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Xfinity bill template for Support

hey everybody it's Lon seidman last week we took a look at my mother's cable bill specifically what she was spending on renting boxes from Comcast and we also looked at how we can save her a lot of money by switching over to roku's to get her cable subscription and I got a lot of people writing in with some other questions so in this video we're going to do an audit of her entire Bill and see how we're getting charged for different things and whether or not we have some additional savings to be found so let's get to that now when we look at this bill this is a bill for my mother's house here in Connecticut and of course Comcast is under different rules and regulations in other parts of the United States so what you see here may not align directly with your bill but they're largely standardizing the language here across the board so you can get an idea as to what your bill has and what you might be able to take off of it while still maintaining your service and I wanted to zero in on this first line because this was this subject of the last video and here we got rid of all of my mother's cable boxes and switched over to Roku as an alternative and the nice thing about using one of these partner devices is that they don't charge you a rental fee for that now in the last video a lot of you wrote in to say you could also get rid of the cable modem by buying your own and the complexity that we have here is that she also has voice service through Comcast now you can buy a modem that does internet and voice but they're rather expensive and as you'll see a little bit later in the video I think we might be taking our business elsewhere when this contract ends so I'm reluctant to make any more Investments so we're going to keep the modem for the time being but if we do end up sticking with Comcast I'm going to get that out of there as well and get her own equipment into the house and as you can see here I've got everything now boxed up they did finally get Us labels for everything and sent over some boxes to send everything back and the thing that I learned over the course of this is that that it was actually worse than I initially thought insofar as how they essentially Bamboozled my mom here to get stuff that she didn't need so if we dial into this premium DVR service add-on in the last video I told you that they took it off the bill well guess what they didn't and the reason they didn't is that she actually had two DVR units on her HD televisions that they apparently sent her when she switched over to this service plan two years ago she's never even used the DVR function by the way there is a cloud DVR feature as part of her current plan which she's had all along she never needed the local DVR box to begin with but this is the kind of upselling that they do when they get you into another contract period with them and so she's been paying for something that she hasn't needed and we can't get rid of this charge until they get the DVR back because although she's spending ten dollars a month for for each box if the box has DVR functionality every additional DVR Outlet also becomes another monthly charge as it is here so when she got that second DVR box that basically triggered this premium DVR 10 fee so until those boxes get back to them we can't take this off the bill and this is an example of some of these nested services that trigger other expenses down the line and you're going to see another example of that in a minute now another thing I wanted to bring up from the last video is that a lot of you asked about the data cap that Comcast has in place throughout many parts of the country where I am in Connecticut there is no data cap it remains unlimited and now that our ISP Market is getting much more competitive which I'll talk about next week I don't think that cap is coming here at all but for those of you who are under the cap if you are watching through one of the Xfinity partner devices on your Xfinity Broadband account in your home they will not ding you for data charges even if you go over your allocation the exception though is they say here is for tve Content which stands for TV everywhere and what you'll see on your channel guide is a little icon that says TV go on it and on those channels those will count against the data cap but if you don't see that TV go next to the channel it does not so a bulk of your Cable lineup that you'll see on your channel guide will not count towards your data usage provided you're not watching one of these channels with a TV go label next to it so let's move on now to the rest of the bill unfortunately there are not as many opportunities for large savings here the low hanging fruit is always the rented equipment but let's take a look and see what the rest of this stuff actually means now you can see here mom is on a two-year contract that she signed when they delivered all this equipment to her and and that contract expires in a few months here from the time I'm shooting this video so on May 15th her bill is going to go up 26 dollars unless she does something to re-up and what they typically do is you'll see in a minute is try to get you into a new contract term length that has an early termination fee so they kind of keep you locked in by offering you a discount across the services that you're using however a lot of the fees that we're going to see on this bill sit outside of the contract so they can continue to rack up your bill even though you're on a fixed price contract for a portion of it and it's a real racket I think the way this works out now right now this is the service offering they've dramatically simplified things but it's also making it harder now to choose what you want to watch now if you look here we've got basically a good better and best kind of service offering here at varying prices the first one is the choice 10 we which is 10 plus channels for 25 dollars a month but also look at the fine print here because there is a charge of 28.10 a month for the broadcast fee and that of course sits outside of the contract now what you get on this minimal option isn't much so I have it right now showing me my local lineup and you get of course QVC and all your local broadcasters but not much beyond that but as you can see here the middle tier gets a lot more except that middle tier also costs a lot more so check it out not only do you pay sixty dollars a month plus the 28 dollars and 10 cents for the broadcast fee but you're also going to get hit with an 18 and 10 cent Regional Sports fee and both of those charges currently show up on Mom's Bill