Comcast ritual is getting tiresome

Yearly negotiation after promotional period yields savings but also is irritating

Recently I discovered that my Comcast internet bill had gone up about $20 per month, as it tends to do in March when the promotional rate I'd negotiated the year before expires. For several cycles, I'd managed to keep my price in the mid-$60 range, and Comcast's mostly annual speed increases had me getting more bang for the buck each year.

The dance typically goes like this: I call Comcast, tell them I want to keep my rate, they try to upsell me with TV service or a faster speed tier. I say no, it's very simple: Same rate, same service, or I'm looking at a sweet AT&T plan I'll jump to. And I'm not bluffing, by the way: I've got the order page for AT&T service up on the screen as we talk.

This time, though, the Comcast “customer loyalty department” rep was polite but firm, offering me a deal that would still increase my cost by $10 a month.

I also had a plan B in mind. Due to Comcast's speed hikes, we were up to 250-megabit-per-second downloads, which is really overkill. It's just my wife and me in our household now. We are cord-cutters, but we have only one TV. We don't play online games, we typically don't

have multiple video streams going at the same time. We don’t need all that speed.

So, I asked the Comcast rep what she could do at a lower speed tier, say 150 Mbps (which is still kind of overkill).

We settled on my paying about $56 per month for 150 Mbps service. The switchover happened instantly, and I can't really tell a difference in my web usage or streaming. That tier, however, comes with a lower upload speed — dropping from 10 Mbps to 5.I do notice that, since I often work from home and upload photos and short videos to our website. But it's a minor annoyance — the $10 a month I'm saving is worth it.

But hey, Comcast! I would gladly pay an extra $5 a month to have better upload speeds. I bet a lot of other people would too. You guys should consider adding that as an option. I bet you'd score a little extra pocket change (not that you need it ... ).

Now Comcast has flipped the switch citywide on its gigabit service that uses the newer DOCSIS 3.1 modems. For new customers, there's a $90a-month promotional rate, which goes up to $160 when that expires. The company is cagey about what it will charge existing subscribers to upgrade, though when the service was launched last year in a limited area, Comcast reps said it would increase customers' bills by $50-$70.

By contrast, AT&T offers its gigabit internet service for $80 a month, $70 if you bundle it with other services. It only goes up to $90 after the promotional period. Unfortunately, it’s not available where I live.

In the past, I'd have been salivating over Comcast’s gigabit speeds and might have signed up. But I have learned in my old age that it doesn't always pay to be speed-greedy.

Still, I wish I didn’t have go through this routine every year. It’s an unnecessary hassle, and the kind of behavior that makes the cable TV industry one of the most hated in America.

Thanks to reforms introduced into the market by T-Mobile, a lot of cellphone service annoyances have gone away.

T-Mobile’s wild-eyed CEO, John Legere, has made noises about getting into the cable TV and internet business and forcing some sanity there, too.

Frankly, it can’t happen fast enough for me.