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.
Personally I haven't had this problem. In fact, every few months they actually increase my plan's advertised max download speed. I wouldn't say the actual download speed is as close as what they say but pretty close.
Of course the upload continues to be terrible
I use my own modem and router now but this was the case when I "rented" from them as well.
This! 2 weeks ago my internet started dropping for 1-2 minutes at a time, 3-5 times per day. The modem status page tells the tale, millions of uncorrectable errors, SNR below spec on several channels, and the event log shows all the disconnects. Neither their chatbot, nor the first level human support however will entertain any possibility except it being an issue with "the website you are using" or "your TV" or "your computer". Took maybe 30 minutes of BS until they offer to send a tech, but I have to pay if the tech concludes the issue is on my end. I eventually lost my temper and just told them AT&T is going round my neighborhood right now running fiber offering to buy everyone out of their Comcast contracts and that they have 2 choices, either they come out to fix the issue or they come out to disconnect and clean up my cable drop - their call. Suddenly a tech was available, the next day, guaranteed free of charge. The tech arrives, plugs in his test modem, says "yeah...that's not related to your equipment" after 5 seconds, shows me a huge signal drop in several frequency ranges and is actually surprised that the internet is even usable at all. Unfortunately the issue is further upstream than "our" utility pole, but he ran a new cable drop just in case and cleaned up on the pole before filing that ticket.
It makes you wonder how many people are limping along with half-broken internet just because they don't know how to debug this and force their way through Comcast's support wall and there not being a competitor they can threaten to switch to.
At this point, whether I’m speaking to my ISP or Amazon, I tend to demand a supervisor immediately, and in many cases, a supervisor’s supervisor. I refuse to speak to someone whose entire job is to _prevent_ me from receiving effective support.
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.
I bought my own router and modem before I signed up for their service as they were the only internet provider in my apartment building at the time. I viewed it as a preemptive measure against bullshit equipment rental fees. Everytime I have had to interact with them since they have tried offer me extra services (none of which I want) for free or reduced price if i would use their shitty box.
Did you get hit with the “no bandwidth cap” if you use their equipment or the $15 a month charge for using your own equipment or a combination thereof? Because that’s their official policy in many places (it’s insanely unethical and barely hidden consumer exploitation of fees).
I’m sorry I was only speaking of the US, as this is a US company.
> You already knew that home broadband competition is sorely lacking through much of the US, but a new report released today helps shed more light on Americans who have just one choice for high-speed Internet.
> Comcast is the only choice for 30 million Americans when it comes to broadband speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, the report says. Charter Communications is the only choice for 38 million Americans. Combined, Comcast and Charter offer service in the majority of the US, with almost no overlap.
> Yet many Americans are even worse off, living in areas where DSL is the best option. AT&T, Verizon, and other telcos still provide only sub-broadband speeds over copper wires throughout huge parts of their territories. The telcos have mostly avoided upgrading their copper networks to fiber—except in areas where they face competition from cable companies.
Also, “broadband” being 25 mbit is their lobby’s choice and definitely should not be a legitimate threshold in the modern world.
Then add that even though others operate in different regions, they generally do not compete for high speed service or are very poor at delivering it, thereby not actually presenting an alternative even though they “officially” do.
Also, be clear that these two companies, that dominate areas of the US, collude.
While 30 million is too much, that’s less than 10% of the population. In the most populated areas it’s most common to have a duopoly. Sucks but “I don’t think there are many places that aren’t Comcast only” is not close to being accurate. They’re not even the dominant provider in Texas and New York.
If anything it makes it easier for them to survive, antitrust below the national scale is much harder to apply.
> At least 49.7 million Americans only have access to broadband from one of the seven largest cable and telephone companies. In total, at least 83.3 million Americans can only access broadband through a single provider.
> Over the past two years, federal stats suggest that Charter and Comcast have an absolute monopoly over fewer households, but we think this is mostly a mirage resulting from how the FCC reports data. A significant number of the census blocks showing new competition are likely only partially served.
