Comcast Takes Heat For Misleading ’10G’ Cable Broadband Branding

Broadband

from the this-one-goes-to-11 dept

Back in 2019 the cable industry, envious of all the attention 5G wireless was getting, pulled a new marketing term completely out of its ass. It simply started calling ordinary cable broadband upgrades 10G, based on absolutely no real-world standards or definitions. It was a hollow attempt to capitalize on wireless 5G hype because these companies hope to someday offer 10 Gbps cable broadband.

Fast forward to 2023, and Comcast has gotten an adorable little wrist slap for its abuse of the marketing term.

The National Advertising Division (NAD) is part of the advertising industry’s self-regulatory system run by BBB National Programs. It’s basically an attempt for industry to claim that you don’t need government regulators with any backbone policing misleading ads, because industry will regulate itself.

It’s all a bit performative; “punishments” occur long after the ads have run. There’s no serious penalty for telling the organization to piss off (outside of an empty threat to forward concerns to actual regulators, who also may or may not actually give a damn). Still, the organization last week urged that Comcast stop abusing the “10G term,” or at the very least make it clear the term is “aspirational”:

“Discontinue its “10G” claims or qualify them to (a) make clear that Comcast is implementing improvements that will enable it to achieve “10G” and that 10G is aspirational, or (b) use “10G” in a manner that is not false or misleading.”

If you actually want 10 gigabit per second broadband, you’ll have to subscribe to fiber, not cable, especially when it comes to upstream speeds. And even then, symmetrical 10 Gbps tiers are pretty hard to find. One of the very few ISPs offering this kind of speed is Chattanooga’s city owned utility provider, EPB, a project companies like AT&T and Comcast have long tried to sue and harass out of existence.

So this stuff does matter. But it’s extremely unlikely NAD’s gentle prodding actually results in any meaningful change at Comcast. And it’s equally unlikely that over-extended U.S. regulators at the FCC or FTC much care that everybody’s least-favorite cable giant misleads and confuses consumers in this way.

Filed Under: 10g, 5g, advertising, broadband, cable, chattanooga, epb, fiber, high speed internet, nad, telecom
Companies: comcast

A New Low: Just 46% Of U.S. Households Subscribe To Traditional Cable TV

Culture

from the not-a-fad-after-all dept

The “cord cutting” trend cable execs spent a decade claiming was a fad just broke another round of new records. According to Leichtman Research, major cable TV providers lost another 1.7 million subscribers last quarter, as users flock to streaming, over the air TV, TikTok, or, you know, books. Roughly 17,700 customers cut the cord every single day during the second quarter of 2023.

Over the last year (Q2 ’22 to Q2 ’23) the traditional cable TV sector lost a whopping 5,360,000 customers, compared to 4,235,000 customer defections the year earlier. The current number of U.S. households that has a cable connection sits somewhere around 46 percent, down from 73% at the end of 2017.

Comcast wound up being among the biggest losers in the quarter, losing 543,000 paying customers:

Historically, a big cable company like Comcast or Charter wasn’t too hurt by “cord cutting” because it could just jack up the cost of monopolized broadband access. And while that’s still generally true; here too cable giants are seeing increased competition from community broadband (co-ops, utilities, municipalities), 5G home wireless, and phone companies belatedly upgrading to fiber.

Interestingly though, streaming TV providers also wound up losing subscribers, albeit at a much slower rate:

The shift from traditional cable to streaming had some very obvious benefits. Lower costs, greater flexibility in choice, and even better customer service.

At the same time, as the streaming sector pursues quarterly growth, it’s increasingly adopting the kind of tactics that made cable TV so unpopular: relentless price hikes, shitty labor practices, and annoying new restrictions on usage. That, in turn, is driving more people to even less traditional services like Twitch or TikTok as the cycle of innovative disruption stumbles ever forth.

