Slimecast constantly lies at every tier of their organization. I won’t overwhelm you with example as they can be easily searched for, but here’s three good ones:
I personally have experienced the lying on every recent interaction with the company, and like many other Americans have no viable alternative providers.
I’m in no way surprised that they are using a lying terms that is clearly intended to mislead people into thinking they are doing better for their customers than they actually are. That the companies’ culture on display.
It’s so unfortunate because I have seen glimmers of what this company be in their charity work and in the occasional stepping up to help people (though there always seems to be a big stepping up when community broadband initiatives are on the table).
I tried to get the advertised “10G” internet when it was first announced. Their website said it was available, so I called to have it set up. They “put in a ticket for [me]” and I didn’t hear back for a month. I called, they said they’d route it to the right department. A month passes. I called again. They said they can do it they just need a deposit. I agreed. They said they’d call me back. A month passes. I called again, they said they’d need to run a line to my house, but no one was available to do it that week so they’d put in a ticket. Also that it was going to cost more and they’d call me back. At this point I thought they were just bullshitting me, so I agreed. You guessed it, a month goes by. I called again, they said it would $20,000 to do the installation. I put myself on mute and laughed out loud. I agreed, and asked how I could write the check. And, wouldn’t you know it, Comcast admitted that my area wasn’t covered and that the website was inaccurate.
> I agreed, and asked how I could write the check. And, wouldn’t you know it, Comcast admitted that my area wasn’t covered and that the website was inaccurate.
that was brave.
I totally assumed the end of this story is "they charged the 20k and put me on hold indefinitely".
Comcast was the only available provider at a home I rented years ago. The router arrived and I set it up, only to find that the WiFi range was (literally) a couple of feet a most. The antenna must not have been connected right internally.
Comcast Support's response? This must be because I am not on their higher priced plan. You can get faster speeds and longer range if you upgrade! The guy on the phone refused to believe that something could be wrong with this particular router.
Ended up going to a local store where the person said it happens a lot, and gave me the "upgraded" router instead.
I found that after a month of working fine, my packet loss jumped up to 50%. Support recommended upgrading my plan.
It seems like they must massively oversubscribe their network then just drop packets based on your tier, with a honeymoon period for new customers so they don't immediately cancel.
Amazing how many companies in all industries try to do the tactic of "our product/service isn't meeting basic standards? Give us more money to fix it".
I'm frankly only ever willing to be upsold when I'm very satisfied with something and would like even more satisfaction in my life.
I moved into an apartment and kept the plan the previous resident had. They also sold us the non-xfinity router they had st a discount.
My roommate and I had spotty internet at various times of day. We measured it and it was way below what our plan claimed. The previous tenants had no such issue. Comcast refused to believe the problem was on their end and claimed my router was too old. This went on until I bought a new router just to prove a point (new router did nothing).
They finally send a repair guy out. He’s there for 5 minutes before diagnosing the problem: the cables were water logged to hell and back. He fixed it in 20 minutes and was gone.
Thankfully and not surprisingly the new nationwide competition from both t-mobile and Verizon 5G Home Internet services are hurting comcrap (xFinity) and charter (spectrum) broadband numbers. With T-Mobile and Verizon continuing to expand their 5G home offerings comcrap wil be less and less the only game in town.
I'm not a gamer but stream YouTube and other streamers 6 to 8 hours day. T-Mobile's 5G home internet worked great for me.
When I moved to a comcast area around 2014, I brought my own modem and they wouldn't let me connect over the phone without an "internet installation kit". I didn't need an install tech to come out since the place was already wired. I think it was about $29, and when the box arrived, it was literally a piece of paper with a url to go to for instructions. Absolute slimeballs.
I had a similar experience with them: they swore they had to have an installer plug the modem in, agreed to waive the $120 fine, and then it came back every month and I had to call their executive office to get it corrected. That last part did double duty because they never once billed at the quoted rate in the year we lived in that area.
Where I live now, Comcast has competition from Verizon and RCN. Starting a few blocks away, it’s only them. Shockingly, neighbors on the no-competition side report the same kind of routine casual fraud but it never happens here.
That sucks. Back in 2021 I moved and decided to get new equipment myself instead of renting. It all was plug and play. Even now when I get an occasional outage they can do the reset for me through their mobile app. No issues.
