Couple bought home in Seattle, then learned Comcast Internet would cost $27,000
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From what the article says, it sounds like they're over the 150 limit, so they wouldn't get the "standard installation charge," whatever it is.
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Posted the same before I saw your comment. I guess the only other obstacle is the expertise required to setup a private link like that - I would do it for them at no cost, but I'm not local
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If it were me, I'd make nice to the neighbor that the previous owners ran a cable from, and maybe offer to pay their entire monthly internet charge if they're willing to share bandwidth. I'd also make damn sure I was never late in paying either. I'd also invite them over for dinner, beer and pizza, a cookout in the backyard, etc.
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At least in my area, and my parents area where I grew up, it is incredibly common to use a buyers agent even if you are not selling a home. They have access to the MLS to help you search for homes and understand the process to help you put in solid offers and navigate the closing process as well. I don't know that it is really that common to buy a home without an agent, probably more common to sell a home without an agent honestly.
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That's what I considered doing at my first house in 2001. I couldn't get DSL (Verizon/GTE) and Cable wasn't a thing yet (AT&T Broadband/Insight Cable). The neighbor right across the street could.
About two months into planning which equipment I could get and working out a deal with the neighbor to get DSL and me paying them half of their bill, and putting the antenna aimed at my house, all of a sudden, Verizon added "high speed" 768K/128K Frame Relay DSL capacity. So I never had to do it.
The solutions like Ubiquiti have matured quite a bit in 20 years since that experience in 2001 and could easily address this.
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Wow that sucks.
We live miles away from the nearest city (just under 200K population), in a rural+farmland mix area. We use cable internet now, and they have installed Fiber. Even the DSL service is 100mb, for dual channel.
When our connection was dropping a lot, the cable company (not Comcast) ran a new buried trunk line to our place. A trunk line was needed because of the 350 foot setback from the road. No cost to us.
It is amazing to me that living in a city like Seattle doesn't get you better service.
They should pay their neighbors $xx a month to leech off their Wifi. $xx is cheaper than the alternatives, and it may get them "service".
We live miles away from the nearest city (just under 200K population), in a rural+farmland mix area. We use cable internet now, and they have installed Fiber. Even the DSL service is 100mb, for dual channel.
When our connection was dropping a lot, the cable company (not Comcast) ran a new buried trunk line to our place. A trunk line was needed because of the 350 foot setback from the road. No cost to us.
It is amazing to me that living in a city like Seattle doesn't get you better service.
They should pay their neighbors $xx a month to leech off their Wifi. $xx is cheaper than the alternatives, and it may get them "service".
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You want crazy - where I am in the rural parts a company brought in fiber. Sweet, we get 1000/1000. However, there was no hole digging. You can quite literally see the cable running in the bushes along the side of the road to the next village.
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I didn't forget, I was beat out on at least five houses. It was slim pickings, but in the end I got lucky and got the house I wanted. I got a great inspection, I did wave all the repairs, but they were all minor. This was June-August of last year that I was looking.
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This is all proof that America is a failed country where we can’t trust anyone to be competent to their jobs or tell the truth. Including your own home inspector and real estate agent. We shouldn’t have to all be experts in home construction and internet and HVAC and law and investigating reporting. It cannot be expected that every person is even half capable of all that shit. That’s why we have society.
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Wow this feels like deja vu.
In this day and age, why is this still a problem for new customers? Especially with 5G and Starlink. Plus why would Comcast not want to obtain a customer before fiber rolls in at no cost to the customer?
In this day and age, why is this still a problem for new customers? Especially with 5G and Starlink. Plus why would Comcast not want to obtain a customer before fiber rolls in at no cost to the customer?
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Sounds like they should free-market this and approach the neighbors, see who wants to provide them with internet via a directional wireless link for X-per month.
Not technically legal, but screw Comcast.
I dumped my cable ISP a few months back and switched to a directional wireless provider in my area, surprisingly works really well. I'm seeing the antenna's pop up all over the neighborhood, and since it's somewhat of a wireless mesh, that's good; we have multiple antennas connecting various houses and then it beams to the microwave dish at the Data-Center across the street. Half the price of cable, 3x the download, 10x the upload, and no data caps. It's nice that technology is slowly moving in to break the oligopolies.
Not technically legal, but screw Comcast.
