For most of a century, AT&T ripped off its customers by requiring
them to rent their phones, meaning that over the life of your phone
subscription, you would buy your phone thousands of times over.
Comcast (and its cable industry co-monopolists) is so much better at this than AT&T ever was.
Not only do they extract $200/year
from every subscriber to rent a shitty, insecure, power-inefficient
set-top box: they also trick you into renting a modem for your cable
internet – a device they pay an estimated $40 for, and then net
$275m-$300m every quarter by renting out to you.
As if that wasn’t bad enough: Comcast’s cable-modems are horribly
insecure. This week, we learned that a bug in the company’s website
allowed anyone in the world to look up the passwords for any Comcast
modem along with the home addresses of Comcast subscribers where the
modem could be found.
Comcast has to let you bring your own modem, and if you do, they are
supposed to stop charging you the rental fee (you might have to chase
them for months or years to get them to stop billing you for this of
course, and the company might charge you $90 in “installation fees” even
if the “installation” is you plugging in your own modem).
You should do this. I’m embarrassed to admit that even though I don’t
use the modem Charter supplied with our home internet, I haven’t
returned it. I’m in Phoenix for Comics Fest
this week, but I’ve made a note to drive over to Charter and give them
back their insecure, overpriced piece of shit modem when I get home.
