My Comcast bill has grown over the years and I’m now paying over $250/mo. for cable (2 hd boxes, 1 dvr, hbo, local sports), internet, and phone.
I’ve not had much luck dropping the rate since local sports and Game of Thrones is what I watch.
I did get a cold call yesterday from a Comcast rep. He would drop my bill to $200 if I kept what I currently had and added Xfinity home security. Free equipment and install.
I asked if there would then be a monthly monitoring fee I would have to pay.
Nope. That’s included in the $200/mo.
He was up front that the $200 rate would be locked in for 2 years and the would increase by $30 after that.
Even after I said I’d need a couple days to think about it and go to an Xfinity store to look at the equipment he had no problem with it and asked if he could call me back later in the week.
Besides myself not really even wanting a home security system, what are they gaining by offering this to me? A lifetime customer locked in for another 2 years? Monitoring rates that will jump past $30 three years from now?
I pay about half that for monitoring on my business via a local alarm company. Alarm monitoring is one of those long term hardly ever have to do anything business models.
Your bill is extraordinarily high already. The salesman just wants a commission on a sale. Whether Comcast gets more money or not isn’t his concern. So someone who pays as much as you do (the phone service is a major tell) will show up on a “sucker” list and you’ll get these offers. But note that Comcast does like locking in people for 1-2 years now. Their bean counters have figured out that the “early termination” fees on those are a great way to make money. All too many people think they’re going to be using Comcast for a long time but life ends up telling them otherwise.
Note: I pay less than half of what you do. The big change is that I have two DVRs (both owned outright with lifetime program service) and no other TV boxes and I have my own VoIP box with service thru voip.ms.
I bet you rent your cable modem, too.
…and is the lucrative basis for home security companies.
Which makes me skeptical about the offer made to the OP. I’d read the fine print very carefully.
How does getting phone service from Comcast identify one as a sucker? These triple play deals (cable television, telephone and internet service) are very commonly offered by the cable and telephone companies.
Now, if you’re getting all three of these from Comcast, you’re unlikely to switch any of them to a lower-cost provider, just because it’s simpler.
I agree. Most of the time it’s cheaper to get all three, rather than just the cable and internet. Besides, I don’t like internet phones. I prefer a landline (since I can still use my rotary phone on a regular land line).
So it makes sense that it may lower your bill by getting all four services. They count on you breaking the contract.
The standard price for phone service via Comcast after the deal expires is $30 a month. That’s price gouging for VoIP from where I sit. (And from where Comcast sits too, but to them price gouging is a-okay.)
One thing I do is to call and get a new deal every time my bill goes up. Not many people do this. Comcast relies on the non-renegotiators to generate a lot of profit.
So, in the mind of a salesperson for Comcast: phone service from them = sucker. The exceptions are noise in the data.