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Comment by mtalantikite | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar experience with Spectrum. They offered a faster service at a cheaper price, but said they couldn't upgrade me because I was an old account from the Time Warner merger. It took a while, but I was able to get them to switch me to the faster, cheaper service. Then after a year my price went way up again, and since I have no other options at my home in Brooklyn I'm stuck paying $80/month for 200 Mbps.

All these mergers have been awful for consumers in the telecom space. My relatives in Europe are always shocked at how expensive service is for such mediocre setups.

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Quick story.

Got new internet service at the office a few years back, and got a bundled 'phone number'. One of the guys at the office (coworking space) needed heavy fax so... we got him the line and a fax machine. 18 months later, he left, and... owed me money. I tried to cancel the phone line part, but was told it was "bundled", and the 'internet only' service was now $10 more than the old bundle service.

I called every 4-6 months to ask for the service to be removed and to get lower pricing. Nope. Nope. Nope.

A few months ago I called and explained the situation to the woman. I then said "fine - give me the higher price. I just don't care any more. Joe still owes me $500, and every time I see that stupid phone line on the bill, I think of Joe and I can't deal with that any more. Charge me more money so I don't have to think about Joe any more."

She laughed. A bit. Well... chuckled any way. "hang on, let me look up some stuff..." Silence. "Are you there?" I asked. "Yes, just give me a moment". More silence. I waited. And... started to play guitar. Just strummed a few chords.

She laughed again. "What's that?"

"I'm playing my own hold music, since you don't have any on your end".

I got a strong chuckle out of that.

"Any requests? Any favorite chords?"

"B".

So I played a B chord.

Then waited a bit longer.

"OK, I can get you back on the previous bundled price, but without the phone line any longer. Will there be anything else?"

SUCCESS! It just took 15 months of calling and a B chord.

I also have a spectrum landline I can't stop paying for because it would cost me $15 more a month to have less service, somehow.

It’s so they can report you as a phone subscriber on the quarterly report.

I’ve always suspected this. Same with TV. Internet+phone+TV = $X. Remove any single component or just choose one and the price is > $X. Makes no sense. I was told at some point if I remove TV and phone my price would go from $90 month to $500 month for just Internet. Their answer is always “it’s a bundle discount!”

With Cox it was cheaper to get Cable TV & Internet than internet alone, so I ended up with a useless cable box stuffed in a corner to keep track of and return 2 years later. Very annoyingly stupid policy

ISPs are a rigged economy. Google Fiber showed competitors are blocked from entering competition. Or so much friction is injected that they effectively block competition.

Contract log-in to block price shopping/switching. Gouge existing customers & lower price for people switching. Low prices on website, but existing customers can't ever get those costs.

Very rigged economy. City level government often sells out to block competitors.

I wonder how much the situation is exacerbated by IP address exhaustion. It's practically impossible to start an ISP of you don't already have IPv4 addresses, and whatever small allocations you might still be able to get won't allow you to grow very large, at least if you want to provide good service.

> All these mergers have been awful for consumers in the telecom space.

It has nothing to do with mergers. If there is 1 pipe/wire going into your house, and if the owner of that pipe/wire wants to extract as much out of you as they can, then you’re in the same position regardless of how big the owner of that pipe/wire is. Unless, of course, the government regulates it such as utilities.

>* If there is 1 pipe/wire going into your house, and if the owner of that pipe/wire wants to extract as much out of you as they can, then you’re in the same position regardless of how big the owner of that pipe/wire is.*

...because the mergers eliminated their competition and loss-leader attacks on the market are still legal.

If there was only 1 pipe or wire going into your house, there never was any competition to begin with. And no one is going to pay to lay a new one regardless of merger.

Check out this previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23910215

Which ISPs merged?

Thousands. Once upon a time, the telecommunications companies who ran/run the internet had more open peering policies and it was possible to have a Mom & Pop ISP that connected to the major exchanges. They could offer web hosting and colocation (your machine, their racks) as additional services and people could have a nice little business.

