A reader from Vermont writes in to let us know that he accidentally discovered Comcast has been charging him a $3/month modem rental fee for a modem he owned, because Comcast claimed that due to poor record keeping, it had no way of distinguishing between Adelphia’s modem renters and owners. This fee went on for months undetected because Comcast doesn’t itemize such fees on their online statements, only on their printed bills. (Well yeah, because including such details online would waste ink…wait, what?) When our reader called Comcast to have the fees refunded, he was told he’d have to provide proof of purchase for his modem.
Here’s his email. [Note: since originally being posted, the dates have been corrected as per the OP's comments below.]
First, a little bit of a back story. I signed up with Adelphia for cable internet service back in June of 2006. I went out and bought my own modem and service was fine.Comcast bought out Adelphia, and that’s when the trouble began. On 10/02/07 I started getting charged for leasing a modem (remember I have always owned and used my own). I wasn’t given any notice of this, and the charge was not itemized in my online bill, only the paper bill. Since I was expecting a rate increase at that point, the additional 5% went unnoticed.
On 01/05/08 I noticed that I was being charged this fee and called up to complain and have it removed from my bill. What I was told when I called is what disturbed me the most. I was told that Adelphia offered a free lease program to its customers, a service that Comcast didn’t have. The records, however, weren’t good enough to determine who had the free lease program and who had their own modem, so they decided to just charge everybody and let the customers figure it out for themselves. I was also told that I needed to prove that I purchased this modem by presenting a receipt (on an 18 month old modem I could just have easily purchased off of Craigslist or from a friend).
I got angry at this point and was told by the CSR that an e-mail would be sent to the Billing and Research Department and they would “see what they could do for me” and I could expect a reply within 10 business days. I promptly filed a complaint with the BBB and on Monday received a call from somebody at Comcast. The charges were removed immediately, but who knows how many other customers out there are slowly having $3 a month stolen from them. I know the amount seems trivial, but it’s how they treated the situation that got me fired up.
(Thanks to Keith!)
(Photo: Getty)
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Comcast did the same to me only I realized it about 3 years ago when I had only had their service for about 2 years. I called them and informed them that they needed to refund me that $72 that they had charged me over the previous two years. I wish I was wiser at the time but I ended up compromising with them to have a credit of $50 put on my account.
Comcast business strategy:
1. Charge higher rates for cable services than anyone else.
2. Use higher rates to build up cash reserves.
3. Buy every other cable company in America using cash reserves.
4. Immediately raise rates on “purchased” customers.
5. Repeat process until you own the world.
@hn333:
“Free” implies that it was given to them – what they were doing is called “theft”.
@Mercurypdx: BZZZT Incorrect! The correct answer is “It takes up valuable ad space where we can upsell our customers.”
Sorry…I pay my Comcast bill online as well, and there are no ads in the part of comcast.com where you pay your bill and manage the financial side of your account.
First of all, the moral of this story is read your bills. Especially when there’s a major change to the account.
With Comcast, you can look at the paper bill that they send you or you can view a .pdf of the paper bill online. This probably would have been a lot easier to deal with if he’d brought it up the first month he was with Comcast.
That being said, it is pretty crappy to automatically assume that everyone gets a modem charge. What Comcast should have done was to continue not charging all of the people with the free lease program until they could figure out Adelphia’s paperwork.
At the very least, this should have been communicated better to the customers. On the other hand, there may very well have been a letter from Comcast explaining the situation included with this guy’s statements, which he would have seen if he had read his bills instead of throwing them right into the trash. See point number one.
@JustAGuy2: I have no problem believing their costs are marked up to make a profit already, and hell, if they HID the stupid Franchise Fee that’d be one thing, but to flat out say “We’re charging you way more than we should, oh and here’s a fee so we can have French Vanilla coffee too,” that’s another thing.
To me this sounds like the credit card issue of charging their customers a fee to use a card to offset the fee the company is charged to accept credit cards.
I can’t wait to switch to dialup and ditch the digital.
