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In many ways it’s a rite of passage in America: being ripped off by your cable company and trying to figure out how they did it. Now a lawsuit against Charter Communications is seeking to uncover just that.
The biggest scam of all – pressuring or forcing subscribers to “rent” the clunky, technologically outdated cable box at a greatly inflated price – is still in place, despite a brief effort by the FCC in 2016 to shut it down.
And then there are hidden costs – such as “broadcast TV fees” and “regional sports fees” – raking in tens of millions of dollars in pure profit for unscrupulous cable companies, despite Consumer Reports focusing on the topic for a number of years, and now Congress even starting to pay attention.
But although we have all grown used to our cable fees rocketing the second you are off the special two-year contract rate, requiring you to call up the company and threaten to move to a competitor until you are offered the next incredible special deal, Charter may have pushed things too far with its latest special offer: a two-year flat fee deal that somehow, it is claimed, grew more expensive every month.
Five Charter Communications customers, based in Ohio and Kentucky, have formally accused [PDF] the company of a bait-and-switch scam for its cable TV service. The biz advertised a fixed monthly rate, they say, but far from being fixed, every few months it cost a little more.
Are the cable companies to blame, or the sports and movie channels that are charging more?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 29 2020, @01:53PM
Yeah, yeah, we know all about it. Telecoms have been ripping off customers since the 1980s. The techniques are tiresomely familiar-- teasers, rate creep, equipment rental charges, reduction of services, etc. Still a good idea to spell things out periodically. And the question is, what's to be done about it?
Before that, in the 1970s, it was big, bad Ma Bell screwing the public. They were greatly hated. You could not have a 2nd phone connected to your line, touch tone dialing, or even just a longer cord for your handset, without them levying an additional monthly charge for those things. When I was a child, my father came back from a business trip to Canada with a bit of contraband: an extra long cord for the handset. Another evil was the acoustic modem (110 baud), because AT&T insisted they owned everything and customers were not allowed to connect anything whatsoever to their phone jack, so modems couldn't be connected directly, instead had to squawk at the handset, maintain that air gap. AT&T also tested lines to see whether you had connected additional phones on the sly. Therefore, aftermarket phones came with a switch to turn the ringer off.
We got one more screw job, the so-called "local toll" call. Calling our own county seat was that strange form of "local toll" call that was even more costly than long distance to another state. The county seat of the closest adjacent county, 20 miles away, was actually a local call. But not our own county seat. Even our nearest post office, 7 miles away in the closest town to us, was local toll. About the only good thing to say is that local calls were free.
At $3/minute, we very, very rarely made international phone calls. Far cheaper to continue the custom of writing letters. We dealt with the cable TV problem by refusing it. We're cord nevers. But the rest of the neighborhood couldn't put that crack pipe down. They complained and whined about the high price, but wouldn't quit.
One of the big problems with AT&T was their network. It was dedicated line. Packet switching, as is used almost everywhere for computer networking, is way, way, way more efficient. VoIP is a tenth the cost of a landline, and would be even cheaper if we could dispense with the phone number. Sadly, DNS is nowhere close to being able to fill that gap in our technology. Networking technology change is what finally ended the high rates for making long distance calls, including the $3/minute rate for the international call. Also had to smack AT&T around to make that happen, as they were abusing their monopoly to delay that threat to their business.
And so, back to the question: what are we going to do about exorbitant cable rates? People whine, but won't boycott cable TV. Streaming TV on the Internet is, I think, the best hope. It will take time, but it's coming. These new video codecs that are rolling out, AV1, and in a few more years, AV2, may prove to be the enabling technology that finally ends the current cable TV regime, same as packet switching networking did to POTS. It's not just that AV1 is about twice as good as MPEG4, it's perhaps more importantly, that unlike the MPEGs, AV1 is in all senses of the word, free. No patent encumbrances, no licensing fees.