Re:Busting Comcast's $250 installation fee for 105 Mbps
by eli on Monday February 17, 2014 @09:13PM
(#7255922)
I don't see why my analogy is any more ridiculous than yours. Windows 7 Home is more-or-less an artificially limited version of Windows 7 Pro. You can pay money and "unlock" the Pro features. I'm OK with that. Even though I'm unlocking bits that were already on my hard drive, there's no scandal here.
If we both agree you can charge whatever you want and price differences don't have to relate to actual costs then what's the problem?
You are upset solely that they called it an "installation fee" rather than an "upgrade fee"? I see your point... but like I said, hardly the crime of the century.
Now of course you can charge what you like and price differentiation doesn't have to relate to actual costs at all, but lying to deceive the customer that the charge is paying for some direct action of employees necessary to enact the alteration is simply fraud.
Now there are of course costs, upstream bandwidth, data handling at intermediate routers and such. That's why it's entirely reasonable for them to charge more for a faster/broader data plan - http://www.comcast.com/internet-service.html it's already charged at more than twice the rate of the 50 Mbps plan (whilst I imagine the real _additional_ cost is probably maybe a few dollars); but that's fine as they're not pretending it costs more because they have to pay for faster electricity or something daft.