The fiber broadband association themselves reports over 70 million household availability for fiber. That just doesn’t square with your original statement.
> Don’t know why you’ve got such a pro-Comcast / Charter bent
Kindly go fuck yourself.
Stick to facts without baseless accusations.
DSL / wireless does not count. Very, very few homes have access to fiber. Most homes only have coaxial broadband, and most of those are only served by Comcast.
I do not believe 70M households have fiber available. I have searched many, many houses in many, many metros, and the ones with fiber are few and far between.
The FCC map is not reliable at all. You only see that fiber is not available when you search the address on the ISP website and it returns with the option for DSL. Even in the region I live now, the FCC map says fiber available in most of the city, but in reality, it’s only the newer housing developments. 90% are older homes in developments from a couple decades ago, and they only have coaxial.
The common factor in fiber availability is a housing development built after 2005 or even 2010, or built so long ago that the utilities are overhead and maybe they could string up fiber for a sufficiently low price.
Any home in any development built 1970 to 2010 with underground utilities that did not already have fiber will most likely not have fiber.
Also, any apartment building from before ~2010 will not have Ethernet wired to the apartment, only coaxial wires, and the apartment building owner is not going to wire it up for fiber, even if fiber is run to the building itself.
These numbers are from the FBA themselves, I don’t see how it is in their interests to lie that way (they have anticonsumer reasons for not doing so, this is not a defense).
I’m more inclined that you’re experiencing sampling bias. Infrastructure is clustered - fiber or anything like that is not “few and far between”. More like large swaths have coverage within deserts. If you’re always looking two doors from the house in the desert, it too does not have water.
I would personally never buy a house with comcast only and would likely not without fiber (I currently live in a Uverse/Shitcast ghetto which essentially leaves me with only one option). I sympathize with the shittiness of US broadband but I see no reason to stretch the facts, they suck regardless. And we do not represent the normal customer. In reality wireless options and even comcast are options to people if they compete on price, and fiber does have to compete with those in the real world.
> These numbers are from the FBA themselves, I don’t see how it is in their interests to lie that way. I’m more inclined that you’re experiencing sampling bias. Infrastructure is clustered - fiber or anything like that is not “few and far between”. More like large swaths have coverage within deserts. If you’re always looking two doors from the house in the desert, it too does not have water.
I don’t know why they would lie either, maybe they are using FCC maps since that is the best data they can afford. And given the low rates of new construction, I still doubt the figures, given the economics of a business installing fiber in older neighborhoods with underground utilities.
I would love to be wrong though, as I also nix living in any place only served by coaxial internet.
> In reality wireless options and even comcast are options to people if they compete on price, and fiber does have to compete with those in the real world.
Yes, which is why installing fiber has to be a taxpayer funded effort by the government, because it will never make financial sense for a business to spend all that money to install the infrastructure and have Comcast just lower their prices to below the fiber business’s installation costs.
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.
I forget exactly what I did, but it was an FCC complaint. Here's what one of Comcast's executive customer relations officers sent me after the FCC complaint was processed (with parts removed):
I am writing in response to the FCC file received in our office on December 2, 2014 regarding your request for the disconnection of your Comcast Business Service. I apologize for the inconvenience and frustration this has caused.
I have forwarded your concerns to the Business Services Group and you should be contacted by a representative concerning this issue. If you have any further questions, please contact me at ----------, ext. ------- and I will be happy to forward any questions or concerns you have to the correct group. Thank you for your time.
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.
That kind of speed is wild. What kind of switching hardware does 25 gigabit symmetric require? Do you have 25GbE to Thunderbolt adapters for your computers?
Shit, I was paying 80.-/mo for Swisscom DSL @100Mb in Schwerzenbach because it was the only wireline option available. Eventually just switched to Yallo 4G at 15.-/mo, which was mostly fine.
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.