outside of the contract so these service fees have have been incrementally increased over the course of her two-year relationship on this particular agreement now In fairness to Comcast what happens here is that broadcast TV stations charge Comcast to carry the network on Comcast cable system and so what Comcast is doing is negotiating what that is going to cost to carry the station and then they're putting those costs into the fee so I honestly don't think they're taking much of that for themselves but it just shows you how broken everything is right now especially when you can put an antenna up on your roof and get these broadcast television stations for free and the reason why Comcast has to fight it out is because if they don't come to an agreement they pull the network off of Comcast cable system and that of course becomes an issue because then people start to wonder is it worth paying Comcast for this this any longer so what they do is create a fee put it into the fee charge whatever they have to for that and keep the network on their cable system and the reason why the broadcasters are doing this is because most of their revenue now comes from these re-transmission fees you can see this chart here from the Pew Research Center which indicates that we're probably in about 12 to 13 or 14 billion dollars a year at this point in revenues from these cable subscription fees and by the way this is something that is also part of YouTube TV and these other internet streaming services if they're carrying broadcasters they are likely having to pay those broadcasters to carry those networks now what about the regional Sports fee my mother watches no Sports at all but she's paying 18 a month for regional sports channels well you can see what Comcast explanation is of that here this is actually very similar to what they're dealing with Broad casters on and that these Regional Sports networks are charging Comcast and threatening to pull their Network off of Comcast if they don't get enough money to carry it and there's really no way around this fee at the moment because one of the things that I looked at was maybe going with the minimal TV tier for Mom's TV watching and see if I can add on some of the channels that she wants to watch unfortunately there's no way to do that so what you can do is sign up for that basic 25 a month plan and then add on these packages of channels to the mix now my mother does like to watch cable news I certainly don't anymore but she does and in order to get cable news she has to subscribe to sports as well to get it and that would add thirty dollars to the twenty five dollars she's already spending and subscribing to news and sports will also trigger the regional Sports fee on top of that thirty dollars and there is simply no way to get new news without paying for sports and the sports fee so now that we know the lay of the land on TV services let's take a look and see what her renewal might look like if she decides to stick with them now I've enabled the term contract option here so we can see what their best offer is at the time I'm shooting this video and what I did is I moved her from the gigabit internet that they oversold her on over to this 800 megabit per second plan as you can see I can't go lower because the go lower gets us out of the contract discount so this is the best I can do incidentally they are telling you only Downstream speeds here not Upstream but this plan I believe comes with a 25 megabit Upstream whereas the 400 is only 10 upstream and I think these two are five so again not everything is being disclosed here so I will save her a little bit here by going off the gigabit plan that she was on before they really want you to sign up for their mobile phone service you'll maybe get some other discounts there if you do that what Comcast is after here is to offer a whole bunch of different stuff in the hopes that you keep at least one thing with them and maybe they can try to upsell you on some other services when you bundle all these different things together and that's one of the strengths they have as a big company is that they can offer bundles that their competitors don't offer now if we go over the TV option here you can see that because we have the term length enabled here our only option is to go into the ultimate plan here if we were to go to the mid plan which honestly is what is fine enough for her it's going to cost 27 dollars more per month we don't have an option to go lower on the TV but either way that Regional Sports fee and the broadcast fee is part of this and again that sits outside of this contract agreement so they can increase that anytime they want and my statement earlier about them not keeping much of it is an assumption we really don't know if they keep you know all of it or some of it or give all of it to the broadcaster it's just not transparent to anyone and they're not required to disclose it either so there you go that's the TV option that's all we can do and then home phone is in here except that they don't tell you what it costs until you scroll down to the bottom here and pull up the list of things that you have on the account so let's do that now and see what we're looking at now right now they haven't taken the uh thing off for all the boxes yet so I'll give you a grand total and compare it to what she's currently paying when we get to the end of the calculation here so as you can see the cost here is 197 dollars a month for the internet and TV but we're going to get forty dollars of that knocked off because we're combining multiple products together additionally there's a term contract discount of forty seven dollars per month now remember those fees for regional Sports and broadcast are mandatory and will go up over this contract length but the service itself will be what this is provided she does something before the end of the term and this term unlike our current one is only for a year so she's got to stay on top of it otherwise her bill will go up by 47 a month once the agreement ends now as far as voice service is concerned they say that's going to cost us about thirty dollars a month unfortunately though given how this deal structure is working on their website I can't actually remove the voice plan from the mix here so what it will do is tell me that this may be part of a deal and you can't undo voice if you're trying to set up the deal the way we are here so it looks like we're stuck with voice whether we want it or not now we're going to get rid of all of these TV boxes here so we're going to see an elimination of all six of these ten dollar charges and what I'm also going to do is calculate