By , Kate Cox
Published May 19, 2016
Over the last few months, our colleagues at Consumerist have reviewed cable and internet service bills for seven of the nation’s largest providers in an attempt to make sense of all those fees and charges. Here's what they learned from these bills covering cable, satellite, and fiber customers from Connecticut to California.
The fees! The fees are everywhere!
As a rule of thumb, the collection of taxes, fees, and surcharges above the stated subscription price ranged from about 15% to 30% of any given customer’s total bill (including bills we looked at but didn’t publish).
Taxes and state charges are, of course, highly variable. State and local taxes ranged from 0% to about 9%, depending on where subscribers live. Likewise, some states charge telecom taxes or franchise fees, while others don’t; all told, it makes for one big mess to compare different locations in any apples-to-apples way.
Similarly, some fees that are technically added by the companies—to recoup state or federal charges—are fixed by other entities, and so the cable companies don’t have much to do with it.
• AT&T U-verse Bill
• Charter Cable Bill
• Comcast Bill
• DirecTV Bill
• Dish Network Bill
• Time Warner Cable Bill
• Verizon FiOS Bill
But then there are the pure revenue fees—those times where cable companies are making bank by charging you money they could just have put in their packages. The biggest bugaboos we saw?
Some companies, like Dish and Charter, are particularly opaque about the various taxes you might need to pay.
Dish has a line item for “tax” but rolls various state and local taxes into one line item so you can’t see what the real charges are. And when it comes to voice service, Charter completely fails to break out any line items and instead just rolls them all into your monthly fee. Convenient? Sure, maybe, if you’re trying to save space on the bill—but that makes it very hard to tell what the real cost of service is, and where your money goes.
On the other end of the spectrum, AT&T Uverse goes so transparent with its invoice details that it loops right back around to being opaque.
By breaking out literally every charge into a separate fee, and putting them all in separate sections of the bill, AT&T generates confusion and make it look, incorrectly, like some fees are being assessed twice.
The best bills are a happy medium, which—don’t count this as an endorsement—Comcast strikes fairly well.
One recurring theme we noticed: new customers are getting better packages, for less money, than existing customers.
When pricing out comparable bundles for the bill guides, we generally saw that new customers were being offered the same or better service for $10-$20 less than our current customer. We even found one ten-year Charter customer, whose bill we did not publish, paying roughly $75 per month more than a brand-new customer, getting similar service, in their neighborhood would.
Customers who do happen to live in competitive markets might as well shop around, check with other businesses, and see who’s offering the best deal. Competition has this way of dropping prices and improving available service, after all.
Unfortunately, a huge percentage of us live in markets where we are stuck with a cable/broadband monopoly, so switching is off the table.
The conventional wisdom says that if you can’t quit, you may as well negotiate. And for a long time, that was good advice.
As recently as 2014, our siblings at Consumer Reports put together a handy list of tips for negotiating a better deal with your cable company. Even in a 2015 survey Consumer Reports still found that by and large, the 42% of customers who tried to negotiate were able either to reduce their bills or to get more services included for the prices they were paying.
Anecdotally, however, it appears that the big companies—especially Comcast—aren’t as interested in negotiating with you as they used to be. Consumerist readers who have tried to negotiate better TV or triple-play rates with Comcast in recent months tell Consumerist that the company is simply not playing anymore, and the calls are ending either with rates unchanged or with Comcast calling a would-be cord-cutter’s bluff, and cheerfully snipping their service.
Why the turn-around from extreme efforts at retention to a “don’t let the door hit’cha on the way out” attitude?
Perhaps the wave of high profile, awkward, painful, retention-related PR disasters the company endured in 2014 and early 2015 has finally pushed it in that direction.
Or maybe they’re just reading the writing on the wall: pay-TV has been losing customers for a while, after all, while broadband subscriptions are going up, up, up. And pay TV costs a lot more to provide, and has much thinner profit margins on it, than broadband service does.
So, friends and readers, we leave you with a parting curiosity. We want to know: if you think your bills are too dang high, have you tried negotiating, and how has that worked out for you?
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https://www.foxnews.com/tech/guide-to-understanding-your-cable-bill