No, Spain using Digi, which is a Romanian company. 10Gbit is only available in cities where Digi has their own fiber/equipment. When you’re in an area where the fiber is shared it’s 1Gbit max for same price.
> You folks have awesome internet because you force the local loop to be unbundled.
I don’t know what this means (although I can maybe guess). Can you explain it for sake of clarity?
> Nobody with bundled local loops will get pricing+performance like this; please don't raise peoples' expectations.
10Gbit sure, it’s not available everywhere. However, symmetric gigabit fiber is standard in many countries in Europe and elsewhere. Typically with 5+ major providers and local ISPs to choose from.
I lived in the US for a long time. I had to suffer the sub-par quality of cable, arbitrary price hikes and random downtime from shitty cable tech. You should absolutely raise your expectations. Complacency will do nothing but entrench the abysmal situation.
I don’t know what this means (although I can maybe guess). Can you explain it for sake of clarity?
Basically it means that whoever owns the "last mile" can't sell it only directly to the customer as part of a larger (bundled) product like "internet access." They have to sell access to that last mile of fiber or copper "unbundled" from anything else (such as "internet access"), and they have to offer it to other ISPs. This is how it has been for ~25 years in NL, and people there understand how important it is.
By forcing the monopoly (local loop) to be a separate company from everything else it makes it totally obvious when there are ridiculous shenanighans. Like, if local-loop company X has only one ISP customer Y, that's an obvious red flag. Also since they are separate companies regulators can subpoena the contracts, communications, and payments which flow between the two companies.
It's essentially the internet version of what the US did to voice telephony after we broke up our telephone monopoly back in the 1970s: no single company was allowed to do both local loop and long distance.
Currently the Netherlands has this for local-loop fiber, and a few counties in the US State of Washington have it due to the odd fact that their local-loop fiber is owned by the electric utility (not the phone or cable companies). It is an awesome system.
Key point yes. That’s how it is or at least seems to be in many countries.
Societies MUST decouple infrastructure, platforms etc from service providers. Doesn’t matter if private or public. If you don’t, you always end up with shit.
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.
The cutoff is $8000 if they’ll run fiber for you or not. It’s a strange service. 10Gb business-class fiber (non-GPON), some $10k juniper router to delineate the edge that they put in your house, and a backup gigabit cable connection for $300/mo. It’s the bargain of the century but I can’t imagine it’s for anything beyond advertising purposes.
I have had it since 2017, though they upgraded it to 10g a year or two ago. It’s not vapor ware. It’s just that $8,000 doesn’t buy you much distance (I think it’s 1/3 of a mile from the nearest fiber node).
Oh I know it definitely exists, it’s just so far from residential grade and costs like 5% of what it would cost if you had a business. Strange product.
I’m banned from upgrading beyond gigabit because my wife knows that I’d have to run fiber through the house so it’s all beyond my ability anyway. I’m jealous.
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.
Haha no I think they might not. I agree the VPS space is underserved wrt connection speed, which is where VPSes could really shine given the egress scams of cloud providers. Sometimes they have higher than advertised speeds though. I suspect most people care about cpu, ram and fs IO more than network speeds. This, in turn, might be because of bloated modern stacks that eat so much resources that link speed never becomes a bottleneck. Just a theory..
I’ve found good deals with Netcup (EU) and Colohouse (US) although the latter is not fun to deal with their “support” aka sales “team”.
Outside possibility of Romania, because they basically skipped over an entire generation (DSL) of telecom so there were no incumbents to cause trouble.
Romania is 10E a month for 10gbit with ~60E install charge
Netherlands is unlikely, cheapest is ~80e/month for 10gbit and 45e/month for gigabit
> because they basically skipped over an entire generation (DSL) of telecom so there were no incumbents to cause trouble.
Oh we had that (romtelecom) and people werent willing to use it, they used cheaper local ISPs that just ran copper wires everywhere.
