Sen. Ed Markey of Massachussetts and Sen. Dick Blumenthal of Connecticut recently posed a handful of questions to the nation’s cable and satellite providers about their set-top boxes — Are they required? How many customers have them? Is there an option for customers to purchase their own? etc. While some providers were more transparent in their responses than others, there was one thing they all agreed on: We’re not telling you how much we make from leasing these devices. [More]
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Comcast To Begin Testing Super-Fast Cable Broadband This Year
By 7.24.15
Most talk of new high-speed broadband has revolved around Internet service providers laying new networks of fiberoptic cable to deliver download speeds of 1Gbps or more, but Comcast says it plans to start testing a system that could provide upwards of 10Gbps over coaxial cable lines. [More]
Comcast Reportedly Looking To Buy Vice Media, Or Maybe BuzzFeed, Or Maybe Vox…
By 7.24.15
Now that Comcast is done crying itself to sleep every night about its forced breakup with merger partner Time Warner Cable, the company is getting back to doing what it does best: No, not providing adequate cable/Internet service (don’t be silly!), but acquiring other businesses. [More]
City Asks For Fiber Network Help, 5 Years After Being Left At Altar By Verizon FiOS
By 7.23.15
Back in 2009, it looked liked Alexandria, VA, residents would get a new high-speed Internet option in the form of Verizon FiOS. The city even went through the bureaucratic process of issuing Verizon a franchise. Then the D.C.-area community got dumped at the altar by Big V and has been looking for someone, anyone to step in ever since. [More]
Cheaper, More Competitive Broadband: Not Gonna Happen Anytime Soon, Analyst Tells Congress
By 7.23.15
A committee in Congress yesterday held a hearing on promoting broadband infrastructure investment. That is, getting more wires put in the ground so more people can get online faster and more reliably. That’s a laudable goal that we here at Consumerist tend to cheer on. But one theme became clear from the testimonies of the assembled analysts, industry members, and local public companies who spoke: real improvement is going to be a long, ugly series of fights… and consumers are going to keep paying a lot more while it happens. [More]
Comcast’s Broadband Customers Officially Outnumber Its Cable Subscribers
By 7.23.15
The writing was on the wall last quarter when Comcast’s dropping pay-TV subscriber base was only 6,000 more than its growing pool of broadband customers, but with today’s release of the latest subscriber numbers it’s official: Comcast now has fewer cable customers than it does Internet subscribers. [More]
Universal Studios Copyright Bot Stupidly Asks Google To Delist IMDb Page For “Furious 7”
By 7.22.15
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s against the law to knowingly misrepresent a copyright infringement claim, and yet copyright holders and the automated bots they use to spit out these takedown and delist demands continue to make sweeping, obviously inaccurate claims without penalty. The latest example comes to us courtesy of Comcast-owned Universal Studios. [More]
Comcast Should Pay You For Sitting Through All Its Product Placement In Sharknado 3
By 7.21.15
If you’re one of the 1,743 people who are still amused by the whole Sharknado phenomenon, then you should consider yourself warned that the latest entry into the self-consciously trashy TV franchise is apparently not much more than an extended commercial for numerous Comcast-owned brands. [More]
“Incorrect Keystroke” Allows Comcast To Withdraw $500 From Non-Customer’s Bank Account
By 7.17.15
We’ve told you before about Comcast not really paying attention to the payments it receives — like the woman who accidentally sent them her rent check and found that it had been deposited in the cable company’s account — but here’s a story of a man who isn’t even a Comcast customer but found that $500 had been taken out of his bank account anyway. [More]
Comcast Exec: Netflix Thrives Because Cable Is Too Expensive, Is Company’s “Ultimate Frenemy”
By 7.17.15
This is a weird time to be a cable company. On the one hand, everyone’s watching more content than ever before. And on the other hand, they’re watching cable less than ever before. That’s bad for cable companies, except that cable companies are also broadband companies. The push and pull is a reality almost all of us live in, but it’s something that the cable folks don’t really talk about much. Until they do. [More]
Lawsuit Accuses Comcast Of Making 9 Months Of Robocalls To Collect On Paid Bill
By 7.17.15
A Philadelphia woman is suing Comcast, alleging that the hometown cable company not only spent nine months hassling her with debt collection calls but that the bill in question had already been paid. [More]
15 Years Into Agreement To Provide St. Paul’s Elderly A Cable Discount, Comcast Reps Have Never Heard Of It
By 7.16.15
The Minnesota city of St. Paul sits, like its twin Minneapolis, squarely in Comcast territory, with nary a competitor in sight. But the franchise agreements that create local monopolies can also be used to residents’ benefit: as part of the contract that lets them be the exclusive cable company in town, Comcast offers low-income and elderly St. Paul residents a discount off their cable bills. Great, right? Well, it would be… if anyone in town could actually sign up for it. [More]
Got A Burning Need To Stream Old Video Games Though Your Cable Box? Comcast And EA Have A Service For You
By 7.14.15
The only two companies ever to win Consumerist’s Worst Company In America award more than once are now teaming up for realsies. Comcast and EA are unveiling a new set-top streaming gaming service together, and it looks like a resounding “meh.” [More]
Comcast’s High-Speed Fiber Service Will Cost $300/Month Just For Internet
By 7.14.15
It’s been a few months since Comcast first announced it would bring super-fast 2 Gbps fiberoptic broadband to a few select markets, but the company had remained quiet about what it intended to charge. Now that we’re seeing what Comcast expects customers to pay, we can understand why. [More]
UPDATE: A Happy Ending For Man Who Almost Had To Sell His House Due To Comcast’s Incompetence
By 7.13.15
Remember Seth, the Washington state homeowner who was putting his recently purchased house up for sale because no one — not Comcast, not CenturyLink, not his county — was willing or able to provide the broadband connection he needed for his home office? We’re happy to tell you that Seth is still in the house and he can now go online. [More]
Comcast’s “Stream” Online TV Service Is Basically Aereo With HBO
By 7.13.15
Comcast is, by far, the biggest cable TV provider in the country, but its pay-TV numbers is sinking while its Internet user base grows. In an effort to sell some sort of TV service to this increasingly large segment of the market, the folks at Kabletown are testing an online-only live-TV service dubbed Stream. [More]
Comcast Improving Download Speeds For Free In Northeast, But Not For Everyone
By 7.7.15
With Comcast losing pay-TV subscribers in favor of streaming video services, the company is doing what it can to retain customers who not only ante up for TV and broadband, but also for home phone service. [More]
Comcast’s New Remote Control Now Advertises Comcast-Distributed Kids Movie
By 6.29.15
Hey kids, isn’t vertical integration awesome? Thanks to Comcast’s acquisition of NBC/Universal, the cable giant can now use its latest high-tech remote control to advertise its feature films directly to your living room! Let’s all cheer for cross-promotional, cross-platform, market-targeted, gibberish-spouting synergy!! [More]
