said by cork1958:TW has to be one of the last of the bigger cable companies to start charging this fee?
As for Charter, yeah, you can still use your own modem, IF you get a hold of the right person who can switch your plan, like I had to. Really stupid that SOME CSR's will do that for you and others won't/can't. It's very seldom that Charters right hand knows what the left hand is doing. Charter is also the first, I believe, at only having 2 lousy tiers to choose from for internet also. Absolutely no plan for anyone on a fixed income or somebody barely getting by.
I'm also quite sure Charter will find a way to recoup the modem lease fee that has so conveniently been removed/integrated into the bill!
I think the timing is rather interesting.. cable companies know that their short life of recently activating docsis 3 modems will be short lived in it's usefulness against a FTTP service like FIOS.. therefore if you were to buy your own modem now it would be obsolete in less than 2 years when new service levels mandate updates to the doscis standard.. these aren't "flash-upgradable" modems in the sense that they could easily upgrade them to 24 or 32 bonded channels.. the mfr's wouldn't allow that.. they have the mindset of the dsl companies-- any significant improvement must come with a HARDWARE re-buy, not a simple piece of machine coding... so the rental fees will just about get consumers to buy the company's cablemodems in rental fees as they transitiion to new equipment..
