If your billing is too complicated to be accurately described to your customers, then you may have put yourself in a situation where you are incapable of being honest with your customers. That's on you.
It's the job of regulators to ensure that you are honest with your customers; therefore, they can reasonably forbid you from having billing so complicated that it cannot be described accurately.
It's funny, my local ISP tells me I owe X dollars a month and that's what I pay. How on earth do they do that? Comcast is telling us it can't possibly be that simple
The airlines managed to figure it out, weirdly enough. Calculating the price of an airline seat is Turing-complete, and at least one airline software service, ITA, needed the runtime compilation feature of Common Lisp to do it efficiently. Yes, when a user asked for a ticket price, their systems wrote and compiled a piece of code to determine the answer.
Many companies, specially telcos, have a complex scheme of paid plans to confuse the users so that they become fed up and say "ok, so how much do I have to pay". This is their exact objective.
My local ISP (not a part of some huge elite ISP) is similar to yours. Pay X and you get unlimited internet for a month at Y Mbps uplink/downlink. Somehow it's too complex for Comcast.
I’d love to have a local option. We get spectrum or wind stream, which means spectrum. They charge whatever they want because they have a pseudo monopoly.
mine even manages to do it for the price they advertise. and without a data cap. and without having to have a comcrap router in order to pay more to not have a data cap. i had my own router i didnt want to use theirs mine was better. but the only way i could find to pay to not deal with the cap was to have their router. fuck that.
I'm so glad I don't have to use Comcast any more. A small local ISP (Sonic) expanded to cover my area last year and offers 10Gbps symmetric fiber for $40/month - half the price I was paying Comcast for 1.2Gbps down / 35Mbps up.
I'm super jealous. At least I'm moving to a new apartment with fiber from CenturyLink at it, but even they are running $70/mo for gigabit. I'm living the T-Mobile 5G home internet life right now because CL only has DSL at my current place, and fuck Comcast in general.
Comcast is a truly rotten company. Like without fail they continue to impress me on their new clever ways of misleading customers. Like remember "10G" from earlier this year...?
Most cable companies appear to be rotten to the core... Cox Communications is rolling out fiber into my neighborhood... Know what speeds they're advertising? 900/30... Which is WORSE than their gigabit coaxial option... At least there you could get 960/30
"The label hasn't even reached consumers yet, but Comcast is already trying to create loopholes." Is anyone surprised? I'm not a huge fan of Google's privacy practices, but their Fiber service is outstandingly easy to use and fast. I'm lucky to live in Kansas City though...
There's an easy fix, just don't allow charging any fees that aren't listed along with the advertised price. See? Very simple. They'll figure out how to list them thereafter, believe in them.
But according to Comcast, "two aspects of the Commission's Order impose significant administrative burdens and unnecessary complexity in complying with the broadband label requirements."
"We much prefer to impose significant financial burdens and unnecessary complexities on our victimscustomers."