Filed Under: competition, cord cutting, disruption, streaming, tv, video
Companies: charter, charter spectrum, comcast

Comcast, AT&T Try To Kill New Requirements To Be Transparent About Their Shitty Pricing

Broadband

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

The 2021 infrastructure bill did some very good things for broadband. Not only did it include a massive, $42 billion investment in broadband deployment and require better mapping, it demanded that the FCC impose a new “nutrition label for broadband,” requiring that ISPs be transparent about all of the weird restrictions, caps, fees, and limitations of modern broadband connections.

It’s 2023 and there’s still no label. And big broadband providers including Cox, AT&T, Comcast, and Charter are, unsurprisingly, trying to have the entire requirement killed. After whining for two years that it was too hard to comply with the requirement, industry trade groups and lobbying organizations have been petitioning to have the new rule killed entirely:

The US broadband industry is united in opposition to a requirement that Internet service providers list all of their monthly fees. Five lobby groups representing cable companies, fiber and DSL providers, and mobile operators have repeatedly urged the Federal Communications Commission to eliminate the requirement before new broadband labeling rules take effect.

To be clear, requiring that these regional monopolies be clear about pricing is pretty much the bare minimum when it comes to regulatory oversight. Big ISPs for decades have advertised one price, then saddled your bill with spurious below the line surcharges to hit you with a higher rate.

The FCC, lobotomized after decades of lobbying, routinely engages in regulatory theater when it comes to big telecom. As in they’ll implement some fairly tepid efforts to demand “transparency” by big monopolies, but they routinely lack the courage to actually take aim at the underlying monopoly power and lack of competition (lest it upset campaign contributors and domestic surveillance allies).

And even the transparency efforts are routinely undercooked. Activists and consumer groups were already annoyed at the Rosenworcel FCC’s implementation of these new rules, noting that the agency didn’t really require that ISPs put the label anywhere conspicuous, defeating the whole purpose, and wasn’t doing a good job illustrating real world speeds.

It’s not particularly clear where this goes from here. The Rosenworcel FCC has generally been fairly feckless when it comes to standing up to predatory monopolies. And the telecom industry just successfully scuttled the nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn, leaving the FCC without the voting majority needed to do much of anything “controversial” — even if it was actually inclined to do so.

A reformer like Sohn would have likely pushed the FCC staff to try a little harder. I’d imagine that once Sohn’s less “controversial” replacement (Anna Gomez) is confirmed by Congress there will be some kind of label eventually, but it’s far from clear that the actual implementation will hold much value once big ISPs get done watering it down.

And this is the “best case” scenario under feckless Democratic leadership. If Trump or DeSantis win the presidency, control of the FCC will revert to Republican “leadership,” which in telecom historically involves simply doing whatever Comcast and AT&T tell them to.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband label, fcc, fees, high speed internet, telecom, transparency, usage caps
Companies: at&t, charter, comcast, cox

Comcast, Centurylink Fail To Derail Community-Owned Gigabit Fiber Network In Bountiful, Utah

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

More than 600 communities across the U.S. have decided to build their own broadband networks after decades of predatory behavior, slow speeds, and high prices by regional telecom monopolies.

That includes the city of Bountiful, Utah, which earlier this year voted to build a $48 million fiber network to deliver affordable, gigabit broadband to every business and residence in the city. The network is to be open access, meaning that multiple competitors can come in and compete on shared central infrastructure, driving down prices for locals (see our recent Copia study on this concept).

As you might expect, regional telecom monopolies hate this sort of thing. But because these networks are so popular among consumers, they’re generally afraid to speak out against them directly. So they usually employ the help of dodgy proxy lobbying and policy middlemen, who’ll then set upon any town or city contemplating such a network using a bunch of scary, misleading rhetoric.

Like in Bountiful, where the “Utah Taxpayers Association” (which has direct financial and even obvious managerial tethers to regional telecom giants CenturyLink (now Lumen) and Comcast) launched a petition trying to force a public vote on the $48 million in revenue bonds authorized for the project under the pretense that such a project would be an unmitigated disaster for the town. (Their effort didn’t work).

