ISP Charging Fee for Customer-Owned Equipment

[Brehohn]

I'm so glad that I work for Spectrum as a technician. I'm thankful that my company is against a non free internet and is against nickle and diming people for equipment. Time Warner in my area previously charged for a router AND modem rental fee. We still charge for the router if you go with Spectrums, but not the damn modem that enables your service. 

[onlybuilt4cubanxlinx]

On 7/3/2019 at 10:19 AM, BrinkGG said:

I'm not gonna lie, this isn't as bad as it seems. BUT it is extremely situational. 

We have two options at my current house; Spectrum and Frontier. And while Spectrum does not charge for rental equipment that I'm not using (I have my own modem, router, firewall and access points), Frontier does. 
BUT, Spectrum will not allow us to have an internet speed above 50/10 unless we also bundle it with cable and phone. So that ends up being about $125/mo with 100/10, analog phone, and the base cable package. 

\  / 

Frontier however, offers 200/200 for $60/mo by itself. Sure the rental fee is $10/mo on top of that, but that is still a MUCH better deal in my eyes then Spectrum's offer. Even adding a home phone line is only another extra $10/mo, and adding cable is $45/mo, but in total, that's still the same cost as spectrum's much slower service. Plus I never actually use cable or the home phone, so Frontier is a much more enticing offer to me.

 

Also, his argument that Verizon "forced" Frontier on him is bit ridiculous. the US Gov't forced Verizon to sell a segment of their market in fear that Verizon would become a monopoly. So they sold the California market to Frontier and handed over all of the equipment, trucks, staff, and customers with it.

 

EDIT: I also forgot to mention, Frontier is completely transparent with the fees as well. If this customer actually asked about the rental fee, they would have told him it is not removable. I called about 1.5-2 months ago and asked, and they confirmed this for me. 

Cancel service and start service in another person's name. Order online and select self install. Don't use the same phone number/email/last name as current service holder. You'll get he SPP promotions and speeds. I worked for Spectrum and I do the same thing to Xfinity when my promo ends.

[SenKa]

Frontier hasn't been charging my family the device rental fee despite us having one of their own boxes.

 

Well... The modem we have is from Verizon, before Frontier bought FIOS in our area. During the change, the charge simply fell through the cracks.

 

I'm not complaining.

[GOTSpectrum]

18 hours ago, CarlBar said:

 

As a virgin media customer i paid an upfront fee, (partially waived as i was on contract), for the router. Given i'm a fibre customer i don't have any choice about using their's AFAIK. but that's ok as they also offer way better speeds than i can get from anyone else, (1.5 meg if i'm lucky from anyone else).

The fee is an installation fee, the router is taken back when/if you choose your account with them.

 

PS, third party DOSIS equipment does exist, just virgin don't let you use them

[keskparane]

How are they arguing this case? I would simply say you can't charge for a service that hasn't been provided, arguing that why didn't they also charge you for the brand new router they didn't send out to you every month?

[jagdtigger]

This pretty much sounds like false billing..... I for one would be pretty pissed if my ISP did this.

[TetraSky]

Glad my ISP doesn't nickle and dime me like this... I get charged for the service, that's it. I bought my modem outright and use my own router...

 

But, my TV provider (videotron), does charge me a fee to use my own f'ing cable box, that they've made me buy from them... and the fee is like, 2$ cheaper per month compared to if I was renting it. Ridiculous. We're already paying to access the service, the box to access said service shouldn't have an extra fee on top if you've bought the damn thing.

[Nowak]

Reminds me of how Comcast sometimes doesn't stop charging you the equipment rental fee if you buy your own modem and replace the rented modem with that, even though they're supposed to. It's happened to a few people I know.

[BrinkGG]

21 hours ago, onlybuilt4cubanxlinx said:

Cancel service and start service in another person's name. Order online and select self install. Don't use the same phone number/email/last name as current service holder. You'll get he SPP promotions and speeds. I worked for Spectrum and I do the same thing to Xfinity when my promo ends.

They don't let you do self install. They require techs to come out for every install.  

[P o n e.c.c.c.c.c if I can]

On 7/3/2019 at 11:01 PM, LazyAK47 said:

The company confirmed that it refuses to stop charging the Wi-Fi router rental fee even when customers use their own router and claimed it does so in order to cover higher support costs for customers...

