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The biggest scam of all – pressuring or forcing subscribers to “rent” the clunky, technologically outdated cable box at a greatly inflated price – is still in place, despite a brief effort by the FCC in 2016 to shut it down.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: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Friday May 29 2020, @03:36AM (8 children)
Every year the cost went up, every year I called and spent an hour or two on the phone getting the bill back under $100. The last time I did it I was at $145/month and told them I wanted it under $100. They got me down to $99. Then I got my first bill. Yeah, the cable bill was $99. But when they added all the fees, taxes, and other bullshit I was back up to over $130/month.
Next year when I called I told them I wanted to cancel. They sent me to a client retention specialist, left me on hold for a good hour, and the first thing out of my mouth was "your stuff is piled up in the corner, how do I send it all back to you? That shut her right up.
That was over 2 years ago and I haven't looked back. I bought a cable modem and router for about $250, and I'm paying $25 for cheap internet that does everything I need it to do.
Maybe if I can get basic cable and a DVR for $50 a month I'll get cable again, but that ain't ever gonna happen.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday May 29 2020, @05:33AM
Waiting hopefully for Starlink.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Informative) by captain normal on Friday May 29 2020, @05:49AM (3 children)
Are you in a dead zone for UHF digital broadcast? If not/or maybe, check out:
https://www.antennaweb.org/ [antennaweb.org]
If over the air is impossible, then check out https://orbytv.com/# [orbytv.com]
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Friday May 29 2020, @01:52PM (1 child)
I've been using a rabbit ear ever since TV went digital, digital TV wiped out every reason to subscribe to cable (I understand it's necessary in certain regions because of topography). Then they changed some frequencies and cut power for 5G (which only helps the phone companies, not you or me) and half my stations are now gone. I'll have to buy an outdoor antenna.
Odd that the government paid TV stations with my tax money to do this with The Cable Guy in charge of the FCC. And people wonder why I detest the guy who appointed him.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stretch611 on Friday May 29 2020, @03:48PM
If you are fairly close to a major city, rabbit ears can work out... But in almost every case a good outside antenna is best.
When I lived out Portland, ME, rabbit ears (actually a small 12" x 8" x 3/4" wall mounted indoor antenna) got me all of about 2 or 3 large stations.
At my house 20 miles outside of Atlanta, those same rabbit ears got me about 6-8 stations.
I bought an outside antenna for about $100 and placed it on my roof. I went from 6-8 stations to about 25-30, many with multiple subchannels giving me over 50 different channels.
One thing though... I tried the same antenna for my mother... who actually lives a few miles closer to Atlanta than I do. The indoor antenna was horrible on only got 1 or 2 stations, the outside antenna only did slightly better in pulled in about 10 stations. But, she lives in a subdivision with a ton of old growth trees. Even though she lives closer to the broadcasting stations and should have a much stronger signal, all the trees cause the signal to bounce around and cause ghosting and makes it harder to get without interference. It should be noted that her subdivision is so bad that most people there, including her, can not even get satellite TV (either DISH or DirecTV) due to the number of large trees.
So bigger is always better with antennas... But you really need a clear view of the sky in order to get the best bang for your buck.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday May 29 2020, @02:45PM
Yeah, I'm in a valley and my OTA reception sucks. I can sorta get NBC, Fox, and PBS if I'm willing to put up with a lot of dropouts. I haven't tried to watch OTA in probably 6 months now.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 29 2020, @12:08PM (2 children)
Good luck hanging on to that $25 cheap internet rate.
I had cable TV for about 6 months when I moved into my first house - hurricane Andrew had just hit and in the ensuing chaos it took the cable company 6 months to get around to shutting off the service that I never paid for. When they finally cut it off, I bought an antenna and never looked back.
By the time we left that house with the antenna, the internet and Netflix had come up as our primary content sources, again: never looking back.
Family spent the night in a rented room last night, first time since the pandemic hit - it's insane how much brainwashing there is on cable TV. The advertising was always intolerable, but trying to watch the launch coverage on cable was pointless - we streamed NASA TV on a tablet instead.
As for your internet charge rate: I sincerely hope the Cable TV company isn't your internet provider. Here, we have Comcast as a virtual monopoly (unless you want AT&T DSL delivered via 40+ year old looooooong copper lines.) They gave us easy teaser rates around $25 a month at first, then jacked us up over $70 for "bottom tier" service. Occasionally they would run a "cable bundle" package for $39 a month or some-such, I would take the cable box and the cheap rate, then return the cable box to them (in person, to get written proof that they have it) still in the wrapper when the promo expired. It was an extreme hassle, as has been every other interaction with them, but the internet service is at least acceptable.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Friday May 29 2020, @02:02PM
That's very similar to me. I was living in a little apartment, and cable was included with the rent. Then the tornadoes hit in March 2006; no electricity for a week, a month for cable or DSL. After they rebuilt the infrastructure, cable was no longer free, so I dropped TV and never looked back. It just wasn't necessary and cost way too much.