Big ISPs like to pretend they’re suddenly concerned about taxpayers and force entirely new votes on these kinds of projects because they know that with unlimited marketing budgets, they can usually flood less well funded towns or cities with misleading PR to sour the public on the idea.

But after the experience most Americans had with their existing broadband options during the peak COVID home education boom, it’s been much harder for telecom giants to bullshit the public. And the stone cold fact remains: these locally owned networks that wouldn’t even be considered if locals were happy with existing options.

You’ll notice these “taxpayer groups” exploited by big ISPs never criticize the untold billions federal and local governments throw at giant telecom monopolies for half-completed networks. Or the routine taxpayer fraud companies like AT&T, Frontier, CenturyLink (now Lumen) and others routinely engage in.

And it’s because such taxpayer protection groups are effectively industry-funded performance art; perhaps well intentioned at one point, but routinely hijacked, paid, and used as a prop by telecom monopolies looking to protect market dominance.

Gigi Sohn (who you’ll recall just had her nomination to the FCC scuttled by a sleazy telecom monopoly smear campaign) has shifted her focus heavily toward advocating for locally-owned, creative alternatives to telecom monopoly power. And in an op-ed to local Utah residents in the Salt Lake Tribune, she notes how telecom giants want to have their cake and eat it too.

They don’t want to provide affordable, evenly available next-generation broadband. But they don’t want long-neglected locals to, either:

Two huge cable and broadband companies, Comcast and CenturyLink/Lumen, have been members of UTA and have sponsored the UTA annual conference. They have been vocally opposed to community-owned broadband for decades and are well-known for providing organizations like the UTA with significant financial support in exchange for pushing policies that help maintain their market dominance. Yet when given the opportunity in 2020, before anyone else, to provide Bountiful City with affordable and robust broadband, the companies balked. So the dominant cable companies not only don’t want to provide the service Bountiful City needs, they also want to block others from doing so.

Big telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast (and all the consultants, think tankers, and academics they hire to defend their monopoly power) love to claim that community owned broadband networks are some kind of inherent boondoggle. But they’re just another business plan, dependent on the quality of the proposal and the individuals involved.

Even then, data consistently shows that community-owned broadband networks (whether municipal, cooperative, or built on the back of the city-owned utility) provide better, faster, cheaper service than regional monopolies. Such networks routinely not only provide the fastest service in the country, they do so while being immensely popular among consumers. They’re locally-owned and staffed, so they’re more accountable to locals. And they’re just looking to break even, not make a killing.

If I was a lumbering, apathetic, telecom monopoly solely fixated on cutting corners and raising rates to please myopic Wall Street investors, I’d be worried too.

Filed Under: bountiful, community broadband, competition, fiber, gigabit, gigi sohn, high speed internet, open access, utah
Companies: centurylink, comcast, lumen

Comcast Tells FCC It’s Just Too Hard To Explain Its Bullshit Broadband And TV Fees To Consumers

Broadband

from the can't-do-the-bare-minimum dept

For the better part of the decade, the generally feckless FCC has been trying to require that broadband ISPs be a little more honest about broadband fees and limits at the point of sale. The FCC has been pondering implementing a “nutrition label for broadband” for years but could never quite get around to it. The infrastructure bill demanded it, so the FCC finally got around to acting.

But big ISPs like Comcast, as usual, are dragging their feet. The cable giant recently told the FCC that it was just too difficult to itemize out all the bullshit fees it uses to pad your bill at the point of sale.

From usage caps to its infamous “broadcast TV surcharge,” the cable giant uses all manner of bogus charges to advertise you one rate, then charge you something else. One Consumer Reports study found that the cable industry makes an estimated $28 billion a year from bogus fees, which they calculated can drive up the advertised price by as much as 24 percent.