Come to Japan the competition is high here.

[jake9000]

Frontier thinks very highly of themselves considering they are just a crappy DSL provider. The only thing they are good for is being a fallback option when you are trying to extend your discounted rates with a cable company. 

[Trik'Stari]

15 hours ago, keskparane said:

How are they arguing this case? I would simply say you can't charge for a service that hasn't been provided, arguing that why didn't they also charge you for the brand new router they didn't send out to you every month?

If I had to guess, they are relying on the complete and utter ignorance of the consumer as well as the court system and legislature.

 

Not to mention they appear to be saying "we have the charge extra to offset the cost of support, but we also don't support people using "not our hardware" " which makes no fucking sense at all.

[onlybuilt4cubanxlinx]

4 hours ago, BrinkGG said:

They don't let you do self install. They require techs to come out for every install.  

Xfinity and Spectrum both offer self install kits. I can't recall one place we didn't let self install unless it was a bulk account meaning your apartment includes internet.

[Anomnomnomaly]

This is something that's been eliminated in the UK... and probably the whole of the EU in general... We have such great choice when it comes to an ISP now that they simply can't get away with charging rental for equipment.

 

However... many do still charge a fee for supplying you with a preconfigured router/modem with some it's a flat fee of around £30-40 and with others it's just a postal fee of around £10.

 

Those router/modems though... and pretty much garbage and missing so many basic features, and often locked into the ISP DNS service and so forth... and with no way to configure their router to bypass it.. you have to resort to a VPN just to get around their ISP 'filter' (IE Censorship).

 

So after many years of suffering crappy routers mainly because I had given up work to help care for my late father and money was so tight... buying new gear was out oft he question... I finally got back on my feet 18 months ago and was going to buy my own to go with a new ISP.

 

I checked in with the tech communities I'm part off (I used to work IT for a long, long time) and asked what UK based ISP 'they would use' and a good 60-70% of them came back with a company called 'Zen'... Very highly rated with techies.

 

So I checked and they supply a 'fritz box' which I'd never heard of before.. But looked into and it's feature packed, dual band, onboard DYNDNS, VPN and everything else you could need... and it was 'FREE'.

 

Granted the ISP themselves are more expensive than the bigger ones. But considering what I get and the level of service they provide... it's worth the £45 a month I'm paying Vs the £30-35 I'd be paying with all the others.  That's just internet, landline and unlimited call package. and as soon as we get FTTH around here I'll be dropping the phone side of things entirely and going for at least a 300Mb service. Sadly... it's gonna be a few yrs before we get it to the home in my little town.

[DavidKalinowski]

On 7/3/2019 at 9:19 AM, BrinkGG said:

I'm not gonna lie, this isn't as bad as it seems. BUT it is extremely situational. 

We have two options at my current house; Spectrum and Frontier. And while Spectrum does not charge for rental equipment that I'm not using (I have my own modem, router, firewall and access points), Frontier does. 
BUT, Spectrum will not allow us to have an internet speed above 50/10 unless we also bundle it with cable and phone. So that ends up being about $125/mo with 100/10, analog phone, and the base cable package. 

 

That is some BS. I have spectrum, and have never used their cable TV or phone service and have 100/10 internet. for about 65$ I would be calling corp about that..

[Iskor12]

I also work for an ISP in the usa.  We definitely don't charge for Modem/wifi rental if you are using your own equipment.

[RejZoR]

In my country, equipment is property of ISP in all cases iirc and you only pay the fee if you fail to return the equipment when you change the ISP or something like that. I'm currently running my setup through my own router instead of their box/router and I don't have to pay anything for their boxes. I just need to keep the thing stored in safe place coz I might have to return it one day. And that's about it. I thought we had it bad, but our mobile providers and ISP's are actually pretty chill compared to shit big players are pulling (especially) in USA.

