Thanks to confusing bundles, hidden charges, misleading promises, and obscure terms, everyone agrees that cable TV and internet providers are the absolute worst. I tried to comparison shop for internet service in my area and ended up an awful mess of sketchy terms, and upsells. It shouldn’t be like this.




Data Caps Are Completely Arbitrary Fee Farms

Everyone hates data caps, but they’re more common now than they’ve ever been. Comcast data usage “trials,” like the kind being tested in my home city of Atlanta, have been going on for years. A look at their plans in even a single market shows that their pricing is inconsistent. In most areas, Comcast sets a 300GB data cap regardless of internet speed. Users then get charged $10 per 50GB for going over. Alternatively, you can opt for their “super saver” Flexible Data Option that reduces your cap to 5GB of data in exchange for a $5 discount. If you go over on that plan, Comcast charges $1 per GB, which quintuples the cost of 50GB from $10 to $50. For the purposes of overage fees, Comcast values 1GB of data anywhere from two cents to a dollar. This makes no logical sense. Comcast’s fees follow no discernible pattern or reason.


There also seems to be no real reason for why the data caps are set where they are. Comcast’s data cap sits at 300GB across all residential plans. That cap doesn’t scale based on how fast your internet is or how much data you consume. The customer with a 10Mbps plan that streams Netflix occasionally has the same data cap as the customer who pays a lot more money for 105Mbps so they can download all 40GB of Destiny in less than an hour. The one exception is that in Tucson, Arizona, Comcast’s caps can go up to 600GB for higher speed plans, which only further emphasizes how arbitrary these plans are.

AT&T is better than Comcast in this area, but only on a technicality. The company’s data caps scale based on internet speeds. However, a closer look reveals some disturbing inconsistencies. For speeds up to 6Mbps, you can download up to 300GB per month, which amounts to around five straight days of downloading at max speed. For 12-75Mbps, your cap goes up to 600GB. On the 12Mbps plan it would still take five days of max speed downloads to blow through your cap, but at the 75Mbps speed, you could eat up that cap in 19 hours.

The math gets worse at the highest tier. AT&T will offer 1TB of data for users ranging anywhere from 100Mbps to 1Gbps. At 100Mbps, you could use up 1TB of data inside 24 hours if you were downloading constantly at top speed. If you’re one of the lucky few who manage to get into the gigabit tier? That cap is gone in two and a half hours. Now, obviously nobody is actually going to download at full speed 100% of the time, but it’s curious to note that as your speed gets better, the cap relative to your speeds gets worse.

There’s also no evidence that there’s a technical reason these caps exist. Internal Comcast customer service documents specifically forbid saying that congestion management is behind the caps. Comcast’s VP of internet services says the caps are a business decision, not a technical one. It’s unsurprising then that both AT&T and Comcast offer an unlimited data upcharge for around $30. These options aren’t very well advertised, so you may have to call and ask for them specifically. However, they may save you a lot of overage fees in the long run. At least until the FCC gets tired of hearing so many complaints about them.


Bundled Service Packages Are a Confusing, Costly Mess


Most cable companies like to package their services together in bundles. After all, if you need internet and TV, why not get them together for a cheaper rate? In principle, it makes sense, but in practice, bundles and promotional pricing make it almost impossible to know how much your services really cost, and whether you’d save money by downsizing or accepting one of the many “upgrade” offers cable companies try to sell you.

I used my own home as an example to try shopping for internet packages. My goal was to find a relatively fast internet package without accompanying TV junk. Both AT&T and Comcast required addresses before I could even see pricing. I also tried to compare service pricing with Time Warner and Charter in my areas as well, but like 67% of America, I only have the two choices for ISPs, so national pricing is impossible. Once I specified that I wanted internet service only, AT&T offered me four plans, with speeds no higher than 6Mbps, maxing out at $35/month. Meanwhile Comcast offered a reasonable, affordable 25Mbps plan for $39/month. Seems pretty easy, right?


After a closer look, Comcast’s 25Mbps plan requires that I subscribe to a basic TV package, which was included in the cost. This was despite specifically indicating I don’t want a television package. It also comes with Showtime, for some reason. If I scroll further down on their website, I can find that same 25Mbps package for $67/month without cable. Now, I expect that not buying the services together would make them more expensive, so I might consider getting the bundle just to save some money. However, in the fine print, Comcast states that the $39/month price is only for 12 months. After that, the 25Mbps plan with TV spikes up to $72/month, which is even more than I’d pay for just the internet on its own, which is all I want. In order to save the most money, I have to order the cheaper plan now, and then make sure I remember to change my plan again in a year.

Meanwhile, the AT&T bundles I found are all too slow for my needs. 6Mbps just isn’t enough, no matter how cheap it is. However, I decide to check out the TV and Internet bundles just in case, where I find that (very much to my surprise), my home qualifies for the ludicrous speed Gigapower gigabit internet package, but only if I sign up for a massive television package that includes over 220+ channels. At my home, it’s impossible to get speeds any faster than 6Mbps unless I buy an unnecessary television bundle.


