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So I received a letter in the mail from Xfinity (AKA the evil comca$t empire) saying that starting November 1st they will be charging overage fees to customers who use more than 1 Terabyte in a month. Each additional data block of 50GB will incur a $10 overage fee up to a max of $200 (and here's the ultimatum), unless you pay another $50/mo for unlimited data. Waaaaahhh!!! They say it would affect less than 1% of their customers. Yeah, because they're jumping ship and aren't your customers anymore! However, I just cut the cable, so to speak, and canceled triple play in favor of a double play (Phone + internet). I'm going to Playstation Vue and Over The Air broadcasts of free TV. Essentially, I'm just shifting my bandwidth from cable to internet, which will increase my usage. The data metering they will now start employing is directed at those who cut the cord and will be shifting their use of cable bandwidth to internet bandwidth - streaming ever increasing data hog formats like UHD 4K...We're screwed! I was averaging 400GB per month before, with just a Wii using Netflix. I have a PS3 I use periodically to watch Netflix, but I did most of my viewing on the X1. Now it will be on PSVue and Netflix, you can easily double that 400GB right there. I just bought a Roku 4 to stream HD 1080P instead of what ever the Wii was doing, and that's only until I can get a 4K TV. I was planning to Get a PS4 this holiday season. All of this was supposed to come out of the savings from an extra $100/mo not going to Comca$t. With the shift from cable to internet, that 400GB/mo is surely to increase near that 1TB mark. And that's without factoring in online gaming and downloading the odd movie. A little background. Our local professional sports team signed an exclusive TV rights deal with Comca$t that held fans hostage. For 10 years I could not see my team play if I did not buy a ticket or see it on ESPN, TNT, or on local TV. The only way to see all the games was to be a Comca$t TV paytron. So for the last 10 years, I've been fighting the cat and mouse game with Comca$t. This year our team finally negotiated another deal. Unfortunately they extended the deal with Comca$t (NoooOOOOO!!!). However, PlayStation Vue managed to pick up the channel that broadcasts the majority of games (Comca$t sports net = CSN). PSVue has TNT and ESPN so I would still get the games they pick up. PSVue doesn't live stream any of our local channels (1 of which will pick up a few games this season), but I can get that over the air with a cheap VHF/UHF antenna. So I now have one, and only one, viable alternative. Being thoroughly sick of Comca$ts business model, I decided to cut the cord. Here is the nutshell of my experience with comca$t over the last 10 years: If you are a new customer at a particular residence, they will give you a good deal. I just looked at their current offering and it was $89.99 for 12mo with only a one year contract (Basic Savings triple play). To compare. I now pay $70/mo for the 25Mbps double play + $35/mo for PSVue = $105, but I can remove $10/mo of that by buying my own modem. So in a few weeks it will be $95/mo. But that's still more than Xfinity triple play right? That's how they hook you, it looks like a better deal. IT"S NOT!. They don't tell you about the fees they add to that price. "Oh jeez, not again. Everyone whines about fees." I know the fee argument seem trite, but consider this. Using my fees from last month would add 47% to that $89.99 making it $132.44/mo. Not such a good looking deal now, huh? And that's just the first 12 months! Many of those "fees" are actually just price increases designed to look as if they are recovering the cost from an overbearing governmental regulation system. This serves two purposes: It makes the service look cheaper than it is, shielding the true cost from potential customers so they can't easily make an informed decision. They hope to get you locked into a contract you can't get out of without paying a severance fee. It serves their political agenda to show all their customers how much the government is making them pay in regulatory fees, and if it wasn't for all this regulation they would be able to remove the fees from your bill. They don't want to combine the fees into a single price, because it serves their bottom line not to. Moreover the effect of the language used is to perpetuate the above misconception, without being liable legally. After the first contract is up they will offer you a promotion that locks you into a 2 year contract on an escalating pay schedule. They'll tell you that they can offer you a special promotion, just for you, that will give you the next package up (from basic to preferred or from performance internet to Blast) at no additional cost. The first year would be cheap (like $139.99, but remember to add in fees = $182.44) and the second would go up $15 to $197.44. After that It will be full price (of the preferred), but if you just call back then, they give you another promotion on a ratcheting basis (they'll offer another "special promotion" that will move you up to premium at no additional cost). Sounds good on the phone, "I gets HBO for free! Hells yeah! Sign me