Talk to your cable provider about internet/cable packages.
We have both cable TV, and cable internet, through the same provider.
A couple of months ago, the bill suddenly showed up with an extra $30 dollars worth of charges on it.
I called them up, chewing them up one side and down the other.
Sorry, they say, but there was a rate hike.
<sputter><fume> says I.
But wait, if you consolidate your basic cable and your internet service under our new <Consolidated basic cable and internet package> (I don’t remember the real name), the cost will be $30 less then you are paying now.
Huh?? So, I get the basic cable and the internet service (just like I’m getting now) and I get $30 off (the exact amount that you just raised rates)??
Yep, that turned out to be the deal.
So I’m back to where I was before, with a different title on it, but the old cost.
I love it when the cable company says things like ‘If you have satellite, you won’t get your TV signal when there’s bad weather.’
The cable companies then neglect to inform their customers that they, the cable company, get their signal from satellites.
I think I see where my misunderstanding came from, BTW. I don’t have digital cable. Just the regular plain ol’ cable that comes out of the wall, and I’m pretty happy with that. That’s where the gap in money comes from, I’m sure.
Lucky? You’re kidding. I use no more bandwidth with my current project than any other user who keeps the internet on for a few hours a day. Charging me for a business account would be laughable.
My phone company got the bill wrong two months in a row. They apologied with a free month. My local supermarket wouldn’t take a coupon because their computers were down. The sent me double coupons to make up for it. Comcast should learn from their examples. You treat the customer respectfully or the customer goes elsewhere.
While my ISP was down I looked at my bill and realized that it has gone from $35 a month to $59 a month in less than two years. I can’t think of another bill I have that has risen so far so fast.
The idiots there are just a bunch of goddamned profiteering scum who are under the delusion they have a monopoly and can therefore jack up prices leaving the customer with no options but to pay. They’re wrong.
avabeth, definitely call and check with the company that your bill is correct - make sure you know what all of those stupid abbreviations on your bill mean. Comcast billed me for about 5 months’ worth of cable I didn’t ask for or receive before I caught the error.
I pay $42.95 a month for cable internet and something like 11 bucks for basic cable, all from Comcast. DSL isn’t available in my area at all. :mad:
This isn’t entirely accurate either. As a guy who is sometimes involved in building channel line-ups for cable operators, I can tell you that the companies providing the content hold great sway over what a cable operator may purchase (I’m kinda in the middle of one right now - in an overbuild situation even, so yeah, that does happen). That’s often why you see such odd channel packages offered by your cable provider. MTV, ESPN and Playboy are a few of the worst in this regard. If a cable operator wishes to broadcast one of their channels, they have to purchase a whole package of additional useless crap.
Certainly a giant like Comcast is gonna be able to negotiate a better deal for themselves than Fred’s cablesystem, but Comcast doesn’t really operate as a megalith. The regional offices, and there are a couple hundred of them (I can think of five in the Detroit area alone), can and do operate pretty autonomously. In case you haven’t guessed yet, Comcast is one of my larger clients.
So the cable companies do get their signals from satellites, except for the local channels they can pick up with a big antenna. Which means in bad weather, when DirecTV is entirely out, cable is almost entirely out - except for channels 2, 4, and 6.
Doesn’t that mean the weather argument only applies to people who are so far away from town that they can’t pick up the local stations with their own antennas? IOW, the very people who might not even be able to get cable?
Well, ya gotta remember, Mr2001, that it’s not the satellites themselves that are affected by inclement weather, but the receiver, the dish. And the chicken-shit little thing you hang on the side of your house doesn’t have nearly the signal collection power that the big dish farms the cable company is using. Nor do you have a big bank of complex electronic amplifiers and filters to clean up the signal that the cable company is using. The comparison you are making doesn’t reflect the differences in the technology implemented.
You don’t have to believe me though, I’m sure you can find plenty of information on the 'Net about dish systems that’ll tell you the same thing I am.