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The Internet Government Network The Almighty Buck United States Technology

US Finally Prohibits ISPs From Charging For Routers They Don't Provide (arstechnica.com) 96

Posted by BeauHD from the rude-practices dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new U.S. law prohibits broadband and TV providers from charging "rental" fees for equipment that customers have provided themselves. A U.S. government spending bill approved by Congress and signed by President Trump last month includes new requirements for television and broadband providers. A new "consumer right to accurate equipment charges" prohibits the companies from charging customers for "covered equipment provided by the consumer." Covered equipment is defined as "equipment (such as a router) employed on the premises of a person... to provide [TV service] or to provide fixed broadband Internet access service."

The companies may not charge rental or lease fees in cases when "the provider has not provided the equipment to the consumer; or the consumer has returned the equipment to the provider." The new law is an update to the Communications Act and is scheduled to apply six months after passage, which would be June 20. The law gives the Federal Communications Commission an option to extend the deadline by six months if the FCC "finds that good cause exists for such an additional extension." One ISP in particular that's been requiring customers to pay a monthly fee for equipment they own is Frontier, which charges a $10 a month "Wi-Fi Router" fee, even if the router they use is fully compatible with the service and requires no additional work on Frontier's part.

Frontier told Ars that it will comply with the new law, but it apparently won't give customers a break on rental fees until it's actually in place. "Once the new law is effective, Frontier plans to comply with the requirements," a company spokesperson told them.
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US Finally Prohibits ISPs From Charging For Routers They Don't Provide More

US Finally Prohibits ISPs From Charging For Routers They Don't Provide

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  • Why just say that any rented or leased hardware mu (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @06:53PM (#59597436)

    Why just say that any rented or leased hardware must be offered for sale and they must do activation for any owned box and no you can't clam that cable box from best buy Canada is stolen

    • Re:Why just say that any rented or leased hardware (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @07:09PM (#59597490)

      I have lived in 3 countries in the past 10 years, and dealt with a multitude of ISPs and connectivity options.

      None of them required me to pay an ongoing fee for any hardware.

      Most of them included hardware for free (I think one asked me to pay a trivial shipping fee for the free router), with no requirement to ship it back to them.

      All of them allowed me to use my own hardware without any concerns.

      None of these countries were the US. Surprising, that! :)

      • Re: Why just say that any rented or leased hardwar (Score:4, Informative)

        by NagrothAgain ( 4130865 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @07:31PM (#59597552)
        I currently have Charter, I have my own modem and don't pay a fee. They do have a disclaimer if I use a make/model/firmware which they haven't certified basically saying I can't bitch if it doesn't work right. And if it fails I have to take care of any return/refund/warranty on my own. I've heard Comcast charges a fee, don't know if it's true or not. But the article is talking about a provider called Frontier which is notorious for fucking over their customers and I don't know what legal Loophole they were using. And what Frontier will probably do is raise their base rate by the amount of the previous fee, or call it something else.
        • Capitalism 101

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Xenx ( 2211586 )
          Comcast doesn't charge a fee if you use your own modem.

          My thoughts on the equipment rental fees are mixed. As a customer, I think it's terrible. As tech support for an ISP it's still a mixed bag. Regardless of whether the equipment was provided by the ISP, customers will call for support with the equipment. Customers also don't always understand/care that it might be their hardware at fault. This drives up call counts and call times.

          Where I work we don't charge rental fees for modems. However, we also do

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Xenx ( 2211586 )
            Sorry, I should have added... With as much as some of the larger companies, like Frontier, charge for their mediocre service they don't need to be charging additional fees to make money. You can easily argue that they make enough regardless.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

            You could also argue that a company shouldn't charge a rental fee for something they aren't providing. Because that's clearly theft and/or fraud. If they have support costs to amortize across customers, just up the base rate to cover it. Specifically claiming a fee for a rental on equipment they don't provide is just wrong.

            You sound like you don't really understand ethics. Do you work for Frontier?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Xenx ( 2211586 )

              You sound like you don't really understand ethics. Do you work for Frontier?

              Do you use your brain? I specifically said I didn't agree with them.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Aereus ( 1042228 )

          Comcast doesn't charge if you provide your own, but they make it super restrictive on which models they will allow. And while Charter doesn't charge for rentals, Comcast charges a whopping $13/mo for their modem rental.

