After a year-end customer audit, some Comcast customers report they are now being notified by the cable company they were not charged modem rental fees in error even though they previously purchased their own equipment.

“Late last year, I received a form letter from them notifying me that they had noticed that I wasn’t being billed for the modem they claimed they were renting to me,” wrote a Reddit contributor. “An hour-long phone call with four representatives later, the $8 charge was removed. However, it seems that since they increased the modem rental fee to $10 per month, they’ve brought my modem back into their flock.”

He isn’t alone.

Another customer found Comcast still billing him for a modem he returned to Comcast three months earlier.

“I’m now on my third month where I had to call, get a refund, and get a promise it won’t happen again,” wrote another Comcast customer.

The customer service representative argued the charges were valid, despite the fact the customer went to extraordinary lengths to document the return of the equipment to avoid being charged for it. Instead of claiming the customer never returned the modem, Comcast registered the customer’s newly-purchased modem as Comcast property.

“It shows that modem is with the customer,” said the confused Comcast representative.

“They are that s****y of a company, I saw this coming from a mile away,” said the customer, who recorded the return of Comcast’s modem in a video he made at the local XFINITY store. Despite that effort, he was unprepared for the possibility Comcast would unilaterally adopt his new equipment and claim it as their own.

Watching your Comcast bill like a hawk for unauthorized charges can also get confusing when Comcast keeps changing the name of the fee.

Customers with their own modems should find no charge for modems, gateways, or routers on their bill.

“I had to make three calls, each one more and more frustrating,” another customer complained. “The first was to remove the equipment fee, the equipment fee then morphed into a modem fee [… and the] final call was when the modem fee evolved into a router fee.”

One Comcast customer complained on the company’s own support forum he was charged modem fees for over a year for a modem he purchased himself.

“I have gone through customer service both on the phone and through chat,” complained the customer. “The charge will come off for a month and then get put back on my bill. I even went through Comcast Corporate Escalation and it was removed in October 2014. I went back through my bills and noticed that the charge went back on the very next bill and I have been charged ever since.”

To add insult to injury, Comcast now also bills a “change of service fee” to remove the erroneous charge, only to have it return the following month.

Because Comcast billing errors are so common, still another customer shared some tips on how to prove Comcast customer-owned equipment does not belong to the cable company.

“My advice if you are thinking about buying your own modem is to make sure you file all receipts,” said the customer. “I went through this same runaround with Comcast last year and luckily I still had both the sales receipt from Amazon as well as the Comcast document stating I had turned in my rented modem. It still took a few phone calls and a week or so for them to straighten it out. Pretty ridiculous.”

Prices are in Singapore dollars.

One gigabit broadband is apparently too slow for Singapore consumers, so one ISP has introduced the world’s fastest home broadband plan, bundling 2000Mbps Internet access with an Android-based video streaming box and residential phone service for around $65US a month with a 2-year commitment, about the same price Comcast charges for 50Mbps broadband alone.

Singapore’s ViewQwest is the first provider outside of Japan offering residential speeds higher than 1000Mbps, despite the fact few home users have computers equipped to handle the service at its fastest speed.

“We want to offer them the fastest residential Internet connectivity available in the world,” said CEO Vignesa Moorthy. “Our current 1Gbps customers can re-contract for 2Gbps for free. This, coupled with the usual high rate of sign-ups that occurs during events such as IT Show, makes us very confident that we’ll be able to sustain this plan.”

Usage caps, speed throttles, and expensive Internet plans common in the United States and Canada are not an issue in Singapore as fierce competition has created a consumer-friendly price war among the city’s competing fiber to the home providers.

One challenge users will discover is finding a router capable of supporting 2000Mbps speeds. For now, the ISP recommends a $600 enterprise-grade network card if a customer insists on getting 2Gbps on a single machine. But ViewQwest expects most customers will aggregate their 2Gbps connection through multiple consumer-grade routers to give each family member concurrent gigabit speeds that will sustain at least 1Gbps for each user.