They thanked me for my loyalty as a business class customer when I moved by charging me money for equipment I had returned + continuing to bill me after I cancelled and had moved away from the location. I ended up having to go through a local regulator to bludgeon them into submission, at which point an upper management level Comcast employee called me on the phone and begged me to sign a paper to make the regulatory complaint go away.
I’ve had the exact same equipment scam happen. I ended up paying the first time. The second time I had a full video of me walking into the office (because at the time you had to return the equipment to the actual office, couldn’t ship it) and it took only a few months to get resolved.
I don’t think there are many places that aren’t Comcast only. I briefly lived in an area with fiber-to-the-home. It was the same general cost as Comcast, but so much better and the service was rock solid reliable.
They are a national disgrace, especially after all the money put into rural broadband initiatives and fiber optics rollouts somehow managed to produce basically… nothing. But I’m sure they weren’t involved.
And what’s happening is plain as day. Check this quote out:
> Comcast’s lack of broadband growth started last year, when the largest U.S. internet provider reported no additions in the second quarter of 2022 for the first time in the company’s history. Since then, Comcast has reported net broadband losses in three of the last five quarters.
> Comcast executives have pushed investors to focus on broadband’s rising average revenue per user (ARPU) growth, driven by price increases and upselling packages, rather than net additions. Comcast’s residential broadband ARPU rose 3.9% in the quarter.
> “As we continue to manage this balance, we expect ARPU growth to remain strong and our primary driver of broadband revenue growth with somewhat higher subscribers losses expected the fourth quarter compared to the 18,000 loss we just reported in the third quarter,” Comcast Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said during the company’s earnings conference call Thursday.
They’re not even interested in expanding broadband footprints anymore, just getting more revenue out of existing customers. And they are completely upfront about it.
Sorry, but I haven’t had one good interaction with this company, and I don’t think I’m alone.
Exactly the same here: We had Comcast Business for at least a decade, and cancelled it ~Oct after switching to city fiber. They wanted me to ship back the equipment by taking it to a UPS store, didn't have to package it up or anything, just hand it to staff.
I took photos of the gear in the UPS store. We worked for a few months with them to try to get it cancelled after that, eventually they said we didn't ship back all the gear, there were 2 wifi boxes we didn't return. We never had Comcast WiFi. We made a couple more back-and-forths saying this, and eventually they relented, but during this time I think we were charged $600-900 bucks (2-3 months of service) that we couldn't use (because we returned the modem) but they wouldn't cancel because we still allegedly had the WiFi gear.
Oh hey, they tried this exact thing on me one time too. They were all over me for it, then went totally silent after I got an attorney friend to write them a nastygram. I really shouldn't be surprised it's a pattern of abuse - they must get away with it pretty often.
Even if 10Gbps to the home is technically available, it's not posted on their website, and I would be willing to bet majority of consumers will be denied due to installation costs (it's not trivial to run a fiber just to your house).
So, why on earth was their network called "10G" if near zero percent of Comcast customers are even aware of that service, let alone actually have that service?
Further muddying the water with the 5G cellular technology and implying 10G is even better, deliberately riding that hype train.
For actual customers, the 100Mbps and 200Mbps upload speed plans are the only "next gen" network upgrade available. It's still not symmetrical, not really what people want, and not priced accordingly. In my area, FTTH providers are rolling out 1Gbps symmetrical for as low as $70 a month - making Comcast's "next gen" network a joke in terms of price and performance.
It was a gimmick from the start, and it's surprising it flew this long.
> The Comcast "Gigabit Pro" fiber connection that provides 10Gbps speeds costs $299.95 a month plus a $19.95 modem lease fee. It also requires a $500 installation charge and a $500 activation charge.
For reference, I’m paying €25/mo for 10Gbit symmetric. Modem “lease” and installation included. To be fair, I get ~8Gbit/s in practice, but that’s well worth it.
I pay CHF 64.75 (~USD 75) a month for 25gbit symmetric in Switzerland.
I can not understand how they can get away with charging 200+ for 10G. That is nuts.
But we have providers selling bullshit here too. One such provider claims 5G wireless is the equivalent of fiber. Sells 1gbit but actuall throughput is bellow 300mbit even with the best tower. Theoretical max is 2gbit but their equipment can't even do 1. Misleading customers to believe 5G wireless can ever beat fiber is just wrong.