The bars still have cable, and what I see appalls me. Discovery used to be about science, History used to be about history, but now all that's on cable besides sports is stupid "reality" shows, crime drama, and "true crime".
And people pay huge sums for that dreck. Now I have AT&T fiber and Netflix in 4K while cable is standard definition.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @05:25AM
> They gave us easy teaser rates around $25 a month at first, then jacked us up over $70 for "bottom tier" service.
> Occasionally they would run a "cable bundle" package for $39 a month or some-such
This is innovation! Entrepreneurs creating jobs! True American patriots! Perhaps some gold lettering in ALL CAPS would provide additional value to you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @04:23AM (1 child)
There are tells you can look for to know when to discard everything somebody is saying. Once you spot a blatent lie, no reason to sift through a bunch o bullcrap and cross verify every other fact, liars lie.
Broadcast and sports surcharges are not "pure profit" for the cable companies. They ARE pure profit though. Point here is you can stop reading when you hit such obvious bullcrap. Yes the cable industry is corrupt, yes they silently increase your rates damned near every month after luring you in with a teaser rate. But there is no point wading through fake news. Just stop. Don't read it, don't rebroadcast links to it and don't post it to Soylent news. This sort of "News" needs to die even more urgently than killing cable by continuing to cut the cord.
(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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @04:45AM (10 children)
Charter is particularly bad. Let's be honest, movie and sports channels are too expensive. ESPN is by far the most expensive of any channel, sports or otherwise. But let's not let Charter off the hook.
I have a grandfathered plan from Time Warner Cable. Charter has raised my rates a lot. But they've also started removing channels from my plan that I used to receive, effectively forcing me to switch to a new plan if I ever want to receive those channels again. In the process, I'll also lose my grandfathered whole house DVR service. If Charter wants to raise my rates, I understand it to a point. But they're being particularly evil about it. And they had no problem screwing over Time Warner Cable's intelligent home subscribers, essentially bricking equipment those customers had purchased and telling them tough luck.
But the reason Charter is being particularly evil about prices is because subscribers are paying for mergers and acquisitions, specifically the purchase of Time Warner Cable. Charter took on a large amount of debt, around $27 billion, to complete the purchase. In the process, they also took on about $23.3 billion in debt that Time Warner Cable had incurred. Now they have to pay off the debt, and that gets passed along to the customers. In total, Charter had about $66 billion in debt after purchasing Time Warner Cable, costs that get passed along to customers. A lot of that debt is poorly rated, meaning that the interest rates on it are higher.
This article describes the situation fairly well: https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/269747-charter-would-have-to-raise-prices-a-lot-to-make-its-merger [thehill.com]. Basically, instead of taking on all the debt to acquire Time Warner Cable, Charter could have spent the money on infrastructure to expand its service area. That would also have added a lot of customers, with the benefits of better infrastructure and serving more customers. Instead, the debt was used to pay Time Warner Cable's shareholders.
Want to know why the prices are so high? Corporate greed is the answer.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday May 29 2020, @05:01AM
I didn't even subscribe to TV. Only internet access. They raised the price 70% in four years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @05:10AM (2 children)
It's amazing how the government wants to go after the good guys (Google, Amazon) where there is plenty of competition and things work well for consumers while they allow the bad guys to merge to reduce competition further and make things even worse for consumers in a space where things were already bad for consumers. The government wants to go after the good guys to make things worse for the consumers, they don't go after the bad guys because the bad guys make things bad for consumers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @07:05AM (1 child)
Those aren't good guys. They're just less savvy at politics and expanded into many domains so more people are in competition with them (meaning out to tear them down). Cable companies just deal with communication and media. The big tech companies do software, do hosting, do logistics, do hardware, do news (scanning existing news sources and reformatting the data so you don't need to visit those news sites), do mapping, etc... A larger surface area means a larger target.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @03:21PM
The government's intent to go after Google and Amazon is purely to make things worse for the consumer. They don't like how these companies do a good job serving consumers when compared to the legacy industries who do a terrible job.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 29 2020, @12:13PM
Mergers and acquisitions often leave the resulting entity in extreme debt, and the former owner-operators of the constituent components with a pile of cash so large that they spend the next decade feathering nests in multiple offshore tax havens.
