Comcast President Realizes How Their Bullshit Prices/Fees Have Them Losing Customers
from the welcome-to-reality dept
It should be no secret that Comcast, as well as many other cable TV and internet providers, have a firm reputation for shoveling mountains of bullshit and calling it their base fees only to have a bunch of hidden or sneaky other fees attached to invoices that greatly inflate the price of services. These have taken the form of everything from so-called “Broadcast TV Fees“, really just the cost of programming as part of the television service, or “Internet Cost Recovery Fees” on the internet side, whatever the hell that means. The end result has been decades of pissed off customers who are only now beginning to have other viable options for content and internet services, with much of the frustration stemming from these inflated prices, sneaky fees, and a complete lack of transparency as to what any of this is for.
I’ve know this for years and years now. So, likely, have you, along with most of the rest of the public. Comcast’s President, Mike Cavanagh, acknowledged what we’ve all known, seemingly for the first time, on a recent Comcast earnings call.
“In this intensely competitive environment, we are not winning in the marketplace in a way that is commensurate with the strength of the network and connectivity products that I just described,” Cavanagh said. “[Cable division CEO] Dave [Watson] and his team have worked hard to understand the reasons for this disconnect and have identified two primary causes. One is price transparency and predictability and the other is the level of ease of doing business with us. The good news is that both are fixable and we are already underway with execution plans to address these challenges.”
The 183,000-subscriber loss lowered Comcast’s residential Internet subscribers to 29.19 million. Comcast also reported a first-quarter drop of 17,000 business broadband subscribers, lowering that category’s total to 2.45 million.
Nothing focuses the mind of a president of a major public company quite like a falling stock price, which is exactly what is happening to Comcast, with its stock dropping nearly 10% over the last five years. It’s a bit jarring to hear this said out loud by Cavanagh as though this is some kind of revelation, particularly given how often Comcast and other cable providers have appeared on lists of the companies that the public dislikes the most. Were they somehow not paying attention to those?
In any case, Cavanagh is saying all the right words about simplifying and locking in prices to avoid this frustration moving forward.
Cavanagh said that Comcast plans to make changes in marketing and operations “with the highest urgency.” This means that “we are simplifying our pricing construct to make our price-to-value proposition clearer to consumers across all broadband segments,” he said.
Comcast last week announced a five-year price guarantee for broadband customers who sign up for a new package. Comcast said customers will get a “simple monthly price starting as low as $55 per month,” without having to enter a contract, giving them “freedom and flexibility to cancel at any time without penalty.”
How well they pull this off is a matter of the specifics and the adherence to the promise. If Comcast finally fully goes all in on simplicity, knocks it off with the bullshit fees, and stops with the sneaky tactics to raise or otherwise hide prices, this will be received positively. Whether it’s enough to put the genie back in the bottle on public perception to turn around subscriber numbers is a different question, of course. I tend to think the train has already left the station on that one. Comcast apparently thinks that might be the case for a bit as well.
Comcast investors shouldn’t expect an immediate turnaround, though. “We anticipate that it will take several quarters for our new approach to gain traction and impact the business in a meaningful way,” Cavanagh said.
Look, Comcast has sucked on this stuff for many, many years. It’s going to take a bit of time and good behavior to gain the general public’s trust back, never mind someone like myself that cut the Comcast cord entirely years ago.
But if the company has finally found religion on its crappy behavior, that’s ultimately a good thing.
Filed Under: broadband, cable, fees, hidden fees, mike cavanagh
Companies: comcast
Comments on “Comcast President Realizes How Their Bullshit Prices/Fees Have Them Losing Customers”
We’ve been bleeding you dry, and you are leaving. I don’t understand!
Calling it a ‘marketplace’ is really really generous as they still are the only game in town in some places & all of the regulations seem to exist only to prop up a few monopoly players at the expense of the alleged benefits of the so called free market.
They are entrenched and have grown fat & lazy because they haven’t had to compete in decades.
One merely needs to look at the MNVO boom where somehow these companies are still making money offering “cut rate” plans for sometimes less than half of the carrier who’s network it uses offers their direct customers.
Perhaps the secret is the magical system where the government runs the lines for a flat fee & various vendors compete to get users for their product & if they mistreat the user they can spend less than 20 min moving to a different provider without any hassle.
Its the 21st Century and 5G didn’t manage to do anything that was promised or feared… althou it is possible it made some zombies. (looks at congress).
I mean we could but we'd just get slower service.
