 Smith6612Premium,MVM
join:2008-02-01
North Tonawanda, NY
kudos:22
 ·Verizon Online DSL
·Frontier Communi..
| The modem rental fee. This fee is silly. Many folks I know stick with providers for years, which more than pays for the modems or cheap, buggy gateways. Plenty of users with SB5101s still or those horrible RCA modems that are years old. The modems are also still circulated throughout the area despite being old and run until they break for good.
Adelphia back when they owned this area used to allow folks to purchase their own Cable modem, which many folks oped for the Motorola SURFBoard. Time Warner permits this to happen too, but if you get their voice service and there is a customer owned modem, they come in, split off the two modems and put in a Voice/Data combo modem. What I find stupid is, when they do this they not only ruin your signal levels, with some lines in the area running in marginal spec as a result, but if you choose to run just ONE modem, you know, the free one they gave you for voice service and opt to sell or retire your personal modem, you would get smacked with a $2.50 fee each month for just having a good gesture of taking a modem off of the network. That price is getting hiked now apparently.
Yet, Verizon for FiOS gives out routers if you say it's broken. The router is yours after a year or two. For DSL? Say your service disconnects and you have another modem on the way, no fee. Apparently the cost of the gear isn't a problem for them!
I won't include Frontier into the discussion though. They're on the same level as Time Warner if you get suckered into their fees for their modem rental which is a few dollars more for the same, cheap and buggy gateways. |
