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Comment by cududa | Hacker News Reader

Earlier this year I purchased my own router and modem and when I called Spectrun to cancel my rental, I was informed I needed to sign up for a new package - the price of which was about $2 more than I was previously paying WITH rented equipment

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That's amazingly customer hostile. In this area with Spectrum you can self-service swap out your cable modem as often as you want by logging into a support portal and entering the MAC address of the new modem and waiting a minute for their system to provision it. No CSR interaction required.

Lucky man. I was doing this during the start of lockdown (when spectrun was having an outbreak at their CS office). So calling to get the modem provisioned took about an hour and a half. The initial provision file was wrong so had to go through waiting on hold again

comcast did the exact thing to me. I had to sign up for a new plan. But they also wouldn't let me use the new plan promos. Oh, and a month later when I got my first bill at the new rate it still had rental fees. Took about 8 months of calling each month to have the rental fee go away. And then when I finally cancelled because I was moving they charged me for not returning the modem/router I returned over a year ago. Fun times.

Comcast has done this to me TWICE!

Have either of you filed FTC and/or FCC claims? The more data we give those agencies, the better chance we have that someone will actually care and finally break them up.

Can't speak to Spectrum specifically but in a past life I did customer service with a cellular company. Their billing system was set up so that you couldn't update the features on an account (a feature being a data plan or texting plan, for example) unless _all_ of the features on the account were current.

It was a pretty blatant move to push customers off of grandfathered plans. For example this was about 10 years ago when iPhones were becoming popular, and at the time at least there were iPhone specific features for data plan and visual voicemail. So someone upgrading to an iPhone would be forced to give up any grandfathered plans on their account.

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