I dumped my cable ISP a few months back and switched to a directional wireless provider in my area, surprisingly works really well. I'm seeing the antenna's pop up all over the neighborhood, and since it's somewhat of a wireless mesh, that's good; we have multiple antennas connecting various houses and then it beams to the microwave dish at the Data-Center across the street. Half the price of cable, 3x the download, 10x the upload, and no data caps. It's nice that technology is slowly moving in to break the oligopolies.
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This is the correct answer. The cost is absolutely in line with what I would expect for the work involved here, and someone has to pay in order to get that done. Also, I'm sure the city would be happy to install poles and run overhead wiring. But here's a newsflash: the city will charge for that. And it's usually the requesting homeowner who would pay.
Contrary to what some of the posters in this comment thread suggest, this type of situation, while not commonplace, isn't exactly uncommon either. In cities like Seattle and plenty of other large and otherwise well developed cities, there are all kinds of oddball issues with access to various utility services. I've experienced this myself: I happen to live in a six square block void where the city never bothered to run natural gas mains. There's natural gas just about everywhere else, including neighbors across the alley, but not in this little pocket. The city was just out a couple years ago doing some work on the gas main under the nearby road, but not to extend service or anything like that. They are willing and capable to do it, but here's the problem: it's expensive to start digging under roads and sidewalks in cities and the city won't do it gratis either.
If someone, or a group of people want to pay the city to do that work, they more than happily will. Sort of like, well... Comcast. Because that costs a lot, people aren't enthusiastic about ponying up thousands of dollars to create a utility service where there was none before, so it hasn't happened. In the meantime, everyone simply lives with alternatives. In nearly every case, that's oil heating.
How about sewer services? Again, you don't have to live in bumble-wherever to realize that in large cities all over the place, there are odd pockets where sewer mains don't fully extend, or where the technically-private lines that connect to mains (but still run under city sidewalks and streets) are ancient or whatever. If you need or want to mess around with that, never mind create a new hookup, it's going to cost a fortune.
I feel for these folks, I really do. That's an incredibly frustrating issue to have on account of weird, goofy artifacts of how lots were divided and utility services run. But that's hardly Comcast's fault. The suggestion that Comcast is somehow responsible for or should be compelled to pay significant costs to hookup service to a single customer because the city, in the past, happened to allow these lots to be divided and hooked up to utilities in this particular way makes even less sense than laying the cost at the city's feet. And that doesn't make much sense itself.
I've had Comcast internet service at various points over the last two decades. Its customer service and billing practices have driven me to madness on more than one occasion. My frustrations with Comcast are legion and, after identifying a serviceable alternative, I quickly switched and no longer use Comcast's service. But I fail to see how the issue described in this article -- including the cost of doing an underground hookup over the described run -- can fairly be blamed on Comcast.
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Internet in the 21st century is a UTILITY. Just like electricity, utility companies should be regulated to provide basic service to EVERYONE in a region of a specific minimum population size. REGULATE THEM.
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5G and Starlink are one thing. But how will fiber "roll in at no cost"? The fiber internet companies have to run the fiber lines somewhere too, you know...
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I think the issue is its not a trench, it has to be tunneled under a road? I recently had my cast iron sewer pipes replaced under my house and the tunneling was $200 a foot.
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I'm no expert, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express. Anyone can look at shingles and see if there are any missing and/or look old...mine was a 5 year old house and I didn't expect to find anything but I do live in a hurricane prone area. Anyone can look how old the HVAC unit is, look for cable/FTTH box on side of the house, look at the fence, siding, etc. I still had a licensed inspector to look at all those things and more.
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"Comcast ultimately said it would require installing 181 feet of underground cable to connect the house and that the couple would have to pay Comcast over $27,000 to make that happen. Cohn and Zenobi did not pay the $27,000, and they've been relying on a 4G hotspot ever since."
181 feet is not that long. Cable plants can use RG11 cable to run drops up to 300ft from a pole or pedestal to a customer's residence. A 1000 ft spool of RG11 costs around $170. 181 feet would be about $30 of that spool.
I'm struggling to understand the markup from $30 to $27,000. Even if labor was included in the final price, either Comcast is smoking crack or we're missing a key piece of information.
181 feet is not that long. Cable plants can use RG11 cable to run drops up to 300ft from a pole or pedestal to a customer's residence. A 1000 ft spool of RG11 costs around $170. 181 feet would be about $30 of that spool.