Locally, Miami Heart and Mount Sinai Medical center merged like that - the story is long and complex, but one visible result was a severe reduction in staff at Mount Sinai - like: on weekends they had one (single) security guard / check in point for the entire complex.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by SpockLogic on Friday May 29 2020, @12:57PM (2 children)
When Time Warner became Speculum (or something like that) and they were bought by Charter, I got fed up with the constant price rise for cable TV and decided to cancel. I called and was shunted off to a retention specialist. The drone started off by trying to be chatty and reading the script with “ Let me pull up your details, it won’t take a moment … and while we are waiting what sort of TV do you like watching most? I exploded with “What TV I watch is none of your fucking business. Your job is to cancel my cable subscription, are we quite clear.” It only took a few more minutes and I dumped their equipment back at their office later that day.
I still get regular mailers and calls from them trying to sell cable, streaming or cell service with dishonest and deceptive clams of fixed pricing and no mention of the bullshit fees that are hidden in the small print. When called my response is to immediately ask "Does your mother know you lie to people for a living?” That ends the conversation.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Sunday May 31 2020, @12:57AM (1 child)
A Comcast rep stopped by here a few months back and knocked on our door. "We noticed you don't have Comcast! Would you like to get fast cable internet and TV," he asked...
I told him we weren't interested. When pushed for the reason why, I said something along the lines of "Comcast isn't a good company. They haven't treated me well, and they've done a lot of things I don't agree with."
The guy of course asks, "Like what?" I told him he didn't have enough time in the day for me to cover it all and they should just move on.
At that point my roommate had come out and the guy asked him, "Would you like to get Comcast?" My roommate said, "I don't have anything nice to say about them and just talking about them makes me mad."
Apparently that was enough to clue the guy in that there were no sales opportunities at our place. I do have to wonder how much the individual sales reps know about the company they're working for.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @08:45AM
The door-to-door ones work on commission with a low base. They don't care because if they did, they'd have never taken the job.
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Friday May 29 2020, @01:44PM (1 child)
Want to know why the prices are so high? Corporate greed is the answer.
Corporate greed == Shareholder greed. When the fingers point back at your 401K, are you ashamed? I'm all up for the whole corporations suck thing, but I'm never quite sure about the whole system that enables it, as well as my part in it. That's sort of why I find the answer of "corporate greed" a little unsatisfying.
That is all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @05:42AM
Last time I checked, my 401k doesn't come with any voting powers letting me dictate whether we pursue one quarter of sugar rush (for me) + degradation of quality (for you) or we pursue a long term warm 'n' fuzzy for us both.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday May 29 2020, @04:46AM (4 children)
But google fiber works consistently, is a self hookup, has a basically affordable cost, and cannot come more highly recommended.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 29 2020, @12:18PM
That's quite the coverage map:
https://broadbandnow.com/mapshot/provider/sm/Google-Fiber.jpg [broadbandnow.com]
We've got fiber, I think by Verizon, in the higher density areas of town. Our neighborhood has ~1 house per acre, we're not holding our breath.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Kalas on Friday May 29 2020, @06:05PM (2 children)
I hear the performance is fantastic in places you can actually get their service but keep in mind the downside of giving Google direct 100% access to all your home internet traffic.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday May 29 2020, @08:27PM (1 child)
You also give them that if you use chrome or firefox and don't fuck with the settings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @05:53AM
Just a reminder for those smug fucks on Firefox with all teh blockers [mozilla.org]:
Security
Deceptive Content and Dangerous Software Protection
"When you download an application file, Firefox checks the site hosting it against a list of sites known to contain "malware". If the site is found on that list, Firefox blocks the file immediately, otherwise it asks Google’s Safe Browsing service if the software is safe by sending it some of the download’s metadata."
Oooh scary.... Dangerous! Better leave the default checkbox on right? Every site (not on the list of malware) you visit gets sent to Google.
(Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Friday May 29 2020, @01:57PM
Sure it's not too much to ask for plain dealing? I am struggling to think of a large corporation that is straightforward and ethical.
But I confess my Spectrum $45 internet-only plan is, and has remained, just that. It's like they are willing customers to cut the TV cord.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Friday May 29 2020, @08:35PM
I'm happy with Pluto and their streaming service. Plenty of channels and its all free with some commercials.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @09:11PM
I've had Comcast internet for over 15 years. My experience has been that service is reliable and on the rare occasion I've needed technical help, it has been excellent.
On the other hand, the sales and billing department are pure liquid evil. It's cruel and unusual punishment to deal with them over the phone, and a good policy to record the conversations you have with their representatives. (I think the law requires you to inform them that you're recording the conversation.) But if I walk into the local office (before COVID-19) and ask for information or help with my bill, it always gets taken care of properly.
But while the local office could tell me exactly what I would pay, including fees, they couldn't cut rates that much. So I only use Comcast for internet, and an OTA antenna for television.