Cable Ops Charge Fees to Downgrade TV Packages

WOW! This is news? I'm glad to see that Variety is on top of things. I'm sure the next they will tell us that smart phones are popular as well as that fancy new HDTV thingie...

Providers charging end users to downgrade their service is extremely old news.

No it isnt, Ive used three different cable companies and have downgraded my service with all three of them and ive never been charged a fee.

Me too downgraded Comcast a few months ago and there was no fee and never have I heard of anyone anywhere doing this before.

From a business perspective seems like a fairly brain-dead stunt to pull if retention of paying customers is at all important to your business. Is a $4 slap in the face really worth someone switching to dish? Does not compute...

I have gotten charged for upgrading/downgrading on comcast. So no, this isn't something new.

yeah. DISH was doing this in the 90s. its to make upgrading for content a wash. say i wanted to watch all the last season of dexter on demand so i get showtime and watch them all in 2 days then cancel. i got what i want for around $1.40

The cable company's need to fall flat on their face and I mean hard..

Not such fees with OTA HDTV...

"Just the usual cable company stuff"

"Oh, that's right, we're the only ones in town"

»www.southparkstudios.com ··· unaround

Fine - come pick up your equipment, it will be on my doorstep in 20 minutes.

exactly, mediacom tried that with me when i went from "hd digital" to "basic" i cant remember the exact fee, think it was $20 to trap the line, i asked "whats the fee if i cancel it all right now?" "none" "ok, lets just cancel it all" suddenly that fee vanished..

they still do it if you make ANY changes now though, "electronic service change fee"

Just a few days ago I switched out a modem for a family friend. I downgraded there internet service as they are retired and hardley ever use the internet ( once or twice a week just to check email only) Comcast had them on a 25 mbps service which when i ran speed test they were only acheving 15 due to the antique modem they were provided so i signed them up for the esential package cutting there bill in half and gave them one of my old (fully owned) moto 5100 modems so they wouldnt need to pay comcast $7 a month to rent the old tired and faulty one comcast had provied them. Would you believe to switch to your own moden comcast charged them a $3 fee and $2 to downgrade service. Total rip off

these are scum fees meant to entice you to find another provider.. but surprise, surprise.. increasingly it is a Telco that neither cares, has deployed an adequate competitive network or raised it's prices in an effort to collude to getting more out of the consumer.

now that this is looking like bad choice A and bad choice B, maybe municipalities & states will think again about getting another company to deploy a network when negotiating their franchises with these carriers. remember these anti consumer behaviors when the time comes...

It cost $300 million for the power company to build the Chattanooga FTTH project. The only reason Verizon build what they did of the Fios system was the CEO made it his pet project. When he left Verizon pulled the plug on Fios to new areas. The only way FTTH will work is for the fiber company to have some kind of monopoly on the transport. If you have transport competition most companies will not build the network.

An abusive monopoly. But seriously, we shouldn't exactly be surprised about this!