Then the big boys started excluding smaller providers, starving them like a gazelle with a broken leg until the hyenas of Larger Business swept them up. To be sure, there was also plain, MBA-style consolidation, but restricting peering prevented new independent providers from replacing them (yet another instance of Boomers pulling up the ladder after themselves).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering#History_of_peering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verio

Does loss leader attack means not making a profit to force out competition with cash from somewhere else?

I think that's pretty scummy in ISPs case but wouldn't banning that also make it impossible for venture backed business to compete in established markets?

I don't know, but I'm not sure that would be a bad thing.

There's no "Unless" there. If the government regulates it as a utility, the government has become the de-facto owner of that pipe who can screw you in whichever way they see fit. The fact that government typically noticeably screws you in different ways than businesses (Spying on your flows, playing morality police) than businesses (mostly extracting cash and providing low quality of service) is almost artifact (because both government and business do all of those things and more).

If the government regulates it as a utility, they effectively set a price cap and minimum service requirements, and nothing else. It doesn't magically become the property of the government.

I just got 250Mbps service from Spectrum with a two year deal for $35 per month then the regular price will be $65. The neighborhood is on the roadmap for a new fiber provider so hopefully I can get a better deal when the special rate expires.

They can make money with cheaper service. I just had a fixed $35 200Mbps plan with Optimum in an area with overpriced competition from Fios. Verizon would send their minimum wage sales drones out to personally plead with me to sign up for $80. The new $50 subsidy is going to ruin cheap internet by setting an inflated price floor. I would gladly take 20 Mbps service for $20 per month but that is never going to happen.

Wow, that sounds pretty good. I'm a TWC legacy customer paying ~30/mo for 20Mbps, called Spectrum last month to ask about upgrade options (need upload speed to be .5Mbps faster for WFH) and they told me their cheapest option was 100Mbps which would be $80/mo after the first year.

AT&T was only slightly less after the apparently mandatory monthly equipment fee, despite the fact that I own my cable modem. Right now I'm looking into EarthLink at "only" $68/mo for 35Mbps. As far as I can tell, cheap internet has already been ruined.

Where in Brooklyn? I've had gigabit for around 70 dollars in two apartments here in Downtown Brooklyn, and in general NYC generally does have pretty good fiber availability at reasonable prices

It's building-specific.

Also it's not like Verizon is your friend either; they just don't (yet) have any incentive to screw you.

These companies are apparently all run by greedy scum. I would much prefer if it were run by lazy greedy bureaucrats instead; at least then theoretically I can write a letter to my local legislators about it and complain at city hall.

I'm in Williamsburg. It's definitely block to block, because other blocks in my neighborhood definitely have fiber. I've actually never lived in a building that has fiber -- the last one I moved out of literally got fiber the month I moved out!

Downtown Brooklyn has a lot more new luxury highrise buildings with fiber wired in from day 1, as compared to pre-war brownstones in other neighborhoods where even _if_ Verizon has fiber on your block your elderly out-of-state landlady and absentee super won't let them in to wire up the unit.

That doesn't sound like a problem with Verizon, that sounds like a problem with legislation.

Your absentee super or out-of-state landlady wouldn't be allowed to stand in the way of you getting hot water, why should they be able to get in the way of other utilities?

Same here. I was paying $45 for 40mbps through TWC, which was an introductory promotion, after which it would be $55, I think? Then they merged with Spectrum and the cheapest option became $65 for 100mbps (they also charged me $65 for the 40mbps service before I had to call to upgrade it). Then it went to $70. I was very close to just cancelling it and tethering to my (also exorbitantly expensive) cellphone plan when the pandemic hit and I realized that wasn't feasible.

It's $75 now, by the way.

Try 180 for 20mbps.

At least they don't have a bandwidth cap.

They don't have a cap yet because it was part of their merger requirements. That requirement expires in 2023 and they've been pressuring the government to expire it sooner[0]. I let them know this was the reason I cancelled and switched to the local municipal fiber as soon as it was available.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/charter-seeks-fc...

For some providers, if you cancel and sign up again after 31 days, it counts as new service and qualifies for 1 year of promotional discounts as a "new customer".

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