      • FWIW, I'm on Cox (in the U.S.). When I first started service, they gave me a choice between renting a modem, buying one of their modems, or providing my own modem. They were very forthcoming about this - they didn't try to hide the fact that I didn't need to rent a modem. In fact their rep recommended I buy one if I was technically competent enough to understand the specs and could set it up myself.

        A year later they called me with a promo, where if I signed up for a package deal they'd throw in a free
    • the same law happened in australia So many of them just made it mandatory to buy and use their router, or hacked the price up abe claimed the router was free.

  • We needed a law for this? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PingXao ( 153057 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @06:55PM (#59597442)

    The rot is pretty clear.

    • Re:We needed a law for this? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Matheus ( 586080 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @07:01PM (#59597466) Homepage

      IMHO we already had (several) laws relating to this generally falling under the category of "Fraudulent Charges" but apparently we need a more "specific" law to make the lawyers shut up?

      • IMHO we already had (several) laws relating to this generally falling under the category of "Fraudulent Charges" but apparently we need a more "specific" law to make the lawyers shut up?

        The right to not be subject to Fraud arises under the 9th Amendment, as a right "retained by the people", and the 10th Amendment, as a right "reserved to the people".

        Hence, under the highest law in the land, it is already the case that charging people for using their own routers is illegal conduct.

        For a lawyer to write or enforce or allow an employer to use a contract to the contrary is placing contract law superior to the highest law in the land, hence creates a contradiction in the law and is unethical pr

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by sit1963nz ( 934837 )
      USA, almost 1% of the adult population in prison
      USA businesses proving they are equally dishonest.
      USA POTUS acts criminally
      USA senate will allow POTUS to act criminally

      I am seeing a trend here.
    • Because the fundamental problem here isn't bad cable and phone companies. It's government-granted monopolies. When the government takes over an economic sector and grants a monopoly, that eliminates any market forces which would normally correct abuses like this. Think about it - if there were a half dozen companies competing to offer cable internet service, and one of them decided to charge rent for customer-owned equipment, they'd be committing economic suicide. All their customers would call them on

  • "Once the new law is effective, Frontier plans to comply with the requirements," a company spokesperson told them.

        What a nice friendly bunch, they have decided to not *break the law*.

    • "Once the new law is effective, Frontier plans to comply with the requirements," a company spokesperson told them.

      What a nice friendly bunch, they have decided to not *break the law*.

      One has to respect corporations capable of such selfless sacrifice.

    • In unrelated news, they will be introducing a new fee which coincidentally is the same amount as the router fee that they aren't allowed to charge for anymore.

  • wow, expensive (Score:4, Informative)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @06:57PM (#59597448)

    Frontier has 3.8 million residential customers and makes an average of $88.45 per month per customer. The company reported a net loss of $345 million in the most recent quarter

    Sounds like this company's management has some difficulty controlling costs. $1 billion in revenue and $1.345 billion in expenses in a quarter year?

  • Translation of Frontier's Message (Score:3)

    by Matheus ( 586080 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @06:59PM (#59597456) Homepage

    F: "We'll stop being dicks when we're legally obligated!"

    My reply would be "I'll consider being your customer when hell freezes over!"

    As it is Frontier isn't a provider in this area (and last I checked my services provider isn't charging me any of these fraudulent fees) so none of this affects me but wow... That's a company I never need to do business with.

    • Frontier is insidious because they mostly serve rural hard to reach areas where you have only one choice.

      I could literally see their fiber into a tower right next to a building I was trying to get better internet for. It took then half a dozen visits just to turn the thing up. That's after all the fiber was brought into the building and all equipment was installed. They literally had people in 4 different locations accessing 4 different routers to finally get the circuit turned up. Completely ridiculous.

      T

      • they mostly serve rural hard to reach areas where you have only one choice.

        You don’t have to live out in BFE to be limited to one choice of wired broadband provider. A suburb where AT&T never upgraded the infrastructure beyond DSL (which is generally no longer available to “new” customers) and conceded to the local cable provider, is all it takes.

        Not as if having AT&T as your alternate provider choice is much better than only one choice, though. AT&T wasn’t very competitive even when they were still a competitor.