They shouldn’t have to just refund the money.
They should be fined and penalized… which they’ll pass on to the customer of course… so man… that sucks too.
@rmuser: I thought the same thing at first too, but then I actually looked up “leach” and this is a valid usage. [www.answers.com]
Comcast bought out Time Warner in our area, and everything (we have digital cable and broadband internet through them) has gone downhill. From the transition, to the TV service (empty guides, On-Demand channels that don’t work most of the time) is worse and the internet connection is definitely throttled, especially when I upload to an FTP site. Just got the new Consumer Reports that had an article on the combo TV/internet/phone service companies, and Comcast was tickling the bottom of all three lists. Surprised, nope.
They tried to do exactly the same thing to me when they first bought out Adelphia, but I caught it after the second month. I called and complained and they wanted to see my receipt. I had purchased the modem nearly 3 years earlier, so there was no chance that I still had the receipt.
At first they wouldn’t stop charging me and they wouldn’t refund the fees, but when I called back and tried another method they agreed to drop it.
I called Comcast billing and immediately asked to speak with a supervisor. As soon as the supervisor got on the phone I immediately asked to speak to their supervisor. As soon as the second level supervisor was on the phone I asked to speak to their supervisor. I didn’t waste time and energy with small talk or pleasantries, I just politely asked to speak to the supervisor. Once I had the third level supervisor on the line I politely told her that obviously there was some kind of mix up and they were improperly billing me for rental on a modem that I owned. After about 2 minutes of explaining that I had purchased it myself about 3 years ago and with her having no record of me renting it she agreed to drop the charge and refund the amount that had been previously billed.
The duration of the phone call was about 8 minutes total.
I believe the key was that I was never impolite or rude. I never raised my voice. I never accused them of trying to cheat me. I simply let them see that there was a mistake that needed to be corrected and they happily corrected the mistake. I didn’t even try to imply that they were doing anything sleazy, I just let her correct the mistake.
Personally I believe that it was a sneaky way to grab another $5 a month from me.
@harshmellow: Oh yeah, I forgot that part. When they took over, Comcast DRASTICALLY cut the upstream speed of my cable Internet service, while simultaneously stating that they were making things “faster” by increasing the downstream speed (though in reality that didn’t get faster either…I’m on the 6 Mbps tier but never get close to that speed). I asked them about this and they said that the claim of “faster” does not apply to upstream because “you don’t need much of it anyway”. That’s funny, considering that it drastically increased the time required for me to transfer big files from home to work.
@That70sHeidi:
They explicitly break out the franchise fee (which is paid to your town or city) to make the point that “look at all the taxes we’re paying.” Same reason the wireless companies break out all the gov’t fees as well.
This might also be a good way to get them to pay attention, and to force them to rethink where the burden of proof lies in this case.
I also discovered this. I have NEVER rented a modem from either Adelphia or Comcast yet closer looks at my bill showed that infamous 3$ rental fee.
It took 6 months to get this taken care of. Every month I would check my bill see the 3$ charge for rental fee and then a 3$ credit from the previous month after I called to report it.
Here’s my dilemma. I currently pay Comcast the $3/month for modem rental. I could easily buy my own modem for $25 and amortize the cost over 9 months and be home free after that.
The hangup is this: My Comcast paperwork says owner-supplied modems are ‘not supported.’ What I take that to mean is if I ever have a problem with my service (and I have in the past, which resulted in Comcast replacing their modem) they are going to see I have my own modem and say Sorry, we can’t help you.…regardless of whether the problem is with my modem or not.
Then, it would be my problem to figure out whether my modem is working or not and a long struggle to restore my service with Comcast would ensue. Of course, I’m assuming that they can’t or won’t do any troubleshooting on their end that would tell me to get a new modem if I needed one.
I literally just had this happen to me last night. I moved to another state in May, and this entire time, I believe they have been charging me $3/mo for modem rental. I called last night, and the guy took the fee off and refunded it to my next bill.