You folks have awesome internet because you force the local loop to be unbundled. Every country should do this. However, almost none do (except yours, and a few counties within the US state of Washington). Nobody with bundled local loops will get pricing+performance like this; please don't raise peoples' expectations.
Instead, point them to the root cause (local loop bundling), because nothing else is going to help them. You'll just make them jealous and distract them from the one change that can actually improve their situation.
Calling your provider and saying "€25/mo for 10Gbit symmetric!!!!" is not going to change anything.
That price reference from Comcast is only if they actually say "yes" to running fiber to you in the first place. It's not very cost efficient to run a single fiber, and at $300 a month they don't have a huge amount of wiggle room for construction cost.
That's gotta be the best deal I've ever seen. Probably a year of service just to break even on the hardware to connect you to the upstream device, not counting actually providing the service. It's hard to find a base VPS with that level of service even allowing for a low data cap for the price and that's just for a connection with no hardware and a limited place to put data in the first place.
Yes, but ATT advertises 1G fiber connections, and it's only available at a small fraction of their service addresses. Or for that matter spectrum with Internet Gig (or whatever they call the 850/30 Mbit service).
I would be in favor of a bit more truth in advertising such that they have to provide a service (not "up to") at, say, 80%+ of their service addresses before being allowed to advertise it. Or, for that matter, they can only advertise the slower of up/down or maybe the average of both if they wish to site a single number rather than both up/down.
To Spectrum's credit they seem to be doing a lot of fiber for new builds. Our 1gbit plan is symmetric and pulls those speeds consistently, but yeah their coax footprint is stuck with lower upload, high/low split coax areas should see 500mbit upload at some point but who knows. The state of internet in the US is awful in most places.
I like the spirit but I'm highly cautious of the measure we choose. E.g. "80%+ of their service addresses" basically means "They can only advertise 25 mbit plans despite massive fiber investments". The intent being few people hear about plans not available in their area but the effect being yet another reason to not bother trying to serve rural areas.
Obviously the measure could be improved, particularly by making it an "and" instead of an "only" (e.g. "Most all service areas with up to 25 mbps, select service areas with up to 5 gbps. Check your location for details") but, for all the song and dance, I'm not sure such a thing really makes much meaningful impact to the consumer in the end (unless, again, it's so restrictive to have negative impacts instead) as regardless you're going to have to check your actual address and see if you're in the remaining x% that doesn't get that speed anyways.
I'm a big fan of just flat requiring "up/down for up to x GB/TB per month" in the advertisement though. Worst impact of that is the viewer just doesn't care.
I am always baffled at how US businesses can pretty much do and get away with anything they want, with little to no concequences. I'm not saying where I live is perfect but every time there's a scandal here I only need to look to the US to see we don't have it that bad.
This is a story about a company not getting away with something. In general the US has turned the dial very far to the free speech side, even for advertising.
But it is a story about a company who tried something that was obviously invalid and that most companies in, say, Europe, would never even think to try. And they got away with it for 4 years.
The dial should be turned very high on the free speech side.
The problem is that companies are treated as the "corporate person," which is complete nonsense. This isn't about pro/anti-business. It's just that companies aren't people, don't have rights, and good business regulation looks nothing like good human regulation. The Constitution, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, etc. are great document for rights of humans.
They don't apply well to things which aren't humans.
That's not even to say other constructs don't or shouldn't have rights. They're just not the same rights.
TBH, unless they used this branding for their mobile network or advertised it without actually being able to provide 10 Gbps fiber, I don't see why they were slapped.
I didn't realize they were actually selling a 10 Gbps service tier as part of this branding. It's never been available in my market, so I assumed that they were advertising the uplink capability of the thing my modem was connected to! Happy to see this go, but I'm still shocked to learn that the name was _less_ misleading than I had thought.
The article says it provides 10Gbps of service to 98% of customers upon request, which would be powered by fiber-to-the-home. I don't need 10Gbps, but I do want symmetric upload and download speeds. Does anyone know if it's possible to ask them to run fiber and have only an upload speed increase?
> The article says it provides 10Gbps of service to 98% of customers upon request
This part is funny to me because I've tried to sign up for their FttH and they declined despite it being in the area, and the same thing happened to others I know. I'm not sure how they came to that percentage but I don't believe it.
