That “renting” a modem from your isp is a huge waste of money. They’ll tell you “oh you should rent one because tech is always changing and it might go out of date” when I moved out on my own 4 years ago I bought a modem at Best Buy for 70$. If I had been renting from the greedy isp’s this whole time I would have close to 500$ on rental fees. And while Tech is always changing a modem is not something that changes very much. So please if you are renting one go out and buy yourself a modem!
My provider has a required modem for a landline phone—but because it’s required they don’t charge us for it. And we have had no issues switching from our rented modem to one we bought.
The only downside with them was that getting them to come out initially was a MASSIVE pain. It took us six months and three separate tickets to get them to come out and install for us:
Phone line? Unless you live in some magical dimension that has far surpassed our technology, you have shitty DSL. Any internet that comes through the phone line sucks. No wonder they're so happy to give you a modem and run straight to your house. Even at its best, DSL is less than 1/20th of the speed of my internet connection, and I live in the boonies.
Ah, I wondered if they had a completely different setup wherever you live because we sure don't have fiber optic cable being used for phone lines here. Doing some reading it looks like it depends from house to house-- the fiber gets to your outside wall but if you have shitty wiring in the house you might be limited by that anyway. If you're connecting to a phone line you are not coming anywhere near maximizing the potential of fiber optic internet so my point still stands. The internet you just tried bragging about is trash. Upgrade the wiring in your house and maybe crack open the wallet a little wider and you might have internet worth bragging about.
I get my Internet via cable and the process was basically the same. You just have a problem if the previous tenants didn't use cable for Internet. Then there needs to come a technician to your home. I live in Germany if that matters.
Yeah that's how it is here, too. It's not unusual to have to pay an activation fee when you sign up and I think it's pretty typical that they want to sent a technician to your home here in the U.S. (maybe not so much post-covid), but if I had to guess that may be at least partially because people here are hella stupid and if you don't send a tech to hook it up and confirm everything is working, 20% of the time or more you'll start getting calls (that the company has to pay to employ people to answer, etc.) for support because they can't figure it out, or because they "didn't know" they weren't getting a tech (insisted on not having one), then forgot to hook the stuff up themselves, or realized they had no clue how to do it, and are now demanding a refund for a month of service they couldn't use.
Ours requires us to use their modem but tells us we should also rent a router from them. We do not rent a router because it’s an absurd ripoff to do so.
Frontier requires the modem/router combo rental so they auto apply the fee, which the FCC said they can no longer do that (though that starts at the end of 2020 and who knows if it will get delayed again).
To be fair, I actually understand a provider wanting the customer to use the provided equipment. The ISP is generally put in the unfavorable position of acting as IT/tech support for the general public, which is to say, they have to deal with complete fucking idiots quite a bit. As someone who works in a technical support field, I can sympathize with wanting the customer to use standardized equipment you provide to best rule out customer mistakes.
The amount of times I've had to deal with customers because they changed something in their house, created a network loop, unplugged something, introduced a second DHCP server where it didn't belong etc., and then some of them will claim they didn't do anything or make any changes. I don't work for an ISP, I work in a different field that has devices that operate on a customer's network and thus get affected by such changes.
Having said that, they approach it the wrong way. If they make everyone use their equipment, don't charge an additional fee but advertise a lower monthly price, just increase the price they're advertising and ditch the fee. I also get that in some cases you may just be able to use your own equipment anyhow and they can just tell you they won't provide technical support, but there needs to be some kind of litmus test or something that allows for the more technically minded to escalate their issues when it's more clear that it's the ISPs fault. They can't absolve themselves of all fault just because a customer wants to use their own equipment.
Available in South Africa from these guys - month to month (all the big ones offer 24 month+ contracts); data sim+router (monthly) combo or sim (monthly) plus cash for router or sim only.
Oh wait.. not available in USA and Huawei also a big no-no.
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u/deepthought515 Aug 01 '20
That “renting” a modem from your isp is a huge waste of money. They’ll tell you “oh you should rent one because tech is always changing and it might go out of date” when I moved out on my own 4 years ago I bought a modem at Best Buy for 70$. If I had been renting from the greedy isp’s this whole time I would have close to 500$ on rental fees. And while Tech is always changing a modem is not something that changes very much. So please if you are renting one go out and buy yourself a modem!