Additionally, they are charging a list of items, including two in particular:
Digital Service: $9.95
Digital Serivce Add’l Outlet: $6.95
I only have one television, and they said that this was for renting a cable box. I just got a TiVo and don’t have a cable box from them. I’m going to call back today to talk to a more helpful rep.
@johnva: I agree. My point was that there was at least some due diligence that could have been done in the absence of good records. Throwing up their hands and saying “just charge everybody” is unacceptable.
@DallasDMD: I’m confused. You meant that they can’t charge for services NOT rendered, I take it? Ditto on the “prove I’m renting from you” idea.
@cwlodarczyk: When I moved into my house, there was comcast cable active (I am a dish customer). I called them to let them know it was active. Two weeks later I called again to let them know it was still active.
A month after that I gave them one last call, and figured I’d done enough to have them turn it off. As it so happens, I have one TV in the house connnected to it for convenience, but since I told them three times over a period of almost two months to turn it off, I dont see why I shouldn’t use the cable ( and again, most of the TVs are hooked to dish network).
@johnva: I think throttling the upstream speed (i.e., uploading to an FTP site) is their way to keep you from running a website from home and not paying for some “upgraded” or “business class” service. You’re right–when I work from home and upload the files to our FTP server, it takes forever now. Thanks for speeding things up, Comcast!
Roadrunner was so much better.
@harshmellow: If their goal was just to stop people from running websites, they could use selective traffic shaping or filtering for inbound web traffic only. It’s possible they’re trying to drive people to upgrade to business-class service. I think they’re just greedy. All I know is that my upstream was suddenly capped at less than 25% of the typical speed I used to get.
Gee, I remember when I couldn’t own the modem due to state law. I hadn’t really thought about it. They’ve already replaced it once due to lightning — which took out my router shortly thereafter (It was acting up, it just finally fell over dead later).
I’m the OP, and I wanted to clarify a few things. First, 01/05/07 is supposed to be 01/05/08, the new year always screws me up. Also, I was never offered a free lease deal, it was simply an offer that Adelphia had at one point in time. I have not left out any details, so those who say I’m trolling are incorrect. I realize that I should have checked my bill more diligently, but that still does not make what they did right.
This same thing happened to me. I was about to alert the consumerist but I was lucky enough to get a rep that knew what was going and and take care of my issue when it called them for one last time. That will probably be the last time I get someone like that but I’m glad I did.
@That70sHeidi: The franchise fee is charged by the city. Taxes are almost always broken down on bills. It is not so they can have a starbucks franchise in their office.
@swalve: Adelphia did not break it down before on my bill. And then when they did break it out as a separate line item they didn’t subtract it from the service cost. Shady way to cover up a rate increase.
So they didn’t even give me a full refund, but the extra $1.93 is not worth arguing about.
My customer-owned modem on Comcast is an RCA (Thomson) modem that has worked flawlessly for about 6 years. With the RCAs the model number has a “R” at the end of it indicating it was sold at retail rather than being provider owned.
I suspect there are similar differences in other brand modems, too.
(Comcast did charge me a modem fee for a few months for no apparent reason, but when I told them the modem type they recognized it was a retail modem, not theirs and they backed out the charges immediately.
In the Adelphia/Comcast case, I believe Comcast should have to prove ownership before they have a leg to stand on charging customers, NOT the other way ’round.
Tomas
A Washington, D.C. law firm is seeking current and former cable internet subscribers who were improperly charged rental fees in connection with the use of a cable internet modem. The law firm is attempting to determine whether various providers of high-speed cable internet services have engaged in the practice of charging rental fees to consumers who already own their own modems. If you believe that you have been the victim of this particular billing practice, please contact the law firm at InternetResearch@gilbertrandolph.com. Potentially aggrieved consumers should own their own modems and have proof of the rental fees charged by their cable company. Once again, if you believe that you have been the victim of this particular billing practice, please do not hesitate to relate your experience to InternetResearch@gilbertrandolph.com.