I think you're asking for something like their 10G service, but at a lower cost and speed?
> The Comcast "Gigabit Pro" fiber connection that provides 10Gbps speeds costs $299.95 a month plus a $19.95 modem lease fee. It also requires a $500 installation charge and a $500 activation charge
I'm not sure that the pricing for that service actually pays for their installation and equipment costs, so I don't think you'd get much of a discount if you only ran it at 1Gbps symmetric. I did know someone who got the service and didn't bother to make the rest of his equipment work at 10G, so was only using a 1G port. And it works fine, but still costs $320/month + any other taxes and the $1000 install.
Oh it's on-request. I followed their marketing link and it only offered me 1G so I assumed it was unavailable. Their big advantage is they have good coverage and many municipalities will preserve that by preventing other telecom companies from putting their alternative technologies in (say FttH).
You should push to have fiber. Once you get 1gb symmetrical (in my fortunate case after moving), there is no going back.
Not-fond memories of getting through to Crapcast support to resolve outage (e.g. cable laid in 90s failed) and then being pitched a "a great deal just for you" of "upgrading" to get catv sh*t package, as I waited.
Damn though, Crapcast did get to IPv6 fast and that specifically was solid in my previous house.
Last I knew, they still needed to finish working with their counterpart monopoly on their collaborative new Xumo device and get all the systems lined up to use it.
Then they need to kick the little old grandma's still watching traditional cable off their network and set them up on a new Xumo streaming box instead. Then they drop the old video channels and use their frequencies to provide faster service on the same old copper wires.
Not sure this is right. DOCSIS4.0 (which I think is what you are referring to?) doesn't require TV channels to be moved off plus it can coexist with existing DOCSIS3.0/3.1 (I think the plan is to actually bond 3.0, 3.1 and 4.0 channels together - much like how most 3.1 rollouts actually are majority 3.0 channels for BC purposes).
DOCSIS4.0 does use higher frequencies though and this requires a lot of additional work to upgrade the infra to support this.
I think what Comcast is calling '10G' is the fact you can now order a totally new FTTH run which doesn't use coax instead.
Tbh it's a confused strategy. If you're going to offer XGS-PON to everyone, why bother with DOCSIS4.0? It doesn't really make sense to run fibre runs just to one customer, you could probably do a whole street in not much more time.
I don't know how coax internet works, or how the channel allocations work, but it seems to me if they can offer 2Gbps/200Mbps already why can't we opt for a channel reallocation and get like 1Gbps symmetrical, or at least 1Gbps/500Mbps or something?
I do understand the legacy channel allocations were designed for almost entirely download - but 2Gbps? That can't be...
I always thought they totally missed an opportunity with their moronic Xfinity brand, why not just flip the cards and call it InfiniG, Yeah, forget 5G, 6G, or the 8G band (Seth Meyers sub-reference) and simply say we having infinity G, hell yeah, if you are going just make shit up, go for it, am I right? We out G everyone else. I know, you have not idea what the G thing even is, but don't worry, we got you, our G is infinite. There, all you problems and worries are solved for $275/mo.
I thought it was pretty well understood, to anybody paying attention at least, that there have been no official 6, 7, 8, or even 9G mobile networks yet, so of course 10G was a slightly quicker name for 10Gbps networking. It's maybe not an industry standard, but colloquially many datacenters will call a 10Gbps-capable network switch a "10G switch." This seems like an extension of that colloquialism to general consumers. But I guess I won't argue, necessarily, about being less vague in our choices of words for things. I just generally don't think accusations of "misleading" is completely fair, in this instance. Comcast has been misleading customers in other ways, but in this case, I think individual ignorance is doing a bit of the heavy lifting for the misleading here.
It wasn't long ago that 5G was the new shiny thing, and I remember that the flood of ads for cell carriers were constantly saying that they had the newest 5G ultra-wideband tech or whatever. Even the vast majority of my relatives know that 5G is the latest *G thing. Very few people would miss 4 G's.
I hate to advocate for Comcast of all companies, but I'm actually on their side for once. They definitely should've had their employees explain what it meant to people if they seemed unsure, which I have serious doubts about, and saying they have a "10G network" when availability for 10G is very limited is rather dubious, but calling 10Gbps internet "10G" is fine with me.