    • It's in the US, where telecoms are granted monopolies. In fact, often even municipalities are prohibited from rolling their own networks. So you don't have a choice. I was in the middle of NYC until 2009 and my best option was 3Mbps internet since one telecom and one cable company were each given a monopoly and neither offered anything faster.
      So, because you don't have a choice, they can announce that they will defraud you until they are legally obligated to stop. And there is nothing you can do. It would p

    • Unfortunately, most people have only one choice in ISPs. For example, I have Charter as my only wired, high speed Internet option. If I didn't like their service (and I'm not thrilled about it), I can either suck it up and stick with them or go without Internet access at home (not an option).

  • Most of these bullshit fees were just hidden price padding. Kinda like what the airlines did when they started charging for bringing a bag. The telco companies aren’t going to settle for less profit, they’ll just jack up the fees to make up for the lost income.

    This would be a win for the consumer if there was some real competition in the US broadband market, but there isn’t. So, “hooray!” for the victory of getting some numbers getting moved around on your bill, I suppose.

    • Internet infrastructure is a natural monopoly due to high capital costs.

      Of course it *would* be competitive if the wires/etc were maintained by the city as a utility.

      Oh right, Monticello tried that and got sued.

  • Router fee - Customer support fee (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vanyel ( 28049 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @07:03PM (#59597474) Journal

    As a sysadmin at an ISP, I can see a point in that customer owned routers are not going to fit in with modern auto-provisioning systems, causing customer support headaches, however $10/mo is rather excessive even so. And I'll bet they just change it from a rental fee to a customer support fee to get around the restriction.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by bblb ( 5508872 )

      If you actually think that's true than you're either not a sysadmin or not a very good one.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by sakono ( 4659761 )
      I have never had a issue with my own cable modem and router that I didn't find myself before calling support. When ever I called support it was a issue on their end and not mine. But I'm a repair tech for printers and computers and most people aren't that tech savy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Khyber ( 864651 )

      "As a sysadmin at an ISP, I can see a point in that customer owned routers are not going to fit in with modern auto-provisioning systems"

      Glad I'm not at your ISP and that you aren't my ISP sysadmin, because routers don't do auto-provisioning, that's all on the modem side. Only thing a router does is acquire an IP address from the modem, assign IP addresses to other devices hooked up to it, handle most NAT, and occasionally steal your modem IP (you have to do this manually most times) so you can actually uti

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by vanyel ( 28049 )

        Most DSL modems *are* routers, and when they're setup for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] auto-configuration, they are pretty much plug-n-play. When you have to put the modem into bridged mode and talk the customer through the various settings, especially when they either aren't as knowledgeable as they think they are, or more likely, some business owner that's been told they need some weird configuration, then it's not, and you're racking up customer support time.

        • Most DSL modems *are* routers, and when they're setup for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]... auto-configuration, they are pretty much plug-n-play.

          Combo modem hardware / router is always a mistake because the router part is controlled by the ISP and unless it is a small shop they have visibility into it.

          When you have to put the modem into bridged mode and talk the customer through the various settings

          You don't have to put the router into bridge mode to interoperate with customer routers.

          especially when they either aren't as knowledgeable as they think they are, or more likely, some business owner that's been told they need some weird configuration, then it's not, and you're racking up customer support time.

          For most the real support issue is that combo modem is controlled by the ISP and has L2 access to the customers network including the ability to see all kinds of shit (see all of your individual devices, device names, MAC addresses, PnP/service announcements) they w

    • As a sysadmin your opinion on auto-provisioning is not at all even remotely related to this financial fraud or the law that combats it.

  • AT&T Fiber just recently started to charge a $10/mo fee for their residential gateway which is "required" for service (they use 802.1x but it isn't specific to an account). You can buy a used gateway device online for $20 (and also extract the 802.1x certs and use your own router).

    I wonder if I returned their gateway to get rid of the credit? What would stop them from deactivating my service and telling me it was required?

  • I've got a Netgear 6250 and the firmware running on it is controlled by Comcast/Xfinity. I don't pay the same "rental fee" that I would if I used a comcast provided one, but they still hit me for like $2/mo so they can install firmware on it. Grr...

  • This law should be expanded further (Score:3)

    by ZorinLynx ( 31751 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @07:12PM (#59597498) Homepage

    In short: If an ISP doesn't allow the customer to purchase their own CPE, rental fees for CPE should not be allowed.

    AT&T here for example doesn't allow you to buy your own router; you must use theirs and pay a rental fee for it. Either AT&T should allow users to purchase their own equipment OR they shouldn't be allowed to charge a rental fee.