[Loote]

IMO this is just a way to confuse the customer about real cost of service. If you can't get away from paying this fee, it should be included in normal price, that's all. I've had some versions of this in my life:
1. ADSL provider that at first gave us a modem for free, I still have it somewhere.
2. Same provider started offering router for(converted to USD) $2.5, it had annoying light and the Wi-Fi didn't cover our whole house, it was a 2 year deal and after 2 months my parents bought our own router, they kept paying for nothing for 22 months, but being smarter from the beginning we could avoid it.
3. Another ISP gave us the most basic router possible, but it at least had external antennas and thus when our own device broke, we used it for some time. I had to lower the number of connections in my torrent client though because it didn't handle it well.

4. New deal, ISP has box that does Internet and works as VoIP gateway, you can use your own, but VoIP is MAC bound to the device. this is the moment when I convinced my mom the get rid of the landline because the only RJ-11 socket that worked okay was in my room, so we had the phone's charging station there, but she used it on the ground floor and it would discharge and not work until somebody noticed it.

5. Same ISP offers Satellite TV and Internet, they say you have to connect TV to Ethernet port number 1 of their router which was probably included in the fee. We use our own router because no, the satellite decoder didn't in fact need anything special(they also offered IPTV so that's probably the source of confusion). The decoder is so bad, like, the responsiveness is unacceptable, but only my mom uses it so whatever.

6. My grandpa has fibre, there's a modem that has an ethernet output, so I think there wouldn't be any issue using his own router, but he got the whole package so router + decoder, the router has shitty Wi-Fi and would crash on serious load, the decoder is the same crap that is taking a second to react to any input(I don't mean switching channels, just menu navigation for example). The price for Internet only is the same as the price for Internet + TV + phone, because screw you if you don't need those.

7. I had a cable provider living on my own that leased us for free a modem which had some security vulnerabilities(all the isp routers do), bad Wi-Fi speeds and according to their support, was impossible to be replaced.

What I'd want?

-Free basic modem
-cheap basic router
-ability to replace the devices for my own ones

-some better quality devices for a bit more from ISP

 

That'd be simple, transparent and would allow power users to do what they want. I know that most of what you get from ISP is sub $20 crap that is affecting negatively the quality of the service.

[cluelessgenius]

i have been runnnig my own hardware now for about 2 years and i totally get that they would charge you extra if you they had to aanswer all your stupid questions or problems when using all sorts of weird hardware configs you cant expect support from them if you set it up yourself. BUT Unitymedia , the german ISP im signed with, just goes ahead doesnt offer support. so when you want to use your own hardware you just call and tell them and they give you a disclaimer that from now on you would be on your own if problems arise that are not on their side. if youre fine with that you can just send back their router and plugin yours.

then a couple months ago i had a problem where the connection was shown in my router a connected but non of my requests/website calls or any package at all would go through. and they told me that theyll check their side. then they noticed that my router wasnt pingable in their system but lso that a bunch of others around my area wnt dark so it was probably their issue not mine. they would send a technician to the nearest distro box. they also again told me that if it was on their side theyll fix it but if they cant and im still having issues that turn out to be related to my own router setup THEN they would charge me to fix my router problems. which i find fair considering its not their hardware and they didnt cause the issue. 

but luckily it was their fault and fixed within a couple of hours.

so basically wether my ISP charges me for support is decidedon a case by case basis and depends on wether the issue is with their hardware or mine.

[IntMD]

Just checked what my ISP gives out these days, it's some sort of Fritzbox for free on your standard ADSL/VDSL+ contracts, you can pay an upfront amount of £60 for a Draytek of some sort for VDSL+ if you want to and the fibre router is free if you go for that. For the ADSL/VDSL ones you can use your own modem/router if you want, but they will still at least send you the basic Fritzbox one for free anyway. Fibre not sure if you can use your own or not, but the one they supply is free anyway (and it should be for the amount they are charging for Fibre at the minute too).

[Donut417]

On 7/5/2019 at 4:26 PM, Syntaxvgm said:

I Have to pay 30 extra to remove,

Let me fix that. $25 extra on Promo and $50 extra normal price. Thats what Comcast charges to remove the cap. OR in some areas the have their xFI gear that you can pay a $15 rental fee and get unlimited data as well. Kinda fucked up if you ask me. BUT at $10 per 50 Gigs on overages, you would need to use at least 250 Gigs above the cap to make unlimited worth it. Ive done the math as Im a Comcast customer in an area with the Cap.