If we're gonna go after ISPs for shady shit, why not go after Spectrum for not listing their upload speed anywhere, not even for their business plans? Comcast at least lets you see what you're actually buying before paying, but with Spectrum you just have to try it out or do some google-fu to find a PDF listing the upload speed for some* of their business plans, and then just hope that ths speeds are the same on the nearly-equivalent consumer plans.
If you don't know what a 10G network in a given context could be, are you likely to understand the difference between what a 5g and a supposed 10g mobile network would be? Are you a candidate for a person that is likely to care about the difference between 200Mbps and 1Gbps? Perhaps it's naive, but I've heard the words "rack that 10G switch" so many times that it's hard for me to say that Comcast intended on being misleading.
Does their device at least support 10Gbps internal networks, I assume? In that way it's still not misleading, in my opinion. Of course the uplink only receives and transmits whatever you pay for (or in that case, what they allow you to pay for based on what is available.)
Who officially decides what is xG?
The number of different technologies and expected speeds varies so much with 4G/5G, that the terms aren’t particularly useful anyway.
On the contrary, I'm simply tossing up whether or not you're likely to care about the difference between 10G and 10Gbps if you don't understand what either one even mean. Are we mad at Comcast for misleading people that don't even know where (or from where) they were led? Or are we mad at Comcast for not using the technical term since we're all tech minded here?
Where this XKCD comic is about experts overestimating the knowledge of average people, I'm attempting to estimate how much the average person should even care, in this case.
That is great, every time I saw an ad with that stupid phrase it drive me insane. It was so stupid and clearly straight up lying and yet they acted so proud of it.
While we are at it can we stop confusing "Wifi" and "internet" in marketing? Somehow consumers seem to have forgotten that the 2 are distinct (likely thanks to most people probably don't use specific routers and instead they are the same). I want to scream anytime I see a post like "My wifi is down, is anyone else having issues?" on a local group and its like, I am almost sure you mean Internet is down but the distinction is very important.
And the providers take great advantage of this ignorance by advertising the “fastest wireless” among their competitors (which may be true when you compare the router/AP lease offerings), but says little about how their internet upload/download speeds compare.
Interesting, I never once made that distinction, always assumed it meant 10gbps. Was this actually confusing people or just companies fighting in court?
Readit News
https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/comments/17cdku6/li...
https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/plan/i-was-lied-to-...
https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/customer-service/xf...
I personally have experienced the lying on every recent interaction with the company, and like many other Americans have no viable alternative providers.
I’m in no way surprised that they are using a lying terms that is clearly intended to mislead people into thinking they are doing better for their customers than they actually are. That the companies’ culture on display.
It’s so unfortunate because I have seen glimmers of what this company be in their charity work and in the occasional stepping up to help people (though there always seems to be a big stepping up when community broadband initiatives are on the table).
that was brave.
I totally assumed the end of this story is "they charged the 20k and put me on hold indefinitely".
Comcast Support's response? This must be because I am not on their higher priced plan. You can get faster speeds and longer range if you upgrade! The guy on the phone refused to believe that something could be wrong with this particular router.
Ended up going to a local store where the person said it happens a lot, and gave me the "upgraded" router instead.
It seems like they must massively oversubscribe their network then just drop packets based on your tier, with a honeymoon period for new customers so they don't immediately cancel.
I'm frankly only ever willing to be upsold when I'm very satisfied with something and would like even more satisfaction in my life.
My roommate and I had spotty internet at various times of day. We measured it and it was way below what our plan claimed. The previous tenants had no such issue. Comcast refused to believe the problem was on their end and claimed my router was too old. This went on until I bought a new router just to prove a point (new router did nothing).
They finally send a repair guy out. He’s there for 5 minutes before diagnosing the problem: the cables were water logged to hell and back. He fixed it in 20 minutes and was gone.
I'm not a gamer but stream YouTube and other streamers 6 to 8 hours day. T-Mobile's 5G home internet worked great for me.
Where I live now, Comcast has competition from Verizon and RCN. Starting a few blocks away, it’s only them. Shockingly, neighbors on the no-competition side report the same kind of routine casual fraud but it never happens here.
I refuse to ever live somewhere Comcast-only.