the cost of getting rid of the cable modem as well so if I did my math correctly here she will be paying 186 dollars and 20 cents pre-tax on this new plan can compared to 181 dollars and 19 cents which is what she would be paying if we got rid of the router and the five TV boxes and DVR charge now a lot of you said why not just cut the cord and look at YouTube TV which is a very popular option right now and it's popular because it offers all of the local networks that you have in your region plus a good selection of cable channels most of which my mom would like to watch and I think the pricing is a little better on the TV side here and another new development in my area is that Comcast is not the only game in town so Frontier the formerly bankrupt phone company managed to pull themselves out of bankruptcy and run a whole bunch of fiber all over the place including in my neck of the woods and if I were to combine Frontiers fiber and voice service with YouTube TV the cost is about a hundred and forty dollars a month with no equipment charge is necessary to get us there either now the only thing to keep in mind about YouTube TV is that its cost has gone up significantly since it was introduced not all that long ago so it began Life as a 35 dollar per month service now it is 65 and the last cost increase if I'm not mistaken took place in 2020 so we might be due for another one at some point because I would imagine these broadcasters are really sticking it to Google and YouTube to get some more money out of them like they've been getting out of Comcast and Comcast customers over the years but right now it looks as though the frontier in YouTube TV option is more affordable for my mother and presumably the quality of the connection might be better as well because it is a fiber optic symmetrical connection so what I would put her on is the lowest cost option here which is the fiber 500 that is half a gigabit 500 megabits per second both up and down that Upstream is significantly faster than even the gigabit Comcast offering which only goes at the moment up at 35 megabits per second if I'm not mistaken so she'll get a much better Upstream for doing FaceTime calls with the kids and everything here and what's nice about this is that she gets the router as part of the deal for no added cost there is a 50 installation charge but that's pretty minimal I think given the overall cost savings we do have to pay extra for the phone service so we can Port her number over and then of course the YouTube TV on top of that but to get a reliable fiber optic connection for that little money I think is a much better deal than what Comcast is offering and altogether it's a lot less expensive at this point in time to switch to Frontier versus sticking with Comcast right now and this is what's been great about competition and I'll talk more about this next week we're starting to see now that these monopolistic practices of charging you whatever they feel like charging you for boxes and rentals and all this other garbage is going away soon because their competitors are not going to do that and they're going to offer service that is relatively competitive if not better than what Comcast is offering and that's something that I think is going to be shaking up this Marketplace quite a bit now if you want to research everything Comcast has to offer they do publish rate cards which will give you everything that they offer in your area so you can calculate all this stuff out yourself and if you go to lawn.tv Comcast rate card while you're logged into your Comcast account it'll pull down the rate card for your area and if you're curious what internet cost by itself you can see here that in my area if I just had internet and nothing else their gigabit is 112 dollars a month that 800 megabit plan is a hundred and seven dollars a month the fast is a 102 bucks a month which I think was the 400 megabit plan and you can see that they are significantly more expensive if you're not bundling other things together versus these fiber optic plans that are coming into many parts of the United States especially where I am and in addition to Frontier we're getting another company called go net speed which is a smaller ISP that is also starting to Elbow their way into the marketplace here and I'll talk more about this next week but this is what competition is doing and I can't imagine Comcast leaving their prices this High anymore especially when fiber optic providers especially large ones with similar infrastructure sell much better offerings for far less money so that's going to do it for this audit of my mother's cable bill this is something we should all be doing right now not only for our parents and loved ones but for ourselves as well because there are many more choices out there now we're going to talk about some of those choices next week my area went from a place with zero choice to one where we've got multiple choices now and I'm quite happy about that and things are getting better for consumers at the same time go figure now this week's video is being brought to you by all of you and I want to thank some super Chatters and super thankers who contributed to the channel over the last week they include Keith Robinson gero 101v and Ed crom we also got some new supporters here on the channel including Henry hikalia I hope I got your name correct there who made a contribution via my donor box page we also have Todd Holter and budley who signed up to support the channel via the YouTube membership program and we got two new subscribers on floatplane bread destroyer and Scion and I want to thank everyone who contributed this week and everyone who's been contributing on an ongoing basis and all of you who watch on a regular basis too because all of those things equal Channel growth and if you want to support the channel you can you can go to lawn.tv support and make a monthly or a one-time contribution through my donor box page which is the best way to do it you can also sign up though here on YouTube under their membership program and on floatplane and patreon if you wish as well we have other channels you can watch me on including my extras Channel where I've got supplementary content and unboxings and then of course we've got a lot of my product reviews up on amazon.tv Amazon shop where you can see most of my stuff ad free and that is going to do it for this one let me know again what you thought down in the comments below I'd love to keep coming back to this topic as so many of you are interested in it and until next time this is lanziben thanks for watching this 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