Now a company (RDS) bought up most of those and kept upgrading and keeping prices low and basically are eating the competition. They're basically so far ahead you have construction companies that ask them to put fiber in new builds so its ready when apartments are being sold.
It's mostly competition that drove this from a very competitive company, the rest kind of suck and would go comcast route if they could afford it.
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.
+1. I've read in various forums they will only install it if the construction cost is less than a few thousand dollars. This means they will say it's "available" on the order page, but then decline to install 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.
I had gigabit pro for a few years, they gave me a half off promo that made it worth it at $150/mo, which is not much more than the close to $100 after miscellaneous fees that the regular gigabit down 35Meg up HFC cable plan costs, not to mention the fiber reliability is so much better - no brief outages and I even had Comcast business proactively reach out to replace gear when their monitoring noticed the fiber switch starting to fail.
I think they also discounted the install and activation to be $500 total.
I split it among around 8 housemates which included the upstairs unit of our house, so it ended up being very affordable and there was always extra bandwidth to go around. The main benefit I enjoyed being greater than 35Mbit upload speed.
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...
The way those cable modem systems work is essentially laying a data channel (usually several) on top of the existing coaxial cable network, similar to DSL laying data on top of the existing telephone network. However this means the cards which transmit and receive are still very much analog beasts, pumping out some incredible signal levels to as far as possible. Similar to DSL, the download centric focus is built into the design. Also, your small modem can't scream nearly as loud as the downstream signal can so some signal loss is more likely, limiting the upload channels. Finally a cable modem network is usually quite shared, with something like 8 transmission lines feeding entire neighborhoods or cities. Depending on node congestion you may not even get your advertised speeds. At least with DSL your line is basically dedicated to you lol
> 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?
Because they cannot actually offer it, it is all marketing bullshit.
Always assume coaxial upload bandwidth is slim to none. They probably just advertise a burst speed you get for 5 seconds. If it is not symmetrical, it is not real in my mind.
How do burst speeds work? What is happening when you get, like, 10X faster upstream speed - for an instant - and then it drops back to its normal crawl?
I assume they take it from the neighbors, which is why you never see coaxial cable internet providers advertise upload bandwidth. They only ever state download, and even then, those are also burst speeds, so you assume if you buy 100Mbps down from coaxial you only get 50Mbps or less sustained.
Because they are heavily oversubscribed and don’t want to invest in fiber infrastructure to increase capacity.
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.
My sister in law insists that 5Ghz wifi is the same thing as a 5G cell network. Comcast shouldn't use misleading terminology. The fact that people don't know what 5g means isn't really a defense. I couldn't tell you the difference between 4g and 5g, but adding "10g" alongside them makes it worse, not better.
This is what happens when we allow Marketing to simply conjure up a unit of measurement. Now nobody knows what a "G" is and how to compare one company's "G" with another company's "G". I fully expect AT&T to offer 20G cell service next because why the hell not?
Same thing happened with CDROM speeds back in the day. At one point 1X, 2X, 3X and so on were based on an actual throughput number, but then soon the Marketing brain trust realized you could put whatever number you want before the "X" and then the number became pretty meaningless.
Same for "bars" on your cell phone service signal. What is the difference between "one bar" and "two bars" on the display? Who the hell knows, it's a meaningless unit invented by carrier company Marketing.
"Hey honey, I called Verizon and they have the 1G service for $79.99"
"I called up T-mobile home internet, and they can give us the 5G for $50"
"Looks like Xfinity has the 10G for $79.95"
The vast majority of people buying internet service are non-technical, misunderstandings about the details are common, and Comcast picked a name that is perfect for confusing with all of their competitors. People don't always know what these measurements really mean, but they know that a bigger one should mean faster internet.
I think a lot more laypeople know the words "100 megabit" and "gigabit speed" than know anything about what 5G mobile service means. So let's leave mobile service aside. That was never my complaint.