To make this all more confusing, both companies only offer the advertised prices for a limited time. Comcast doesn’t require a contract, but it will bump up your monthly bill after a promotional period (anywhere between six, twelve, or eighteen months) has ended. AT&T does require a contract, and it reserves the right to raise prices at the end, but it doesn’t explicitly say that you’ll pay more. However, there are hefty fees for leaving early.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to get around all this confusion. Your best bet is to find the deal that’s best for you today, then set up a recurring reminder to call your cable company every year or so and negotiate to something more affordable. You can usually score the same deal that a new customer would get by firmly yet politely threatening to leave.


Hidden Fees Are So Abundant, I Could Barely Keep Up With Them All


Setting aside the problem of bundles, all of the plans I looked at in the previous section also came with a ton of excessive, complicated fees. Most of them are buried so deep in the fine print that I’m still not sure I found them all.

AT&T’s Gigapower, for example, costs $140/month. However, in a collapsed tab on the checkout page, I discovered that the package included an “optional” premium television package that was selected by default. It was free for the first three months, but afterwards, my bill would go up by $54 per month. On the next page, I discovered a generic $30 discount that required I allow AT&T to monitor my browsing activity to serve ads, and there’s no way to disable or remove it. As of this writing, I have checked every method I can find on AT&T’s website short of placing my order and calling in to have it removed after the fact, but I cannot find a single button that allows me to opt-out and pay the extra $30. To AT&T’s credit, most of the usual device and installation fees were waived, but I felt like I’d been tricked twice before I even got to the checkout, and I went hunting for this stuff. Think about what people who call and sign up wind up agreeing to without even knowing it. That’s not a great feeling.


Comcast’s plans were similarly riddled with upcharges. That $39/month plan for 25Mbps internet with all the cable packages wasn’t just a promotional price. It also required that I enroll in automatic payments and paperless billing. If I didn’t, or if I ever turned either one off, the plan would go up by $10/month. There was also another $10/month charge to lease a modem. To Comcast’s credit, I was presented with a very clear option to use my own, but by now my $40/month internet plan could be as high as $60 if I didn’t use it on Comcast’s terms.

Neither company tried very hard to mention their data caps, either. Comcast had a reference to their Data Usage Plan exactly once in a hidden link on the promotions page. If AT&T mentioned their data caps anywhere, I couldn’t find it. Now, the internal logic behind this is that most users don’t even need to know there’s a data cap because they rarely hit it, but that’s hardly an excuse to hide potentially huge charges from users.


The only defense here is to read absolutely everything. Cable company websites are designed to be labyrinths that obscure a wide range of fees and upcharges. I spent an entire day going over every detail of multiple packages because it’s my job and I still don’t know that I found every fee. In the absolute worst-case scenario, if you’re not sure what you’re going to be charged, call someone and ask. If you can (legally) record a conversation with a customer service rep and get a human person to tell you exactly what you’ll be charged and how often, even better.


Gigabit Rollout Announcements Are Wildly Overstated

Everywhere in the US that 1Gbps service is even advertised, according to the National Broadband Map


Internet speeds in the US aren’t great. According to content delivery network Akamai in its State of the Internet report, in late 2015 the average US broadband speed was 11.7Mbps. For reference, the FCC updated the legal definition of “broadband” to 25Mbps in January of 2015. So, when a company promises internet speeds in the gigabit range, people pay attention. You may even keep that promise in mind when you’re considering where to move. Like when Comcast announced that it would start rolling out 2Gbps internet speeds to the city of Atlanta.

These kinds of announcements make for great publicity, but in practice they’re extremely limited. For example, Comcast said it planned to make gigabit service “available” in Atlanta as soon as May of 2015. This didn’t happen until a year later. Customers also have to live within a third of a mile of Comcast’s core network. Then there are installation costs that can easily exceed thousands of dollars. In some cases, Comcast has declined customers entirely because the associated costs are too high. This is a bit hard to reconcile with Comcast’s claims that the service would be “available to 18 million homes” by the end of 2016.


AT&T prefers to announce its gigabit availability in terms of “markets,” listing the cities where it exists, rather than specifying how many users have access. However, living in the city isn’t the same as having access. You can see on AT&T’s own availability tool here that Gigapower may be listed as “available” within a city, but once you check specific addresses, a lot aren’t available. Verizon has done a similar thing with its FiOS rollout in New York City.

Most of these rollout announcements are designed to sound impressive to build good press and help curry favor with the FCC. They’re not a true indication of which services you can actually get. Worse yet, if you buy into the hype, you can find yourself moving to an area that doesn’t have the service you hope for or, worse, paying thousands of dollars more than you expected to get it.


Illustration by Sam Woolley.