I'm struggling to understand the markup from $30 to $27,000. Even if labor was included in the final price, either Comcast is smoking crack or we're missing a key piece of information.
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That's right. They have to jackhammer up the street, with all of the accompanying permits, cautions about not hitting other utilities, city inspections, and the rest that comes with doing so. The cost of digging large holes can add up surprisingly quickly, doubly so when it involves city streets and property. There is nothing surprising at all about the quoted cost.
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I agree with your comments. People assume that the city is completely innocent and an evil corporation is the one doing it wrong. The reality is cities, especially usual suspects like Seattle, have complex permitting processes that make it very difficult / expensive to do small utility projects like connecting a single home.
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No you dig on either side of the road and pound a steel rod across the road to pull the conduit through. Dig safe marks utilities. Then you have a technician with a trencher machine that plants the conduit in the ground like a sewing machine, minimal digging needed with a tech that makes $20/per hour.
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Did you catch the "underground" part of the sentence you quoted? They're talking about tearing up and running it under the city street. That's the cost.
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From the technical side this can be dealt with just by putting it on a tower (or at the top of a tree for that matter with top branches appropriately pruned). It's possible to do something quite nice and cosmetic for a lot less then $27k. The bigger issue is simply that Seattle is quite dense and Starlink can't do density. It can handle the exact same number of people per 100 square miles in Seattle as it can in rural Montana. I suspect they're already saturated there for residential usage (even if they could keep up with terminal demand and it wasn't a year or multiyear wait already). Starlink down the road could get a lot more density acting as the uplink for some local distribution system but it's still early days. 5G/LTE fixed service, a micro-WISP type thing (sharing someone else's connection in exchange for helping pay for it), and so on would be what I'd investigate.
And I said "from the technical side" because I live in a rural area and if I want to put up a 60' tower with wireless gear on it I can just do it, but I suspect there are a lot more requirements in more urban/suburban areas. That said it's absolutely possible to buy 60-80+ foot fake trees from a number of providers. People can get very creative when they need to! It's just really sucky it's even necessary, fiber should exist everywhere in America the electrical grid does.
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Is that still a thing in Seattle? Internet monopolies are pretty rare these days, at least those codified through municipal agreements. There are still some markets where Comcast - or some other provider - is the only player, but not nearly so many that are locked in by local laws as there once were.
True or not, this sounds like an area where cities ought to have such authority, so maybe that's something the city of Seattle needs to take a look at.
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This is correct though you can actually do air blasting, water/mud assisted and so on now too. A lot of horizontal direct boring techniques for dealing with exactly this kind of situation have been refined over the last decade, though as always knowledge and tech percolates out quite unevenly.
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They don't need to dig. I used to install them
.Again, you dig on either side of the road and pound a steel rod across the road to pull the conduit through. Dig safe marks utilities. Then you have a technician with a trencher machine that plants the conduit in the ground like a sewing machine, minimal digging needed with a tech that makes $20/per hour. One man job.
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I'm on the first page of comments here so this may have been addressed already but; that's a pretty big liability to take on. I'd guess it violates the TOS and you have no idea what these people are into and how much data they are going to use. I probably wouldn't do it.
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Comcast has been consistently difficult for years to get valid information on providing connections to unserviced addresses, as documented by numerous horror stories. It seems that customers are often told service is available or easily added, only to find out later it's simply not true. Unsuspecting homebuyers are frequently screwed by bad info.
10 years ago, I worked for a company located where the only ISP was horrible Frontier DSL. There was Comcast service a half-block away on our side of the street. There was another business next door and a small professional office complex that were potential customers (in addition to us) if/when the cable line was extended. I happened to speak to a Comcast supervisor working in another neighborhood nearby who said they expected to extend the line on my street the following spring. I kept checking, but it wasn't until 3-4 years later that they finally extended the line and we were able to connect for cable service and dump Frontier. In the meantime, I had received all sorts of conflicting info on timelines. At one point, I was told that Comcast would connect only us (not the next door businesses) to their line across the street, and we would need to pay a $35,000 "contribution", and when would we like to order that?
If I were the Cohns, I would put more effort into cutting a deal with one of the six adjoining neighbors. Everyone has a price, and I'd expect one of them might be amenable to having higher-tier cable service for free (paid by the Cohns) if they shared access.