I think some laypeople see the marketing materials companies put out comparing one speed and price tier to another. In other words, a fair number of people who have actively price-shopped internet speed ("should I buy the 'fast' tier that says 100 somethings, or the 'boost' tier that's 200, twice as much, for 50% more money?") would think 10G means 10 times as much as 1G which, it's not a huge leap to think that a fair number of people are aware means 1000 of the Ms.
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.)
For their fiber gigabit pro (2+1 gigabit symmetric service) they lease you something like a juniper acx2100, so presumably something similar with an SFP+ port would be used for higher speed fiber plans.
Granted that's just a handoff so I'm pretty sure you're just on your own when it comes to picking something that can route at 10G. I just went with a decisio opnsense appliance and called it a day.
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?
The Xfinity 10G Network™ refers to their latest infrastructure upgrades. It is not a product. This is the confusion the article is about. The product "Gigabit x10" is the plan you are looking for, and is not on their website. It's a residential service but everything is handled by the business side of Comcast and Metro-E. You must get in touch with them directly. See these modmail requests on reddit[1] or dslreports[2]. More on the process here[3].
Otherwise you will need to wait for their DOCSIS 4.0 "X-Class" speed tiers that are slowly rolling out[4][5].
Initial deployments are limited to 2Gbps, but they are symmetrical speeds. DOCSIS 3.1 technically supported 10Gbps down already. So we need to wait and see if the infra upgrades enable higher 10Gbps download tiers[6][7].
Yes, I know. My comment is in criticism of their advertising practices. They're plastering '10G' all over the ad copy on sales channels that aren't for 10gbps service. They know it's misleading, and it was 100% intentional.
Yeah, I unfortunately don't count right now, unless someone else in between us does:
> In order for the location to pre-qualify for Gigabit Pro Service, it must meet the qualifying distance factor. The location cannot be more than 1,760 ft. from the fiber splice case. Second, the cost cannot be more than $8,800 to build; this is determined based on whether the fiber is run underground or aerially. At some locations, the customer can be within the distance but cost is greater than the limit.
> Please see the results for the submitted ticket.
> Name: XXX
Address: YYY
Ticket #: ZZZ
Distance: 1,928 ft, from fiber splice case
Cost for fiber install: $14,327.00.
I don't think I've ever talked to a Comcast (or AT&T) salesperson who understood the difference between bits and bytes. They literally all quote me speeds in "megabytes per second".
American capitalism let private companies run some co-axial wires to our houses, which was a big capital investment for sure but not that big, and then we let them milk us for the privilege for the next 60 years. We've probably paid for it 1000 times over now. If the government just laid the wires as a public utility, as wasteful as the government is, it wouldn't be this bad.
I’m grateful for our local “community telcos” that deliver far faster connectivity and far lower prices, and with generally great service. I have toyed with the idea of starting one for my current neighborhood (low density residential, so no hope of any “traditional telco” investing in upgrades).
I worked in the cable industry for over a decade. All the worst things you can dream up about these companies are true. At the highest level of the companies phrases like 'what are they gonna do switch to dsl' and 'they can move if they don't like it' were common.
It's discouraging that the goalposts (Overton window?) have been shifted so far that "company reluctantly agrees to stop harmful actions" is where we all pack up and go home. Like that's table stakes right? How about forcing them to divest the entire product line that benefited from misleading branding? Then we can claim a win.
My current mindset is that campaigning for legislation to override e.g. Citizens United is the only hope of reversing this trend. Does anyone have other suggestions on other ways forward to stem the escalation of US corporations' abuse of the rest of us?
I’ve wondered if what we need in society are nonprofits that advocate exclusively against certain evil and nefarious corporations. Imagine what an org could do with a few million and a mission to combat Comcast and expose their behavior. One organization whose mission is to expose Amazon’s bad behavior. A PR check on monopolies.
Consumer Affairs, etc. do good work, but we need a more 1:1 relationship.
Probably turn out like the Mozilla Foundation and hundreds of other foundations giving piles of money to do good, which ends up meaning do good for the directors of the foundation.
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).