Obviously Comcast doesn’t want this gravy train going away, but consumer advocates are clearly unimpressed by this latest delay tactic:

“The label hasn’t even reached consumers yet, but Comcast is already trying to create loopholes. This request would allow the big ISPs to continue hiding the true cost of service and frustrating customers with poor service. Congress created the label to end these practices, not maintain them, and Comcast offers no compelling reason for the FCC to violate Congress’ intent.”

Keep in mind the FCC is doing the absolute bare minimum here. They’re not banning ISPs and cable companies from ripping you off, they’re just politely asking that the broadband industry be slightly transparent about their fees. And despite turning the FCC into a feckless invertebrate on consumer protection over the last seven years, industry can’t even do the bare minimum.

More generally, whether telecom, hotels, or airlines, U.S. regulators have made it clear that they’re ok with giant corporations ripping you off with spurious surcharges provided they’re just moderately clever about it. Even here, when the government is finally prodded to action after decades of apathy, the end result at best winds up being slightly more transparency.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband caps, consumer protection, fcc, hidden fees, jessica rosenworcel, monopoly, telecom
Companies: comcast

Report Shows Comcast Continues To Lie About Its Broadband Coverage

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

As we’ve noted a few times now, U.S. taxpayers have doled out more than $400 million to map broadband access, yet regulators are still struggling to get it right. U.S. ISPs routinely overstate broadband availability and coverage, and they’ve historically challenged efforts to improve broadband maps lest it truly illustrate the downsides of monopoly power and limited competition.

Case in point: a Colorado resident complained to Ars Technica that he couldn’t get Comcast broadband service at his address, despite Comcast claims that he could. The outlet dug a little deeper and found that Comcast’s broadband maps, including the ones submitted to the FCC, dramatically overstated the ISP’s coverage across large swaths of the user’s neighborhood:

Upon reviewing Hillier’s address, we verified that it’s impossible to order service at the home on Comcast’s website. Just as Hillier told the FCC, Comcast’s online availability checker says it’s an “invalid address”—even though Comcast not only told the FCC it serves the home but also disputed Hillier’s challenge when he pointed out the error.

We found similar evidence suggesting Comcast submitted false broadband coverage information at dozens of homes near Hillier’s Arvada address and on a street in Fort Collins, Colorado.

The FCC’s new mapping program includes a challenge system that’s supposed to allow residents, towns, or competitors to challenge inaccurate ISP data. But that system needs a lot of work despite a decade of effort and $400 million. Comcast automatically defended its bad data, forcing the users to jump through hoops to try and prove his very obvious lack of Comcast broadband service:

“I submitted proof from Comcast/Xfinity’s own systems that my address was not served by this provider despite being reported as such to you by Comcast/Xfinity… I expect more from a government body like the FCC [than] to just say ‘go sort it out and let us know how it turns out,'” he wrote in a response to the FCC that he shared with Ars.

As Ars correctly notes, the FCC has a shaky track record when it comes to standing up to monopolies that artificially inflate their broadband coverage. Wireless carriers also have a long history of over-stating broadband and wireless coverage, and the GAO has been complaining about the FCC’s timidity on holding ISPs accountable for the better part of the last decade.

With more than $45 billion in subsidies (thanks to the Infrastructure Act) stumbling down the road, you’re going to be seeing a lot of new complaints about ISPs inflating their broadband availability to nab subsidies they probably don’t deserve. You’ll also see countless stories about how the feckless FCC — whose processes have long favored powerful monopolies — dropping the ball.

Keep in mind that Comcast is also participating in a lobbying and smear campaign to prevent the seating of Gigi Sohn to the FCC, ensuring that the agency lacks the voting majority to do much of anything deemed controversial by the telecom lobby — including holding them accountable for inflated broadband coverage claims.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband mapping, broadband maps, cable broadband, fcc, high speed internet, infrastructure act, maps, subsidies, telecom
Companies: comcast

Cord Cutting Is Hitting Comcast Harder Than Ever

Failures

from the apathy-isn't-a-business-model dept

For a while there, everybody’s least favorite cable company, Comcast, was weathering the cord cutting revolution fairly well. The company’s losses on the cable TV side could simply be recouped over on its broadband side, where a monopoly protected it from having to actually, you know, try.