up homie." The thing is, that the ratchet only turns one way (it's called up-selling). You get a promotion to the next package up or another special promotion on the one you're currently in. You can go back to the next lower package, but they wont apply a promotion with it, so it ends up being the same price by design as the promotion to stay at your current package. Once the promotion expires and your at full price 2 years later you'll see this bill... On my last bill the bundle was the following (Read this, it was helpful to me): $174.99 (HD Preffered Plus XD with a $20 bundle discount) + $10.00 (Wireless Gateway, the WIFI telephony modem. You can buy your own to avoid this lease fee. I did this once and then they obsoleted it in a year or two going from DOCSIS 2 to 3. I just bought another. I've heard of people getting phantom modem lease fees, where suddenly a bill comes with a lease fee that shouldn't be there. I hope that comca$t would retroactively reimburse customers who don't notice this for a few months, but even if they do it forces a call where they will try to negotiate an up-sell. You can't up sell if they don't call. I'm on the national do not call list, so I wonder how much they'd be calling if I wasn't) + $9.95 (The X1 HDDVR, only one. Each additional one will cost you) + $4.99 (Additional Outlet, tiny box that technically got cable. But all we ever used it for was local TV, what a waste - especially since they are charging me a re broadcast fee on top of the additional outlet fee, totaling $11.50, see below, when I could have just used an antenna. It makes me feel humiliated. It was hiding in plain sight all this time and never once did I make the connection, nor did comca$t inform me during one of the many calls I placed to them in order to find a way to lower our bill without canceling altogether! Now that I've cut the cord how'd that work for you Comca$t? The answer is pretty outstanding considering their monopoly and my insignificance. It's a numbers game. In this one simple way they are getting an extra $11.50 x however many of the 22.5 million comca$t TV subscribers have an additional outlet they don't use.) + $ 6.50 (Broadcast TV Fee - they charge you for rebroadcasting the free tv you could otherwise get with an antenna. This is a bogus charge and just a scam to raise/veil prices) + $0.98 (Universal connectivity fee - Passes Comca$ts Federal Universal Service Fund contribution onto its customers. This fund provides affordable communications services to low-income and rural customers, and eligible schools). + $2.02 (Regulatory Recovery Fee -This is a bogus charge and just a scam to raise/veil prices. It's Comcast passing the cost of projected loss in profits from local, state, and federal regulation onto its customers, which sounds like it's not Comca$ts fault, but don't be fooled. This is not a fee imposed on Comca$t by government! It is the amount Comca$t will will not earn as a result of complying with local laws (Laws they would prefer didn't exist). It might be cheaper to plow through a protected forest if not for that pesky law. "Oh well, well just make the customers pay the difference." That's what this charge is in all reality. It's also known as a Monoplyi/TBTF Tactic and is nothing new. This is the type of thing that results from deregulation, but they make it look like too much regulation in an effort to further undermine regulation. The psychology is interesting. And where do you think all those psychology majors get a job? Mental asylums? Ok...I know what you're thinking...Comcast is a mental asylum...lol. Actually, in a mental asylum the psychologists run the asylum, not the psychopaths, Comca$t is the exact opposite! The only thing Comca$st has in common wit a Mental asylum is that both exist to help the psychopaths.) + $4.50 (Rregional Sports Fee - all thoes regional sports channels you may not want are subsidized by all comca$t customers, not just those who want them) + $8.51 (Franchise fee - the Fees imposed on Comca$t by local municipalities for use of public property to run cable. In other words, Comca$t passing the cost of doing business onto its customers in such a way to make you think they're too heavily regulated. "See all this crap we have to pay." Seriously? If you're going to dig up public streets to lay a cable line, you should at least foot the bill. Like I said earlier, this is just a way to hide this amount from prospective new clients, while simultaneously perpetuating the myth that they're over regulated. They insinuate that they could remove this fee if the laws were changed, but all they would do is add it back to the base price and take it off the monthly bill. They push numbers, that's what they do.) $0.08 (FCC regulatory fee - Comca$ts portion of the FCC administration costs passed onto its customers). $0.75 (911 fee - Comca$ts portion of the emergency support services passed onto its customers). So the bill that finally broke me totaled: $222.44= I'll end with this: America The Beautiful: ... O beautiful for glory-tale Of liberating strife When once and twice, for man's avail Men lavished precious life! America! America! God shed his grace on thee Till selfish gain no longer stain The banner of the free! ...