Customers will also discover their speeds will only be as fast as the connection to the website they want to reach. For now, that means international content traveling across undersea cables or distant servers will arrive at considerably slower speeds, but as the Internet grows faster, ViewQwest customers won’t have to wait for their ISP to catch up.

New York regulators have once again kicked the can down the road, delaying a final decision on the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger for the seventh time.

Pursuant to a request from Department of Public Service staff in the above-referenced matter, Comcast Corporation and Time Warner Cable Inc. agree to extend the time for action by the Public Service Commission on the Joint Petition, with a final order issued no later than Monday, April 20, 2015.

There is no clear sign why the Public Service Commission has further delayed its final decision, but the merger remains mired in controversy on both the state and federal level. The FCC recently stopped the clock on further consideration of the merger as legal wrangling continues over who gets to see copies of cable programming contracts with Comcast.

A draft report from California regulators recommended approval of the merger in February, but only after dozens of conditions were recommended to protect the public and competition. Final consideration of the merger request may come next week at a general meeting of the California Public Utilities Commission.

Phillip “It isn’t so dumb to own the pipes” Dampier

In 2006, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre thought his company was at a disadvantage being stuck with “dumb pipes” while Google, Yahoo! (remember them?) and Vonage couldn’t count their earnings fast enough. While AT&T sold consumers plain DSL service, content was king on Wall Street and Whitacre groused it was unfair for bandwidth hogs to use “the pipes for free.” That one statement was the equivalent of throwing a lit match on a hillside in Malibu Canyon and a predictable firestorm over Net Neutrality ensued.

Nine years later, Net Neutrality is now official FCC policy, although the sour grape-eating Republicans will continue to throw Congressional hissyfits along the way. While they rely on tissue-thin evidence to back their assertion the FCC secretly colluded with the Obama Administration to stick it to AT&T and demand its repeal, the future of Net Neutrality will more likely be decided in a courtroom a year or two from now.

Back in 2006 AT&T primarily sold DSL service and was looking for cash to finance its then emerging U-verse platform. AT&T planned to follow cable’s lead, devoting most of the available bandwidth on its fiber to the neighborhood network to cable television programming. Broadband speeds were limited to just under 25Mbps — even less if a large household had multiple television sets in use.

But as the Great Recession arrived and wages stagnated, the cost of what used to be a “must-have” service for most Americans increasingly began to exceed the household budget and the day finally arrived when cable companies started losing more television customers than they were adding. Even worse, cable programming costs continue to spiral upwards and no major cable company can increase cable television rates fast enough to support the usual profit margin the industry counted on.

What Whitacre failed to realize nine years earlier is that broadband providers did not simply own “dumb pipes.” AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, Charter and other providers actually occupy two gilded catbird seats, with AT&T and Verizon dominating the wireless Internet business and Comcast, Time Warner, and Charter dominating at-home viewing and wired broadband. Lawmakers who deregulated both industries predicted pitting AT&T against Comcast or Verizon against Time Warner Cable would create competition not seen since Coke vs. Pepsi. Consumers would benefit and world-class service would result.

Instead, Time Warner Cable now sells Verizon Wireless phone service. Verizon gave up on expanding its FiOS network and is selling off its DSL and FiOS business in pieces to focus on its best moneymaker, Verizon Wireless. Comcast in turn threw in the towel on any notion of offering competing cellular service and, in fact, sold its acquired wireless spectrum to Verizon.

PlayStation Vue’s lineup

The best way to make money is to avoid price wars with your competitors and the evidence shows there is growing peace in America’s Telecom Valley. Comcast can now raise your broadband bill because, for most, Verizon FiOS isn’t an option. AT&T U-verse does not have to hurry speed upgrades to customers if Time Warner Cable delivers no better than 50/5Mbps service in large parts of its service area. Google Fiber remains a minor threat, only available in a handful of cities. AT&T distributed more copies of its press release touting U-verse Gigapower — its gigabit Internet offering — than there are customers qualified to sign up.