Things have shifted. Last year, Comcast saw a record 11 percent of its customer base cancel their Comcast cable service in favor of streaming video, over the air broadcasts, or free services like TikTok. And the company lost lost 440,000 traditional video customers in the fourth quarter of 2022 alone, a big bump over the 227,000 customers it lost in the last three months of 2021.

Overall, Internet disruption hasn’t been kind to the cable giant, and it appears to only be getting worse:

Worse, the 2.034 million pay TV customers lost by Comcast in 2022 was a significant uptick over the 1.67 million lost in 2021. Overall, Comcast’s pay TV base eroded by a huge 11.2% last year, and it now serves only around 16.1 million subscribers. Just three years ago, that figure stood at nearly 20 million customers. 

The company has had some better success with its own streaming video service, Peacock, adding five million new customers in one quarter. The problem: those users pay significantly less money than the traditional cable customers they’re losing, and Peacock itself has been a net loss so far:

Peacock’s quarterly losses grew to $978 million from Oct. 1 – Dec. 31. In Q3, Peacock reported losses of $614 million. For all of 2022, Comcast and NBCU lost around $3 billion — the “peak”, they claim — building Peacock. 

Comcast still has its broadband monopoly to protect itself from pesky innovation. But even that’s facing some new challenges. Fixed 5G wireless providers are starting to nibble away at the company’s frustrated subscriber base, and cooperatives, utilities, and municipalities — buoyed by an historic infusion of broadband subsidies — are also gaining steam.

At this rate Comcast may, someday in the not so distant future, be required to actually try.

Filed Under: 5g, broadband, cable tv, cord cutting, monopoly, streaming tv, tv, video
Companies: comcast

AT&T, Comcast, Quickly Returned To Being The Top Corporate Funders Of Anti-Democracy Insurrectionists

Politics

from the corruption-at-work dept

Much like the company’s dedication to women, AT&T’s dedication to not funding people eager to overthrow democracy appears to be somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent. And the company certainly isn’t alone.

Shortly after January 6 a number of companies, including telecom giants like AT&T, publicly crowed about how they’d be ceasing all funding to politicians who supported the attack on the Capitol and the overturning of, you know, democracy. Of course that promise was never worth all that much, given that the umbrella lobbying orgs companies like AT&T used never really stopped financing terrible people.

Initially, AT&T made a big stink about how it had suspended funding to all 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election. But not only did AT&T not actually suspend funding via its numerous policy and lobbying tendrils, it didn’t even really ever stop funding insurrectionists directly.

A more recent breakdown of campaign financing by Bloomberg found several things. One, big telecom, which has largely been forgotten about during the myopic, multi-year DC policy fixation on “big tech,” was far and away among the biggest donors to insurrectionists and election conspiracy theorists:

Bloomberg found that companies like Comcast not only didn’t pause donations to election deniers long, they ramped up the funding of those candidates right before the midterms, as it was working tirelessly to keep the FCC mired permanently in partisan gridlock so it can’t do any of the things the public wants (restoring net neutrality, restoring media consolidation rules).

As is usually the case, Comcast didn’t much want to talk about why it throws money at people trying to destroy democracy:

By the end of the 2021, the Philadelphia-based cable giant had not only resumed giving to those candidates, but increased its contributions throughout 2022 to $365,500, becoming the second-biggest donor to election deniers among the tech and telecom firms. Comcast didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The mainstream press being, well, the mainstream press, Bloomberg chooses to inform its readers that telecom companies are lobbying radical anti-democracy insurrectionists and conspiracy theorists to “boost broadband rollout”:

Conversely, telecom companies and semiconductor makers want more government aid for programs to boost broadband rollout and domestic manufacturing. That requires developing relationships with newly empowered Republicans.

