and sign up again at a later time to get the new subscriber discount (could be the same day))

> It's dishonest and sleazy

It's comcast™

> Why don’t cable companies charge by megabyte used, instead of by speed?

Because "speed" sells, and the customers Comcast wants don't use much bandwidth.

The #1 source of revenue for Comcast is the customer who has cable, has high speed Internet, doesn't really use the Internet for much, and just pays their cable bill every month without really thinking about it.

The family with 3 teenagers all watching Fortnite live streams or whatever the kids are doing these days is Comcast's second worst customer, only superseded by the guy streaming those videos.They're taking up a significant chunk of their area's local bandwidth, and that costs real money to upgrade. Comcast has no incentive to allow for this use case unless they can find a price tier that makes you a good customer again (notice that for $50/month, Comcast will remove the bandwidth caps).

It's effectively the same reason that Comcast doesn't let you sign up for individual cable channels.

Customers would hate having to consider how much data they are using.

Bandwidth is not a finite physical resource. The marginal cost to add more capacity is tiny. Their cost to serve is tiny. I HATE data caps.

I've long been a proponent of usage-based pricing because it aligns the incentives of the business with the consumer: They want you to use more data, so they have the best interest to get you as fast of service in as many geographic areas as humanly possible.

But wireline carriers have seen how poorly tiered data was received in the wireless industry by consumers, and I think it'd take an act of Congress to divorce them of being able to use the word "unlimited" in marketing materials, no matter how fraudulent the claim might be.

You're assuming they are trying to make the service the best they can. They've obviously done the math and it's cheaper to charge people a flat fee. They don't really care how good their service is, or how fair it could be, just that they maximize profit.

Well you are missing the angry rant of tech savvy customers about charging per mega/giga bytes. They want flat rate and unlimited data.

Why charge for one when they can charge for both?

(They already do, read your terms of service carefuly)

Before overselling internet access was commonplace, you bought based on guaranteed physical capacity (i.e. bandwith).

Even with overselling, their network is still bound by that capacity. So they charge for both.

> Why don’t cable companies charge by megabyte used, instead of by speed?

Because they can and do charge you for both and laugh all the way to the bank.

Did you do any testing with a VPN?

When I was visiting someone in Atlanta GA, the speeds weren't good for what they advertised, but once I put on a VPN the speeds almost tripled.

They just have internet through Comcast too, so I was wondering if something was up.

Im very surprised this doesn't violate the bundling antitrust laws [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_(antitrust_law)

> It'd just be a matter of time until Netflix, etc. only run well on the upgraded speed

I think you overestimate the bandwidth requirements of Netflix.

I only have a 30 mbps internet connection, and even that's more than enough for Netflix's highest bitrates.

Source: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

> It'd just be a matter of time until Netflix, etc. only run well on the upgraded speed.

I don't think this is true. Netflix and co have an incentive to run well on the lowest common denominator connection.

Sure you might not get 4K, but you can watch pretty much anything in their streaming library uninterrupted on 10Mbps of bandwidth.

Very unlikely that Netflix will have any problems whatsoever at any of the speeds being discussed. Netflix only needs around 10Mbps to run very, very well.

> Sonic, a local ISP, has been blitz building out fiber in the East Bay Area

As a lesson for the world, how does a company like Sonic get the money for that kind of investment?

This is what I'm doing. Sonic's service should be starting to be installed in May in my area. The price for Sonic's gigabit service is going to be the same for me as what I'm paying for Comcast right now. It's great to finally see some competition in this field and have the opportunity to ditch Comcast.

I switched from Comcast (@ 300 Mb/s) to Sonic (@ 30 Mb/s) just to support them. I really wish Sonic well as they seem to be the last honest ISP left.

the gigabit fiber? whats the speed? i entered my neighborhood and it only says up to 30 mbs is available. desperate to ditch comcast.

Unless it's fiber to the home, I doubt there's any difference. I assume they just make up numbers or relax some constraints so you can get "up to" some arbitrary bandwidth, but your latency will still be garbage, you still won't have upload, and you're still sharing the same pipe with your neighborhood.

On Rogers cable in Canada, I noticed the jump from DSL to cable, and from 25 Mbps cable to 150 Mbps, but that was accompanied by a modem change from plain old DOCSIS to DOCSIS 2. I didn’t notice the jump from 150 to 250 as much (at all) but the jump to gigabit was significant in that it increased upload speeds to 50 Mbps. The next jump was from gigabit over coax to gigabit over plastic optic from Bell Canada, with 100 Mbps up — asymmetric still, but it easily handled multiple requests at the same time with very low latencies to Bell-peered servers. I mention that because gigabit symmetric was again a jump I noticed, in that posting photos and videos became instaneous, but Bell not peering with TorIX the way Rogers does means most of my traffic to Toronto routes through New York or Chicago first as both Bell and TorIX have US peering arrangements. So not everything is perfect even with symmetric gigabit finally. I suspect my next speed increase will arrive when a third-party is finally able to use Bell’s fibre optic network at which point they might peer locally. I’ve contemplated running both Bell and Rogers for the pings, but I’d need somebody to give me BGP for the routing which is likely expensive...

I upgraded from 100mb to 1g for 400 person site and no one noticed.

They might notice the corresponding upstream speed increases though.

If you can get it, go with AT&T. It's at least 500mbit up and down for only $80. It rarely ever hits over 800mbit but it's not like you can really know if it's AT&T or the other side (even when doing speedtests).

Comcast fiber isn't so obscure today. My neighbor has 1 gig symmetric, but it's something like $300 a month.

I would keep your symmetrical plan. Comcast upload speeds are anemic. I have their "Gigabit" service and while I do get a solid 900+ down, they cap my upstream at 50.

If Google couldn't make it work, and by consequence made the other ISPs raise their defensive shields, why would Netflix try?

Check your bill, we found a charge on ours for rental on the also unused box. Took it back to the service center, and removed the charge.

Alternatively, they should be acknowledging that they're becoming more of an ISP and less of a TV provider, consumers are less interested in traditional TV service, and that they need to adapt in some way.