Notice that we’ve drifted away from talking about cable television programming. So has the industry, now increasingly dependent on broadband rate increases to make up the difference in revenue they used to take home from their television packages.

But now that the biggest players have a predictable source of revenue, allowing disruptors to further challenge earnings isn’t something your local cable and phone company will allow for long. At the moment, those most likely to cause problems are the growing number of “over the top” streaming video services that do not require a cable television subscription to watch. But they do need broadband — Whitacre’s “dumb pipes” — to reach subscribers. To manage that, services like Apple, PlayStation Vue and Sling TV and their customers must deal with the gatekeepers — AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon and others.

What Whitacre thought was a disadvantage is now becoming the best thing in the world — manning a toll booth on the only two roads most Americans can use to access online content.

Today, Sony officially launched its Internet-TV service, “PlayStation Vue” in three cities (New York, Chicago and Philadelphia) with a base price of $49.99/month. In includes more than 50 cable networks and in the three launch cities — local network affiliates. In Chicago and Philadelphia, where Comcast provides cable service, potential customers will need to pay $50 a month for Vue and another $64.95 a month for 50Mbps broadband — the least expensive broadband-only tier that is suitable for high quality viewing. Your combined bill for both services is $114.94 a month. Comcast charges $99.99 a month for its double play – 220 TV channels and 50Mbps broadband — almost $15 a month less for its package, and it includes around 150 more channels than Vue.

Comcast explains its new usage caps.

But Comcast also has another weapon it is testing is several of its markets — the resumption of usage caps and overlimit fees on its broadband service. Comcast customers in most test markets are given 300GB a month, after which they face overlimit fees of $10 for each additional increment of 50GB. While web browsing and e-mail fit more than comfortably within those caps, watching HD video may not. That leaves a potential Vue customer with a major dilemma. Should they pay $15 a month more for service than they can pay Comcast for a better package -and- chew away their usage allowance using it?

Comcast has yet to figure out how to install a coin collector on top of your television set, so you can watch as much Comcast cable television as you’d like. But watching streaming video could get very expensive if it exceeds a future Comcast usage allowance.

Smaller video packages from providers like Sling TV or the forthcoming Apple streaming service might make more sense, but will still be subject to Comcast’s usage caps if/when they are reintroduced around the country, while Comcast’s own television service will not.

This is why cable and phone companies hold enormous power over their potential competitors, even if Net Neutrality is fiercely enforced. Usage caps and usage-based billing represent an end run around Net Neutrality and both are permitted. The FCC has consistently refused to engage on the issue of broadband usage caps, leaving providers with a useful weapon to deter customers from dropping their television package in favor of an online alternative.

With most Americans having a choice of only one or two “dumb pipes” over which they can reach these services, being an owner of those pipes and getting to set the rates and conditions to use them is a very comfortable (and profitable) place to be.

Greenlight Networks, a fiber overbuilder serving select neighborhoods in the greater Rochester, N.Y. area, today announced it was cutting the price of its gigabit broadband offering by 60 percent.

The new $100/mo price takes effect immediately and will increase competition for local incumbents Time Warner Cable and Frontier Communications. Time Warner currently sells up to 50/5Mbps service and most Frontier Communications customers qualify for DSL at speeds of 10Mbps or less.

Greenlight also announced it is waiving its usual $100 installation fee for customers signing up for gigabit service.

Greenlight president Mark Murphy said he wants Rochester to be considered America’s next “Gig City,” and emphasized Greenlight does not charge hidden fees or surcharges and has no usage caps. The company also sells a less expensive 100/20Mbps tier for $50 a month and recently introduced a 500/50Mbps tier for $75 a month. The upload speed for the gigabit tier is 100Mbps.

Greenlight currently offers service in a few neighborhoods in Brighton, East Rochester, Henrietta, Irondequoit, Pittsford and Rochester where enough customer demand can be demonstrated. Potential customers sign up on the company’s website (temporarily disabled) and are notified when service becomes available.

Greenlight now only sells broadband service and has stayed out of the cable television and telephone business.