Comcast has a real deal for you.

The maximum fees Comcast can charge California customers are about to skyrocket as part of a general rate increase Comcast has announced for some areas effective July 1.

Comcast’s official notice of rate increases for certain cities in northern California show some fees up double, even triple, what customers used to pay for service.

The average Comcast California TV customer will pay 11 cents more a day for the company’s “Digital Starter” package. Xfinity’s “Performance” package, now $1.51 a day, will rise to $1.61 a day according to the Times-Herald newspaper.

The largest fee hikes come when customers arrange for a service call. Comcast will now charge $50 an hour for custom installation work (up from $33.75). Activating a pre-existing outlet for cable service during an installation increases from $7.75 to $25. If you call to activate an outlet after your service is installed, the price doubles that at $50.

Other increases will cover converter boxes, inside wiring, remote controls, and general service fees.

But Comcast spokesman Andrew Johnson tells the newspaper customers should ignore the rate increases, which he says can be avoided by shopping for a Comcast sale or promotional offer.

“You should look at it like an auto dealership’s list price on a car,” Johnson said. “No one pays that price.”

Comcast also urges customers to consider doing installation themselves, which often means no service fees. Johnson still calls Comcast Cable a bargain, even with the average 5.2% rate increase Comcast customers will pay for their ongoing service in the coming year.

Verizon FiOS standalone broadband customers choosing the company’s standard service will see rate increases of $10 a month starting June 17, but those upgraded to the company’s premium speed tiers, which are getting much faster, may not see any rate hike at all.

The Verge received word from an anonymous Verizon employee who passed along the rate hike information that will apply to broadband-only customers:

• Standard 15/5Mbps service: (Was $54.99/mo) now up $10 to $64.99
• 50/25Mbps service: (Was $74.99/mo for 25/25Mbps) remains $74.99
• 75/35Mbps service: (New offer) $84.99
• 150/65Mbps service: (Was $94.99/mo for 50/20Mbps) remains $94.99
• 300/65Mbps service: (Was $199.99/mo for 150/35Mbps) now $204.99

All new pricing requires a two-year contract (month-to-month service costs $5/mo more) and home phone service with Verizon (or pay a $5/mo surcharge). Speeds of 150 or 300Mbps require a 2-4 hour service call and upgrade fee of $100 for new equipment unless you are on a two-year contract, are a new customer, or already have Verizon’s 150Mbps service. Customers living in multi-dwelling units served by VDSL and not fiber-to-the-apartment will pay the new higher price for standard service, but cannot receive the new enhanced speed tiers.

With the majority of Verizon customers paying only for standard speed service, Verizon will pocket significantly higher revenue for broadband. But customers need not pay for more expensive a-la-carte broadband. Verizon offers significant discounts for customers who sign up for triple play packages on phone, Internet, and television service. Bundled customers continue to get the most bang for the buck, but not if you don’t use the services Verizon wants to sell.

Jonathan Takiff, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News says he isn’t buying at the prices Verizon is charging.

I also was disappointed with the announcement that Verizon will continue to offer entry level FiOS Internet running at  15/5 Mbps. If the operation has such superior technology and capacity, why not flaunt it and give us casual users more headroom?  Even with its old school coaxial cable network, Xfinity service starts at 20 Mbps down.

Clearly, Verizon hopes  to up-sell customers to a higher, more profitable tier. And they’re using that grandiose 300 Mbps offering as an attention getter, to get folks thinking more aspirationally. Kinda like the way a car company throws a high powered, ridiculously priced, super flashy sports car into the showroom mix. Makes you go for the bigger engine in the econobox.

[…] What’s a good deal for Internet service on a global basis? In front-running Japan, the  average service runs at 61 Mbps and costs 27 cents per megabit, per month. While not quite as dramatic,  Internet services in South Korea, Finland and France also make U.S. providers look like stingy bastards.

Rogers' "unconscionable" service contract allows the company to do just about anything.

Did you know that signing a contract with Rogers Communications for your broadband, phone, and cable television service will not protect you from the company’s annual rate increases?

