{"id":57403,"date":"2012-05-09T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-10T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/customerthink.com\/declining_service_and_sneaky_price_increases\/"},"modified":"2012-05-09T21:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-05-10T04:00:00","slug":"declining_service_and_sneaky_price_increases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/declining_service_and_sneaky_price_increases\/","title":{"rendered":"Declining service and sneaky price increases"},"content":{"rendered":"
In our business office, we’ve used Comcast’s business-grade cable modem service for Internet access since 2007. In general we’ve been satisfied: the service is much faster than the DSL connection we had before, and the price was reasonable and exactly what we had agreed to in the contract nearly five years ago.<\/p>\n
Over the past year, however, we’ve noticed the quality of our cable modem connection declining a little. Where it used to always be wicked-fast, we now see occasional slowdowns and overnight outages.<\/p>\n
Then this month, a surprise: a new $7 fee in our bill for “equipment rental.” $84\/year is not going to make or break us, but as a general rule you should only pay bills for money you actually owe. Companies which break this rule tend not to stay in business.<\/p>\n
So I dutifully called Comcast customer service to try to get to the bottom of this. It seemed a little strange that our five-year-old cable modem was suddenly worthy of a monthly fee when it hadn’t been for so many years before. Here’s more or less what happened:<\/p>\n
In general I don’t have a problem if Comcast wants to push through a modest price increase. They have never raised their price to us in almost five years, and on the whole they’ve provided good value. But if they want to raise their price, they should do it the right way: send us a prominent notice or an insert in our bill announcing the change. Trying to sneak in a new fee like this is just, well, sneaky. Instead of looking like a legitimate price increase it looks like a mistake, which I had to spend a fair amount of time tracking down. Then when it wasn’t a mistake it just looked sleazy.<\/p>\n
As it happens, there’s a new carrier pulling fiber to our office building this summer. A week ago I wasn’t really interested in switching from Comcast. Today I am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In our business office, we’ve used Comcast’s business-grade cable modem service for Internet access since 2007. In general we’ve been satisfied: the service is much faster than the DSL connection we had before, and the price was reasonable and exactly what we had agreed to in the contract nearly five years ago. Over the past […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7569,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[128,95,87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57403"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7569"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}