10 years ago, I worked for a company located where the only ISP was horrible Frontier DSL. There was Comcast service a half-block away on our side of the street. There was another business next door and a small professional office complex that were potential customers (in addition to us) if/when the cable line was extended. I happened to speak to a Comcast supervisor working in another neighborhood nearby who said they expected to extend the line on my street the following spring. I kept checking, but it wasn't until 3-4 years later that they finally extended the line and we were able to connect for cable service and dump Frontier. In the meantime, I had received all sorts of conflicting info on timelines. At one point, I was told that Comcast would connect only us (not the next door businesses) to their line across the street, and we would need to pay a $35,000 "contribution", and when would we like to order that?
If I were the Cohns, I would put more effort into cutting a deal with one of the six adjoining neighbors. Everyone has a price, and I'd expect one of them might be amenable to having higher-tier cable service for free (paid by the Cohns) if they shared access.
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I have had ATT at my house in Houston since 2004, and upgraded to their "giga-power" fiber in 2017.
Apart from sporadic DNS issues during the first 3 months after go-live in 2017, I've had no problems and can upload a 2 GB file to Youtube in less than a minute.
Now their stock performance on the other hand....
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There are no de jure contractual monopolies in the cable business in the US. That would be illegal; any such franchise terms are unenforceable and have been for decades.
There are many de facto monopolies.
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This happened to my wife and I when we bought a house in NorCal. Comcast wanted to charge us $25,000 to bring an overhead line about 1/3 of a mile to our house. Of course we didn’t but we think about it often because our AT&T dsl service is terrible!
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There's a state law prohibiting it. I'll give you three guesses which company lobbied for that law and the first two don't count.
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Or install a pole(s) to bring the cable through the air, like the neighbors are doing.
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Michael Powell - son of Collin - as head of the FCC , destroyed rural internet. Where communities have gotten together to create community ISPs, the GOP rural govt - steps in to block and make it illegal. As far as electricity: a lot of that was done by the federal government via projects like the TVA.
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In most hot markets right now, if you insist on an inspection you'll just lose out to someone who's willing to waive it. Personally I wouldn't buy a house without one, but that just means I'm not going to be able to buy a house.
It's also worth knowing that the inspector has no liability for anything they miss, and in many parts of the country there's no legal licensing for inspectors. You may just be paying for a cursory glance, or for someone in cahoots with the sellers. Lots of stories out there about inspectors who refuse to climb ladders, enter attics, etc.
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
One of them could also get an amateur radio license. There is protective legislation that prevents localities from blanket antenna regs. The nasty morse code restrictions have been dropped from most classes and anyone with tech background can pass a technician's class test.
Then you add your Starlink on the same tower system.
As you say, a little ingenuity and out of box thinking may help.
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They may want to check the cable franchise agreement Comcast has with Seattle.
Comcast may be required to provide "Television Cable" service to every dwelling within a certain distance of a cable drop. However, that does not explicitly cover "Internet Cable" service.
So maybe they should request "TV Cable" service from Comcast.
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Edit: re: posters that state that the Free market would have solved this problem.
No, if there were a true free market, it would not solve the problem in the way that you would think. It would just mean that there would two or more suppliers asking for >$20,000 to wire up the location for internet since it's what would probably be the minimum to make a profit.
I think what people are misunderstanding is that a true free-market, AKA true capitalism is about as evil as things can get since there are NO Regulations in a "true" free market and all decisions are based on what is technically legal and company profitability.
Honestly, I'd gladly take the existing cable/telephone duopoly for high speed internet over a true free market any day.
Comcast may be required to provide "Television Cable" service to every dwelling within a certain distance of a cable drop. However, that does not explicitly cover "Internet Cable" service.
So maybe they should request "TV Cable" service from Comcast.
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Edit: re: posters that state that the Free market would have solved this problem.
No, if there were a true free market, it would not solve the problem in the way that you would think. It would just mean that there would two or more suppliers asking for >$20,000 to wire up the location for internet since it's what would probably be the minimum to make a profit.
I think what people are misunderstanding is that a true free-market, AKA true capitalism is about as evil as things can get since there are NO Regulations in a "true" free market and all decisions are based on what is technically legal and company profitability.
Honestly, I'd gladly take the existing cable/telephone duopoly for high speed internet over a true free market any day.
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