I hate it, I live in a somewhat competitive marketplace for internet service and those who know no better will switch to 5G service for home internet over cable which is fiber all the way to the CMT and then copper for the last mile. But 5G can only hypothetically beat DOCSIS speeds. In reality, only in the most ideal (which are still exceptionally rare) circumstances will 5G get anywhere even close to its hypothetical maximum speeds. And even then only when there isn’t a lot of demand on the network.
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Sometimes it seems that DOCSIS can only hypothetically attain DOCSIS speeds, too. The CableLabs people annouce big numbers like 1 Gb/s, even 10 Gb/s, but who can reliably get it? The local cable company would have to be really on top of node-splitting, as well as the upgrades needed for a good upstream/downstream split—but if they were willing to do a ton of work, they’d have already laid fibre to the customers.
Besides that, I’ve yet to see a reliable DOCSIS deployment. I’ve used networks operated by 2 or 3 companies, and multi-hour outages were just expected (granted, they were mostly overnight). I doubt 5G will be better; it’d be far to easy to blame problems on radio interference, customer equipment, or other unprovable things.
Comcrap
It would take a 1000 word essay for me to describe my trials & tribulations with Comcrap. Here is a good one:
My sister calls me because her Internet is down. I go there with a new cable modem (yes I keep a spare) & go through all the motions & am able to prove that it’s the cable, something outside the home causing the problem. So we call Comcrap CS & I pose as my brother-in-law so they will talk to me.
After the usual extended menu insanity & extended hold time I get though to a rep. I explain the problem in detail being as polite as I possibly can. They automatically claim that it’s the cable modem as my sister does not rent the comcrap one. I tell them clearly that I am using a new, just out of the box cable modem. They say it doesn’t matter, it’s still the cable modem. Even if I went & bought a dozen cable modems & none of them worked, she told be it wouldn’t matter, it’s still the cable modem.
So I escalate the call. The “supervisor” claims the same thing, it’s the cable modem. They will not schedule a service call. I start to get agitated. Then they claim some sort of hundreds of dollars if we were to get a service call. I tell them not to threaten me with these charges as I am sure the problem is outside the home. 10 mins or so of my bitching, getting more & more agitated, basically begging for to schedule service, YELLING at the end, she finally schedules a service call. After the call my sister says that they would never been able to get through all that.
The problem? The drop cable from the pole was 30 years old, corroded, & had to be replaced. Problem solved. Even better, two months later, fiber from a different provider became available my sister’s residence. Of course she cancelled comcrap, got terabyte speeds for half the cost. Why would they ever stay even after comcrap offered to match the deal?
One place I lived I had a choice between 3 providers & prices were $70 less a month. Services better? meh
At my current residence all we have is Comcrap & they know it. There is a cable 30-40 yards away that carries both AT&T & Verizon fiber but we can get neither here.
The day will come when I can call & cancel Comcrap. I plan to throw a party that day to celebrate!
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I don’t think you’re supposed to post here if you’re under thirteen.
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Doesn’t seem to stop you.
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Obviously not a comcrap customer I see.
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i guess he should have said fuck.
That sound you hear is Richard Bennett frothing at the mouth, trying to draft a furious copy blaming the left Gen Z furry gay kids for not willingly letting themselves get fucked by a corporation.
The market works. Crappy behavior eventually begets lost revenue. They’ll improve or they’ll die.
Re: Market works if…
Market works if some competition is allowed to take place.
Tariffs are an outstanding means of limiting competition, btw.
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Sure, if there’s competition.
ISPs historically haven’t had any. That’s how Comcast got this far.
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Kind of.
There’s not much of a “market” for cable television anymore. It’s an obsolescent technology, paid for mostly by people who signed up when it was relevant and just never canceled. Some have got to be actual masochists to continue with it.
For internet, I guess some areas have enough of a market to attract the attention of the large cable-based ISPs—and even people in the non-competitive areas might get some benefit from it.
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Only for the same reason that a brand new light bulb becomes obsolete (the correct adjective) just a few months after you fit it: planned obsolescence. If you don’t believe me, just take a look over the pond, where Virgin Media is still going strong, and upstart EE TV is flourishing. TBH, you have a point in that cable tv should have become obsolete by now, but the providers of paid for streaming services played a huge part in preventing that by enshittifying their own offerings.
Yep
Was forced to use Verizon Comcast for years. Everything was fine for about 18 months, then suddenly mysterious fees began appearing on our bill every month. DVR fee–“Oh that’s extra, not included in your package.” But you gave us the DVR Receiver when we signed up 18 months ago?”
Next Month–Voice remote fee.