Most of the federal COVID and infrastructure broadband funding has already been assigned. And most of the dictating of who gets that money is being determined on the state level, not the federal. Bloomberg just somehow forgets to mention that AT&T and Comcast have been working tirelessly, arm in arm with the GOP, to keep the FCC mired in partisan gridlock in perpetuity.

All told, most of the claims by corporations that they’d be more discerning about their campaign financing in the wake of January 6 wound up being bullshit. And any interest in campaign finance reform in the wake of this giant middle finger to democracy appears similarly hollow.

Filed Under: campaign donations, campaign finance reform, conspiracy theorists, election denier, elections, gop, insurrectionists, january 6, lobbying, maga, republican
Companies: at&t, comcast, verizon

Despite Warnock Win, Gigi Sohn’s Path To The FCC Remains Mired In Dumb, Corrupt Bullshit

Politics

from the dysfunction-junction dept

We’ve noted several times how telecom and media giants are running a sleazy year-long smear campaign against Biden FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, in the hopes of blocking her confirmation vote and miring the agency in perpetual consumer protection gridlock. The attacks have been carefully seeded across the US press through various think tanks and nonprofits, and accuse Sohn of everything from hating police to being an enemy of rural America.

Nominated last October after an inexplicable nine month delay, Sohn is widely popular and broadly experienced. Yet whereas Trump FCC appointee Nathan Simington (who had little to no telecom experience) was nominated and confirmed in less than 30 days, Sohn’s nomination has languished for much of the year. Why? She’s an actual reformer. An anti-monopolist.

Sohn’s nomination is uniformly opposed by the entire Senate GOP whose blind fealty to telecom monopolies has long been unwavering. That means she’s needed all Democrats to get in line to get her nomination across the finish line. But three Senators: Mark Kelly (Arizona), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nevada), and Joe Manchin (West Virginia) have repeatedly waffled on providing their support.

All three Senators were targeted by companies like Comcast over the summer, which hired former staffers to try and influence their votes on Sohn during heated midterm fights. With the midterms over there was some hope that Kelly and Masto could be swayed (Manchin is generally viewed as the most obstinate of the three), but Democrats have made it clear they’re in no rush to confirm Sohn during the lame duck:

Cantwell said the nomination of Democrat Gigi Sohn to fill the key fifth seat on the Federal Communication Commission faced the same issue on timing when asked if the Senate would take up the nomination before the end of December. The FCC has been divided 2-2 between Democrats and Republicans since January 2021.

“It’s all about the queue of are we doing legislation or are we doing nom(inations) and my sense is right now we’re trying to get the omnibus done,” Cantwell said.

There’s never really been a sense of urgency to seat Sohn from folks like Cantwell, who has repeatedly been accused of “dithering” by reformers. The original 9 month delay by the Biden Administration to even appoint Sohn also sent a loud message, intentional or not: telecom consumer protection really isn’t much of an actual priority.

If there’s no lame duck vote, the hope is that Warnock’s Georgia win will give Sohn enough help to get over the hump in 2023. But that would require Biden re-nominate Sohn in a new year. If Sohn’s not re-nominated, it’s extremely likely that any replacement candidate would be far friendlier to telecom industry interests, and less “controversial” (read: interested in actual, meaningful reform) to grease the skids.

Even if Sohn is eventually seated sometime in the middle of 2023, that gives her only around a year and a half to develop and help pass meaningful policy. And should the GOP retake the White House in 2024, it would be relatively trivial to strip those reforms away using the Congressional Review Act, just like they did in 2017 with the GOP killed basic FCC broadband privacy rules before they could take effect.

The Washington Post reported this week that “Conservative groups” (read: nonprofits used by telecom and media companies to pee in the discourse pool while pretending to be objective, good faith organizations) have spent a quarter million dollars on Facebook ads smearing Sohn:

In the past year, two conservative nonprofits — the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) and the Center for a Free Economy (CFE) — have placed at least $246,000 in Facebook ads opposing Sohn, according to a review of digital ads archives. Facebook does not disclose the exact amount paid or reach garnered for ads on the site, but its database shows that the two groups’ paid messages have been shown to users at least 14.8 million times.