I’ve had the exact same equipment scam happen. I ended up paying the first time. The second time I had a full video of me walking into the office (because at the time you had to return the equipment to the actual office, couldn’t ship it) and it took only a few months to get resolved.
I don’t think there are many places that aren’t Comcast only. I briefly lived in an area with fiber-to-the-home. It was the same general cost as Comcast, but so much better and the service was rock solid reliable.
They are a national disgrace, especially after all the money put into rural broadband initiatives and fiber optics rollouts somehow managed to produce basically… nothing. But I’m sure they weren’t involved.
And what’s happening is plain as day. Check this quote out:
> Comcast’s lack of broadband growth started last year, when the largest U.S. internet provider reported no additions in the second quarter of 2022 for the first time in the company’s history. Since then, Comcast has reported net broadband losses in three of the last five quarters.
> Comcast executives have pushed investors to focus on broadband’s rising average revenue per user (ARPU) growth, driven by price increases and upselling packages, rather than net additions. Comcast’s residential broadband ARPU rose 3.9% in the quarter.
> “As we continue to manage this balance, we expect ARPU growth to remain strong and our primary driver of broadband revenue growth with somewhat higher subscribers losses expected the fourth quarter compared to the 18,000 loss we just reported in the third quarter,” Comcast Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said during the company’s earnings conference call Thursday.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/26/comcast-broadband-worries.ht...
They’re not even interested in expanding broadband footprints anymore, just getting more revenue out of existing customers. And they are completely upfront about it.
Sorry, but I haven’t had one good interaction with this company, and I don’t think I’m alone.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/comcast-is-americas-most-hated-co...
I took photos of the gear in the UPS store. We worked for a few months with them to try to get it cancelled after that, eventually they said we didn't ship back all the gear, there were 2 wifi boxes we didn't return. We never had Comcast WiFi. We made a couple more back-and-forths saying this, and eventually they relented, but during this time I think we were charged $600-900 bucks (2-3 months of service) that we couldn't use (because we returned the modem) but they wouldn't cancel because we still allegedly had the WiFi gear.
I would love to hear more in details on this. I feel like I am going to have to do something like this but not sure where to begin the research.
So, why on earth was their network called "10G" if near zero percent of Comcast customers are even aware of that service, let alone actually have that service?
Further muddying the water with the 5G cellular technology and implying 10G is even better, deliberately riding that hype train.
For actual customers, the 100Mbps and 200Mbps upload speed plans are the only "next gen" network upgrade available. It's still not symmetrical, not really what people want, and not priced accordingly. In my area, FTTH providers are rolling out 1Gbps symmetrical for as low as $70 a month - making Comcast's "next gen" network a joke in terms of price and performance.
It was a gimmick from the start, and it's surprising it flew this long.
> The Comcast "Gigabit Pro" fiber connection that provides 10Gbps speeds costs $299.95 a month plus a $19.95 modem lease fee. It also requires a $500 installation charge and a $500 activation charge.
For reference, I’m paying €25/mo for 10Gbit symmetric. Modem “lease” and installation included. To be fair, I get ~8Gbit/s in practice, but that’s well worth it.
I can not understand how they can get away with charging 200+ for 10G. That is nuts.
But we have providers selling bullshit here too. One such provider claims 5G wireless is the equivalent of fiber. Sells 1gbit but actuall throughput is bellow 300mbit even with the best tower. Theoretical max is 2gbit but their equipment can't even do 1. Misleading customers to believe 5G wireless can ever beat fiber is just wrong.
You folks have awesome internet because you force the local loop to be unbundled. Every country should do this. However, almost none do (except yours, and a few counties within the US state of Washington). Nobody with bundled local loops will get pricing+performance like this; please don't raise peoples' expectations.
Instead, point them to the root cause (local loop bundling), because nothing else is going to help them. You'll just make them jealous and distract them from the one change that can actually improve their situation.
Calling your provider and saying "€25/mo for 10Gbit symmetric!!!!" is not going to change anything.
They don't happen to offer colocation do they :p.
Can you post where you live so I can move there.
I would be in favor of a bit more truth in advertising such that they have to provide a service (not "up to") at, say, 80%+ of their service addresses before being allowed to advertise it. Or, for that matter, they can only advertise the slower of up/down or maybe the average of both if they wish to site a single number rather than both up/down.
