Technology

Ok so strap in...

It started with splurging on gigabit pro, the obscure fiber service they will only sell if you call a special number, have a back and forth with a small property manager, and wait for them to check your proximity to fiber and get approval from their finance department on top of a $1000 install fee (discountable to $500). Once I had gigabit pro (6 months and several approvals later), things got started as a result of repeatedly humoring the comcast salespeople every time they called to try to upsell me to cable TV. Since none of the residential salespeople were familiar with gigabit pro, which is installed and managed by the business side "metro-e" division of comcast, they were always shocked to see I was being billed $150/mo and assured me they could get me TV bundled and reduce my price (gigabit pro is often discounted so I was getting 2 years at 50% off the standard $300/mo price, I was actually planning on cancelling as soon as that ran out because there would also be an early cancellation fee). They would spend like an hour trying and failing to get the billing system to bundle in TV because I assume the residential billing system is probably only set up to bundle TV with residential high frequency cable internet packages. Eventually they would give up and tell me they would reach back out. Sometime later, I would get another sales call from someone else offering a TV bundle and the whole thing would repeat again.

I think I spent a total of 6 hours on the phone across several occasions spanning a month or more (always multitasking of course on these calls while they went in circles) just being entertained that they couldn't figure it out when one day the salesperson got their manager to override the billing system and they re-entered my plan from scratch. Every step of the way I told them I was happy with my speed (I was hoping that way they wouldn't notice I was managed by the metro-e team) and would only agree to bundle if they also dropped the 2 year contract I was in, and they agreed. So when they re-entered my plan, they erroneously entered in regular gigabit service. Since there would be no speed change I guess they didn't even look at the modem provisioning let alone notice that my "modem" was listed as the Juniper fiber switch that is normally rented out for fiber service.

Later I cancelled the TV part of the plan and was just left with the gig pro fiber service while my internet bill went down to the normal gig price. Not being completely satisfied I later called a few more times trying to negotiate my bill even lower. When I finally succeeded at negotiating my bill a few more dollars lower over live chat support, they made the mistake of sending me an xfinity combo modem/router self install kit - maybe because I didn't have a modem attached to my account that the system understood. I decided to just try to activate it and see what would happen, surprisingly I was able to activate it on my account while the fiber service was still active. I took advantage of having an actual returnable modem and swapped it out with a purchased modem to get rid of the modem rental fee which I was originally made to pay for the fiber switch, which further lowered my bill. So to this day I have 2gig symmetric SFP+ with an additional 1gig symmetric rj45 powered by fiber as well as the standard cable modem with an additional 1gig non-symmetric connection for a total of 4 gigabit download and 3.035gig upload.

To top that all off for several years I gave 1 gig out of the 4 that I now have combined to our neighbors through a moca adapter so for a large portion of my time here I have only paid $40/mo split with 4 total roommates, so my monthly portion would be $10/mo

TL;DR: I splurged like a $500 install fee to get gigabit pro which is super obscure and took 6 months to get all the approvals, then I kept interacting with customer support and salespeople while taking advantage of their confusion and the fact that the residential folks don't interface with the business fiber / metro-e folks to reduce my bill by tricking them into billing me standard residential price with a TV bundle that the salespeople REALLY want to sell you on, then I continued haggling for a few more dollars off resulting in them sending me a normal modem, which I set up and immediately swapped out with my own modem for even more money off. I also ended up splitting this extremely haggled bill with our neighbors (in addition to roommates) so my monthly portion has ended up being $10 since these 4 gigabits are split among 9 people who combined rarely even exceed 1 gig.