  • $5/month or whatever rental fee disappears. Ooops, basic cable/internet price just went up by $5 or whatever...
    • Probably. But at least it makes their advertising of monthly prices honest. AT&T currently advertises "$50/mo. for 12 mos. plus taxes & equip. fee", and in small type, "w/12-mo. agmt. $10/mo. equip. fee applies. Incl 1TB data/mo., overage chrgs apply. Geo & svc. restr’s apply."

      So, what they really mean is, "$60/mo. for 12 mos. plus taxes", so they should just say it up-front and not use weasel words to make it sound like $50/mo.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anil ( 7001 )

      They will just rename the fee into some other bullshit "federal tax reclamation fee" or something.
      The advertised base prices for services are always artificially low.

  • Things like:

    Maintenance fees
    Surcharge fees
    Recovery fees
    Administration fees

    Verizon charges some form of state related recovery fee and a digital voice administrative fee. The fun one was the threatened 'old router support fee' of 2.82 a month if I didn't upgrade to a newer version of THEIR supplied router.
    All non governmental fees should be included in the advertised price. It's pure lies.

  • They been screwing customers since forever.

  • Simple, they will just add a $10/month fee for customers who decline to rent a modem from them.

    Because of all the additional paperwork involved in keeping track of who isn't renting, of course.
    • Exactly. On our office VOIP plan I couldn't believe my eyes that we have two 911 (or E911) fees. The first one is no surprise, you see it on cell plans too. But the second fee? That was for the VOIP company because of the work they did collecting the first fee.
  • Wife wanted HGTV, or as I call it, home porn. Fees were for Network Enhancement, Sports Fees (espn), Broadcast TV fees, Box Rental Fees, Premium Outlet Fee....oh, and the actual programming. All in, two boxes, $1400 per year. Insane. Philo for $20 per month is much better.

  • I suffered with them for ~4 years. When I first called about their DSL service I was told it was $30/mo for 6Mbit down speed. I replied that I've had DSL before and understand that's a theoretical possibility but depends on proximity to the CO so what could I really expect... Frontier's rep replied "Oh no sir, you're going to get 6Mb!" I replied "Really?", "Yes Sir, 6Mb!", "Well this will be awesome!" I was stoked. This was going to be the fastest internet I'd had to that point.
    So, they did their install a

  • They need to also mandate that they MUST activate and deliver all types of service which are compatible even if the equipment is customer-owned; providing the equipment meets the relevant industry standards such as Ethernet, DOCSIS 3.1, etc.

  • Meanwhile in Comcastland (Score:3)

    by CBob ( 722532 ) <crzybob_in_njNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:41PM (#59598068)

    They will let you have your modem / router, but just raised rates. With Verizon stuck firmly in the 90's with speeds up to 3meg, they know we're stuck.

    • Comcast never raised rates on me when I brought my own modem/router. What they did do that eventually forced me to rent their AIO (which thankfully can be bridged) is tell me that I can't get unlimited data if I don't use their equipment. Why they have this limitation is entirely beyond me, however.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wolfrider ( 856 )

      Your memories of the 90's are a bit different from mine - IIRC I had 150KB/sec DSL around '99 and was quite happy with the speed increase from ~4-6KB/sec (OR LESS) 56K phone modems

  • Seriously pay for something never rented? Why are they not getting sued?

  • What these American companies are really doing has nothing to do with "charging a monthly fee for hardware" at all. What they're doing is lying about the monthly costs because it looks good on the advertising, then slapping the users with compulsory additional fees every month. For example, instead of outright stating that the cost is $60 a month you can advertise it as costing $49.99 per month and slap on $10 of "rental fees" along with the price.

    The most likely outcome is that the company will just raise

  • My mom had TDS with a rental modem. The only issue I had switching her to self-owned hardware was we had to move her phone service off TDS before we switched. I was actually impressed, I expected it to be much more difficult to get them to switch over and stop charging the $12 a month rental fee.
  • Sure, when the law takes effect, they'll probably stop charging the rental fee. But they'll just replace it with some other fee, such as an "access fee". [That's what Dish Network did to me years ago. I had the choice of leasing their receiver, or connecting a receiver that I already owned. In the former case, they would charge me a monthly lease. In the latter case, they would charge me a connection fee which was equal to the lease amount.] Governments get in on this game, too. A few years ago my state of

  • They will probably just change the name of the fee to "IP Address Lease" or "Access Port Fee".

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