Next Month–mysterious internet fee
Next month–new “multi-room” fee
And on and on. Thankfully we now have 3 fiber optic providers in our neighborhood.
And after five years you get the games again.
As low as $55
We should all beware the weasel words “as low as $55” because we all know Comcast will do everything they can to make sure people don’t actually get that price.
'A healthy and consistent profit is not All The Money so charge more for less!'
Even if I believed them that they mean to start with price transparency and no more dishonesty this is business and in business The Number Must Always Go Up, so they might start out transparent and with reasonable prices but it’s only a question of how soon they’ll start backsliding to keep the shareholders appeased.
Epic trolling?
This just feels like epic-levels of trolling. Over the past 30-40 years, the one phrase that has united Democrats, Republicans, and even Independents has been: “The cable company SUCKS!”
And now, 30-40 years too late, they’re finally getting that message? c’mon, no one can be that dense … can they?
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As Upton Sinclair said, “it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Even if they secretly do understand, the person in charge of a cable company can’t just come out and tell the investors that they’re investing in a company with dead-end technology (co-ax), and no concrete plan for its replacement.
But you should also keep in mind, when you talk about “30-40 years ago”, that you’re referring to a time when cable television service mattered, and was a growing business. The cable companies offered only one service, a popular one with no competition, so there was no reason for them to care. Now, they’re internet service providers with a dying side-business. Everyone wants internet service, and there are actually some competitors in some areas.
The cable companies got lucky in the 1990s when we found out that cable could deliver better internet service than telephone lines. That temporary advantage is starting to run out.
Not only is the promise “as low as” which normally implies “but good luck getting that price” or “and the product will be kneecapped so bad you will go for a higher price plan” and probably both. Also I notice that the promise is only for new subscribers so current customers are still basically told to shut up and pay up.
Good luck improving your reputation when it’s clear you still really want to do the same thing you’ve always been doing.
It’s so easy but of course they’d never do it. Just fix the comcrap portal/app so that you can futz around with the tradeoff between $ and mbps. I get 600 mbps for $60. Maybe I’d rather have 300 mbps for $30. I don’t think I have any particular need for that speed.
So I try 300 mbps for a while. If I don’t like it, I bump it up to 400 or down to 200 till its optimized. Comcrap can amortize the fee to a monthly rate based on my futzing.
Customers would feel they have control, if it’s too pricey, they can fix it, and the futzing might become an addictive game that makes them less likely to cancel.
But Comcrap is a dinosaur company and they just blunder along like idiots till they go under. That works for me too.
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Speed and cost are not very closely related, and a lot of customers have little idea how much speed they’ll need. I don’t think your plan would work all that well.
That darn Xfinity...
Feel assured stockholders, Cavanagh is taking on the major problems facing Xfinity!
“One is price transparency…”
They addressed transparency by rolling all of their fees into a single total, so the make-believe fees are hidden (including $29 for a sports package that doesn’t include the ChiSox, Bulls or Blackhawks). Pretty great, right?
“Make our price-to-value proposition clearer.”
So, they hiked rates +10% without improving a thing.
Yes! Price-to-value is MUCH clearer, the value proposition is worse, but clearer.
Years of customer abuse and monopolistic greed...
I really don’t care WHAT they do, it will be a cold day in hell before I EVER use them again! I finally got off their service when T-Mobile offered “5G” home internet…and no, it’s not as good as what Comcast offers…but it’s good enough, I get roughly 400mbps down and it’s $30/mo!
More importantly, they don’t try to nickel and dime me when I use an “excessive” amount of data! I kept getting an extra $10-$50 tagged on to my Comcast bill because, apparently, bits and bytes are a scarce resources, and I used too many of them doing routine things like downloading games, watching 4k video and facetime.
So, I hope this trend continues until Comcast goes fully bankrupt. Screw ’em! They treated us like absolute GARBAGE for decades. Now they can reap what the sowed!
it’s all in the fine print
That's how business works? !
So Comcast finally ran out of options on what competitors to merge with and no one wants the divisions they want to spin off.
So the execs finally had to get down to business and learn what it is their business! That doesn’t seem right.
misleading title
They already knew. This is just them publicly saying it to pretend to be remorseful.
Nightmare Clown Show? Try calling Comcast...
Anyone who want to pull their hair out and cry/laugh, just try calling Comcast re: their account. The staff are follow scripts that send you into never ending circles of repeating illogical claims about your account and ridiculous remedies for faulty billing. Thankfully, Sonic has arrived in my neighborhood: 10 gigabit fiber for $40 / month. EVERY person that I know is switching.