It represents a classic example of an “unconscionable term” in a contract, according to Anthony Daimsis, a contract law professor at the University of Ottawa. Not because Rogers has inserted language that allows the company to raise rates on contract customers at will, but rather because consumers cannot escape the contract without paying a stiff early termination fee, usually approaching $200.

Rogers says its service contracts do not guarantee stable rates, instead providing a discount for bundling its services together. Most Canadians asked by CBC’s Marketwatch thought otherwise, believing it should lock in current rates for the term of the agreement.

The consumer show also chases Bell for charging Canadians $2.80 a month for touch-tone service — a fee that disappeared off most other phone company bills 20 years ago. Bell claims the touch-tone fee was introduced because the company met opposition from rotary phone customers when it tried to bundle the fee into its general price for phone service.

These days, buying a rotary dial phone requires a visit to an antique shop, but should you acquire one just to escape paying the phone company an extra $33 a year, it won’t work. Bell says the fee is now mandatory for all customers, rotary or otherwise — no one can “opt out.”

Bell’s touch tone bill padding rakes in an extra $100 million a year in revenue, all for a service upgrade paid for decades ago.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CBC Busted 04-2012.flv[/flv]

CBC Marketplace presents “Busted,” a special marathon edition exposing consumer ripoffs and deceptive advertising. In this clip, the show chases down Bell’s bill padding touch tone fee and Rogers’ notorious service contracts that lock customers in place -and- subject them to annual rate increases.  (13 minutes)

Frontier bills are often confusing, as this example from 2009 illustrates.

Some of Frontier Communications’ 230,000 customers in Oregon are enduring billing snafus after the company accidentally cancelled promotional discounts, resulting in higher bills.

Frontier recently completed a billing system change for those formerly served by Verizon Communications, but The Oregonian reports some customers found bundled service promotions and service contracts established with the former owners suddenly canceled, eliminating discounts that delivered de facto “rate increases” as much as $20 a month.

Frontier had promised customers their “services and pricing plan will remain the same” after the billing system conversion.

Many of the worst-impacted customers subscribe to Frontier’s adopted FiOS fiber-to-the-home service.

Albert, a Stop the Cap! reader with Frontier FiOS, says the “abuse of FiOS customers” has continued since Frontier bought Verizon’s landline and fiber network in the state.

“First they wanted to jack the rates up, then they tried to sell us an ‘upgrade’ to satellite TV, and now it’s just the latest in a series of bill screw-ups from a company that couldn’t run things right if it tried,” Albert tells us. “My contract with the company says ‘no rate hikes while the contract is in effect,’ so they just made it no longer in effect and presto, a rate hike.”

It took four phone calls to straighten things out.

“Frontier’s customer service offices are apparently in other states, and a lot of their people don’t seem to know about FiOS, need supervisors to intervene on everything, and still cannot fix things,” Albert writes. “On the fourth call, I finally got someone who was able to cross-reference my older bills and find the promotion I was supposed to be on, and got me back on it.”

Albert says Frontier really has not offered much to sell people on the company’s fiber optic network.

“Frontier FiOS is a big secret with the company, and the last thing in the world they want to sell you is Frontier FiOS TV,” he reports.

The newspaper reports Frontier’s confusion over promotions and billing have impacted others as well.  Some of the problems have prompted customers to file complaints with the Oregon Public Utility Commission (PUC), which says it has seen “a big increase” in consumer issues since Frontier’s billing system changeover.

Frontier promised the state it would not raise any rates in Oregon without notifying the Commission, and so far the company has kept its word. But that doesn’t hold true for Albert.

“Dropping the ball on promotions represents a hidden rate increase, and many people will just pay the bill no matter what it says,” Albert said. “Then Frontier will try the backdoor rate increase with more surcharges and rental fees on other services.”

While Frontier executives have heralded the billing system conversion as a major accomplishment that opens the next chapter on Frontier Communications’ future, some customers are less celebratory.

