Tong Family

OK, time to look at Comcast bills again, my fairly reasonable bill at $100/month for 1.2Gbps/50Mbps has jumped to $133 so time to look at it. The big problem with Comcast is that you fall off your one year commitment and don’t realize it and then your bill rises

If you look at the pricing curve, you can see they initially were encouraging moving to 1.2Gbps, but the sweet spot is now more like 800Mbps. I’m a little sad, I bought a gigantic 2.5Gbps capable cable modem, but even that $100 purchase is nothing like their $15/month router (highway robbery), but see below, they have a good deal with bundled unlimited data

The sweet spot for pricing: 200Mbps low-end or 800Mbps

Right now, Comcast pricing is really tilted against the low bandwidth plans and the high bandwidth ones. You can see this by looking at the marginal price to get more capacity. All of these assume a 1-year commitment. As an aside, you should set a tickler every year to look at Comcast because once the one-year commitment falls, your prices rise you can see this because Connect More is actually less expensive than the 75Mbps base play because there is no contract on 75Mbps.

And to show you the difference we were paying $62/month for a month-to-month 200Mbps plan, but it is a whopping $18 to get the one year term so even if you keep the plan six months, it is worth it)

And that the pricing is pretty linear from 400 to 1000 Gbps. For me at least, given the upload speeds are so low, a Superfast at $75 is a pretty good deal.

Note there is an early termination fee of $110 if you don’t finish your commitment, so make sure you are going to be there for a year:

Plan	Bandwidth	Marginal Increase	One Year	Marginal Cost
Connect	75Mbps	75Mbps	$51	$0.68/Mbps
Connect More	200/5Mbps	125Mbps	$45	($0.12/Mbps)
Fast	400Mbps	200Mbps	$55	$0.05/Mbps
Superfast	800	400	$75	$0.05/Mbps
Gigabit	1000	200	$85	$0.05/Mbps
Gigabit Extra	1200	200	$100	$0.075/Mbps

The autopay discount of $10 is only for checking accounts now, so prepay with Chase only on mobile

This is what T-Mobile just did, so now it looks like you will have to try to prepay your bills with the appropriate card, for instance, Chase Ink rewards you with 5x points for cable bills, so another tickler you have to set. I’m sure there is a service for it, but I need to set up a bunch of things like this to get better discounts.

Also for some reason early payment does not work on the web, but does from the mobile app, but you can’t change the plan in the mobile app, argh!

Getting $30 Unlimited Data with a $25 XFi Complete

OK, this is a new thing, last year, you had to pay $30 for the 1.2TB cap removal. This is important when I was doing hyperbackup, but with the switch to BackBlaze, as the Google Workspace Unlimited is ended, I’m not sure I need it. The BackBlaze protocol is much more efficient, so I think that I’ll try it without the Unlimited Data and see how we do.

Of course if you sign up for this, you have to actually go get this modem and you have to worry what happens if it breaks, but worth it for the 1.2TB if you are doing lots of uploading.

If you have two Xfinity accounts clear cookies

One problem is that the thing seems to be terrible (at least with Safari) with both bill payments and also with multiple log-ins, so make sure to clear cookies once you log out if you are trying to fix two accounts. I would login with the second account and it would say it was the new one, but the billing page on the browser would refresh 2-3x times and show the old account!

There is also a refresh bug where you can’t see the menus if you are clicking down

Whopping $400 savings for high-end, $216 for low end

The net is that with about 15 minutes of work, we are saving $400 a year 🙂 And for once, you can do all this online, the main confusion is the $30 pack if you have it is that it is sticky on the first screen and then disappears.