Comcast complains to FCC that listing all of its monthly fees is too hard

c2h6@lemmy.world to Technology@beehaw.org – 173 points – Comcast complains to FCC that listing all of its monthly fees is too hard
arstechnica.com

Comcast blasted for seeking "loopholes" in rule requiring disclosure of all fees.

62

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.

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.

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.

Man do I ever get sick of corpo bullshit

Too hard to disclose fees but easy to charge them huh

That's some straight up gaslighting shit. If they can figure out to charge it, they can print it on a bill.

It's a simple solution, Comcast. Don't charge any fee you aren't willing to spend the effort to disclose.

Comcast: "But I am le tired."
(This reference goes back a few years, kids!)

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.

If it is too hard/difficult for a company to itemize all their fees, they are charging way too many fees.

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.

Comcast is a truly rotten company. Like without fail they continue to impress me on their new clever ways of misleading customers. Like remember "10G" from earlier this year...?

Most cable companies appear to be rotten to the core... Cox Communications is rolling out fiber into my neighborhood... Know what speeds they're advertising? 900/30... Which is WORSE than their gigabit coaxial option... At least there you could get 960/30

I think that's the point?

Nonono it's simple when we bill you, just too hard to list it upfront.

Nonono it's easy to charge you, it's just hard to disclose it. Duh

"The label hasn't even reached consumers yet, but Comcast is already trying to create loopholes." Is anyone surprised? I'm not a huge fan of Google's privacy practices, but their Fiber service is outstandingly easy to use and fast. I'm lucky to live in Kansas City though...

I wish Google fiber were in more states.

They will just have to create a fee to "cover the costs" of having to tell you what they are going to charge you.

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 for $40/month - half the price I was paying Comcast for 1.2Gbps.

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.

Yeah I'm super grateful for it. Before I was living at my current place, I lived at an apartment, and we could only get Comcast cable. The apartment building had an agreement with Comcast that ensured they were the only available internet provider.

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).

There's an easy fix, just don't allow charging any fees that aren't listed along with the advertised price. See? Very simple. They'll figure out how to list them thereafter, believe in them.

I think comcast getting fucked by regulators forcing fee disclosure has the potential to make a lot of people 'too hard'

But according to Comcast, "two aspects of the Commission's Order impose significant administrative burdens and unnecessary complexity in complying with the broadband label requirements."

"We much prefer to impose significant financial burdens and unnecessary complexities on our victims customers."