Oregonian reader Max Gramm:

Frontier is perhaps the worst phone companion in history. Twice now they have changed my account number and never informed me, then refused to apply the money I had continued to pay to the old account number to the bill. I would get bill saying I owed $180 dollars even after proving to them I had made payments every single month. They shut off my service for over a week during one of these disputes. Though part of this could be due to Verizon (when they hear I am from Oregon, I get sent to a different department) Frontier has been absolutely awful to work with.

The newspaper recommends customers check their bills for sudden increases and contact Frontier with any questions. If Frontier has no satisfactory answers, file a complaint with the PUC (800-522-2404 or online).

Verizon Wireless will force customers off of their grandfathered unlimited data plans when they reach the end of their current two-year service contracts, according to the company’s chief financial officer.

It is all part of the cell phone company’s strategy to boost the average bills of customers with new, more expensive tiered family-shared data plans. With a significant number of current customers grandfathered on unlimited data plans that users likely will not forfeit voluntarily, Verizon will force the issue as customers come up for contract renewal.

The plan received considerable approval at today’s JPMorgan Chase TMT conference, a gathering for Wall Street investors and tech companies like Verizon.  Executive vice-president and chief financial officer Fran Shammo laid out the plan to switch customers to forthcoming family “data share” plans that are priced based on anticipated usage:

As you come through an upgrade cycle and you upgrade in the future, you will have to go onto the data share plan. And moving away from, if you will, the unlimited world and moving everybody into a tiered structure data share-type plan.

So when you think about our 3G base, a lot of our 3G base is unlimited. As they start to migrate into 4G, they will have to come off of unlimited and go into the data share plan. And that is beneficial for us for many reasons, obviously. So as you pick what tier you want to be and we think that there will be some price up in those tiers.

“Price up” is code language for bill hiking. Customers adopting family share plans may be able to share data across a larger number of devices, but at consumption pricing, many customers will find their Verizon bills substantially higher than before.

Shammo

“And the important part of that is we want the connections to come in and the way we have designed our plan, this plan is built on tiers and as we look at the future growth of LTE consumption because of the speeds and video consumption and consumption of other M2M-type devices, it is going to be more important that people will start to upgrade in their tiers as they start to really realize the benefits of the LTE network,” Shammo said. “As [customers] add more devices, they are going to have to buy up into tiers. So again, you will see the revenue increase there.”

Those revenue predictions were not sufficient to satiate Phil Cusick, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase. He questioned Shammo about the prospects for Verizon further increasing revenue with across-the-board rate increases on service plans.

Shammo would not commit to that, but was pleased with the lack of customer protests over their recent introduction of a $30 equipment upgrade fee. He called the new fee “the right thing to do.” More fees and surcharges are likely, according to Shammo.

“I think implementing these additional fees is probably where we are at,” he said. “With the construct that we have dealt with around data share and where we see consumption of LTE going, when you put the combination of them together, we are fairly confident that we will see people start to uptake in the tiers, which is really where we will get the revenue accretion in the future.”

Shammo also said Verizon’s fiber to the home network FiOS has gotten such rave reviews, it almost sells itself. That means the company will pull back on promotional offers and plans a general rate increase for all customers in the coming months, if only to bolster company profits.

“We have to do a better job in discipline of price increases and I think that you’ll see us do some price increases here over the next two quarters to offset the content increase and that will also contribute more profitability to the bottom line,” Shammo said. “You are going to have to concentrate more on reducing the amount of promotions, reducing the amount of retention that you put on the table to retain a customer and then also you are seeing that the industry is pricing up.”

Verizon FiOS customers will find rate increases applying both to equipment rental and service pricing nationwide, according to Shammo.

“We were actually below-market compared to our competitors on the amount of fee that we charge on the rental of a set-top box or a digital converter box,” Shammo explained. “We are switching around our bundles and the customers that are coming out of the current bundles will be priced up to the newer bundles. So you are going to see really a shift over the next two to three quarters in price-ups coming out of FiOS.”

As far as FiOS expansion goes, the company does not expect any major expansion in the service for the next several years.

“If we can penetrate the market and really turn the wireline profitability, could we potentially build out to other areas? Yes, but that is a decision that will be made in years out, not right now,” Shammo said. “So from a capital perspective, we are being very disciplined with where we are going to put that capital.”