Obviously the measure could be improved, particularly by making it an "and" instead of an "only" (e.g. "Most all service areas with up to 25 mbps, select service areas with up to 5 gbps. Check your location for details") but, for all the song and dance, I'm not sure such a thing really makes much meaningful impact to the consumer in the end (unless, again, it's so restrictive to have negative impacts instead) as regardless you're going to have to check your actual address and see if you're in the remaining x% that doesn't get that speed anyways.
I'm a big fan of just flat requiring "up/down for up to x GB/TB per month" in the advertisement though. Worst impact of that is the viewer just doesn't care.
The problem is that companies are treated as the "corporate person," which is complete nonsense. This isn't about pro/anti-business. It's just that companies aren't people, don't have rights, and good business regulation looks nothing like good human regulation. The Constitution, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, etc. are great document for rights of humans.
They don't apply well to things which aren't humans.
That's not even to say other constructs don't or shouldn't have rights. They're just not the same rights.
In Capitalism, eventually capital owns everything.
It's not very interesting; tautologies tend not to be.
This part is funny to me because I've tried to sign up for their FttH and they declined despite it being in the area, and the same thing happened to others I know. I'm not sure how they came to that percentage but I don't believe it.
> The Comcast "Gigabit Pro" fiber connection that provides 10Gbps speeds costs $299.95 a month plus a $19.95 modem lease fee. It also requires a $500 installation charge and a $500 activation charge
I'm not sure that the pricing for that service actually pays for their installation and equipment costs, so I don't think you'd get much of a discount if you only ran it at 1Gbps symmetric. I did know someone who got the service and didn't bother to make the rest of his equipment work at 10G, so was only using a 1G port. And it works fine, but still costs $320/month + any other taxes and the $1000 install.
this sounds like PR doublespeak weasel words for burst vs sustained.
Not-fond memories of getting through to Crapcast support to resolve outage (e.g. cable laid in 90s failed) and then being pitched a "a great deal just for you" of "upgrading" to get catv sh*t package, as I waited.
Damn though, Crapcast did get to IPv6 fast and that specifically was solid in my previous house.
Then they need to kick the little old grandma's still watching traditional cable off their network and set them up on a new Xumo streaming box instead. Then they drop the old video channels and use their frequencies to provide faster service on the same old copper wires.
DOCSIS4.0 does use higher frequencies though and this requires a lot of additional work to upgrade the infra to support this.
I think what Comcast is calling '10G' is the fact you can now order a totally new FTTH run which doesn't use coax instead.
Tbh it's a confused strategy. If you're going to offer XGS-PON to everyone, why bother with DOCSIS4.0? It doesn't really make sense to run fibre runs just to one customer, you could probably do a whole street in not much more time.
I do understand the legacy channel allocations were designed for almost entirely download - but 2Gbps? That can't be...
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Maybe they don't think you should have to follow the industry to know what a company's advertising means?
It pissed me off to no end to hear the monopolist advertise their "10G network" ("with speeds starting at 200Mbps")
It was CLEARLY meant to mislead.
I hate to advocate for Comcast of all companies, but I'm actually on their side for once. They definitely should've had their employees explain what it meant to people if they seemed unsure, which I have serious doubts about, and saying they have a "10G network" when availability for 10G is very limited is rather dubious, but calling 10Gbps internet "10G" is fine with me.
If we're gonna go after ISPs for shady shit, why not go after Spectrum for not listing their upload speed anywhere, not even for their business plans? Comcast at least lets you see what you're actually buying before paying, but with Spectrum you just have to try it out or do some google-fu to find a PDF listing the upload speed for some* of their business plans, and then just hope that ths speeds are the same on the nearly-equivalent consumer plans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSMA
Where this XKCD comic is about experts overestimating the knowledge of average people, I'm attempting to estimate how much the average person should even care, in this case.
While we are at it can we stop confusing "Wifi" and "internet" in marketing? Somehow consumers seem to have forgotten that the 2 are distinct (likely thanks to most people probably don't use specific routers and instead they are the same). I want to scream anytime I see a post like "My wifi is down, is anyone else having issues?" on a local group and its like, I am almost sure you mean Internet is down but the distinction is very important.
It’s not on their regular website. You have contact them directly to have someone come out to survey and see if you are eligible for a fiber run.
https://youtu.be/tQV0ltA1tCk