Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

Wow, they are such a piece of work. First of all during this COVID-19 thing, suddenly the bill rises 40% without any notification (I’m sure I rolled off of some plan). It is so difficult, here are some things to know:

1. Add a notification on auto payment. Comcast does not provide any notification when you roll off of an annual plan nor do they notify you when their 40% of charges that are not part of the bundle change, so you have to monitor them. As an example our $70 plan because $90 just by their silent addition of fees.
2. You cannot find prices for anything but bundles on the Comcast site. Do not just choose from them!
3. Instead, you need to go to the Chat. They are the only folks who are not sales invented, so they will tell you the Internet only prices for your region.
4. Why do you want internet only prices. Because if you take even $1 of broadcast, they will charge you a $15/month ‘broadcast fee’ which always above the line. So in nearly all cases, even with Internet bundles, it makes no sense to take them.

So if you want to make a change, here’s the complex process you need:

Internet only pricing

Call the chat and wait patiently to get the internet-only prices. Right now these look like in my quote as:

1. Performance Starter+ – 25mbps at $50.00
2. Performance Select   – 100 mbps at $55.00
3. Performance Pro+ – 200 mbps at $70.00
4. Blast Pro – 300 mbps at $80.00
5. Extreme Pro – 600 mbps at $90.00
6. Gigabit – 1000 mbps at $100.00

I don’t know if it is even legal to publish this (so I might have to take it down). But you can see the sweat spot is the 300Mbps at $80 or 200Mbps at $70. The higher rates are hard to understand if you need them.

Now why does this work, the big reason is that the so called double play and triple play prices of say $104 sounds great, but there is a $15/month surcharge at least in the Northwest for “broadcast fee” so that it will be hard to beat the internet prices.

How to get a downgrade

They make this really complicated. Basically, you cannot do this over chat or with the regular customer service people. You are going to have to survive about 30 minutes of relentless upsell before you can get to I really only want Internet pricing. As an aside, Comcast has just the most amazing call scripts (which makes sense, the longer the script the less likely you are to switch). So here is the process:

1. Budget yourself 1-2 hours to do this.
2. Make sure you have the prices from the chat. About half the time, the rep will claim there is no such Internet only price. Your only choice then is to hang up and hope for a better rep.
3. They are the only ones who know the “final” price. You need to ask them and be aware they will likely not tell you the truth, so it’s not crazy to call twice and when you get the same low result twice hit the bit.
4. The magic number is can only do on the phone 1-800-934-6489 / 1877-424-2028  and they have very limited office hours for obvious reasons, only Monday-Friday, and one-time zone. You will have to wait for a while. This number by the way does not seem to be available from the main Comcast number without a lot of discussions. It is called the downgrade office. And they will oftentimes just busy out all the lines, so be patient!

And finally good luck! Having only this monopoly makes things really hard, but for most folks in the US, that’s the only choice.