Countless millions more have been spent under the table on all the nonprofits out there currently seeding the press with false claims that Sohn hates cops, rural Americans, free speech, and Hispanics. And some of the money attacking Sohn has also come from Democrats, like former Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who, over the summer, waged a $250k campaign aimed at making things up about how Sohn secretly hates rural America, an incoherent claim to anybody that actually knows her.

All of this illustrates how afraid telecom and media giants are of losing all the hand outs thrown their way by the Trump administration, whether we’re talking about net neutrality or media consolidation rules. It also illustrates what awaits you if you’re a popular, experienced policymaker interested in genuinely reforming one of the most heavily monopolized industries in America.

The telecom industry enjoyed four years of pure regulatory capture under a Trump administration that effectively gave the sector everything it wanted: zero oversight, mindless merger approvals, and huge tax breaks for doing nothing. Under Biden, the agency has been gridlocked for going on two years thanks to a relentless smear campaign.

That’s six years in which the top U.S. media and telecom regulator has been either directly captured by industry, or bogged down in partisan gridlock directly thanks to corporate lobbying. Yet the press, when it can be bothered to cover what’s happening to Sohn in between transcribing Elon Musk brain farts, seems incapable of calling any of this what it is: corruption.

Filed Under: broadband, catherine cortez masto, corruption, digital divide, fcc, gigi sohn, high speed internet, joe manchin, mark kelly, media, monopolies, telecom
Companies: comcast

Comcast’s Bullshit ‘Broadcast TV Fee’ Surges To $27 A Month

Scams

from the *spurious-surcharge dept

Back in 2014, Comcast introduced a new $1.50 per month surcharge on cable bills it called its “Broadcast TV Fee.” Said fee was really just a portion of the cost of doing business for Comcast (programming costs), busted out of the full bill and hidden below the line — designed specifically to let the company falsely advertise a lower price.

Fast forward to 2022 and the fee has jumped to $27 a month, with recent hikes as high as $7.35 a month in some areas:

Comcast’s advertised prices do not include the Broadcast TV or the Regional Sports Network fees even though these fees account for a large portion of customers’ actual monthly bills. On Comcast’s ordering website, the base prices are listed along with a message stating that Broadcast TV and Regional Sports fees are “extra” and that the price is “subject to change.” The Broadcast TV and Regional Sports fees also aren’t included in how Comcast calculates promotional pricing and thus can be raised even when a customer’s promotional rate hasn’t expired.

This is something that cable giants have been doing for decades. It’s effectively false advertising, and allows them to pretend that they aren’t consistently raising rates. And, as the quote above notes, it even allows them to raise prices on you if you’ve agreed to a promotional rate.

A 2019 Consumer Reports study found that about 24% of consumer cable bills are comprised of bullshit fees, generating cable giants $28 billion in additional revenue annually. The problem is just as bad over among phone companies selling broadband (see Centurylink’s utterly nonsensical “Internet Cost Recovery” fee).

Occasionally, a state AG will dole out a brief wrist slap for the practice that only costs Comcast (or Charter, or Centurylink) a tiny fraction of the money they made off the misleading fees. Federal regulators, regardless of party, have generally given their tacit approval to the practice, much as they have in the banking, airline, and other industries. Ripping people off creatively is innovative, apparently.

The Biden FCC’s big solution to this and other nickel-and-diming efforts has been to demand a voluntary nutrition label, letting you more clearly see how you’re getting ripped off. Actually stopping big telecom monopolies from ripping you off (or even acknowledging that it’s happening using pointed language) is unfortunately just a bridge too far.

Filed Under: broadband, broadcast tv fee, cable, consumer protection, fcc, ftc, hidden fees, high speed internet, regional sports fee, tv
Companies: comcast