- COMCAST XFINITY SELF INSTALL KIT NOT RENTING MODEM HOW TO
- COMCAST XFINITY SELF INSTALL KIT NOT RENTING MODEM FREE
I called Comcast Xfinity customer service and scheduled to have a tech come out. The next (and for 3 days after), it dropped to 0.2 Mbps download. One day it was working fine, delivering serviceable speeds. Meanwhile, Comcast raised its rental fee again.
COMCAST XFINITY SELF INSTALL KIT NOT RENTING MODEM FREE
Months and months went by and I thought to myself, “This is great, I have a free Comcast router that I am not paying a rental fee on. Lesson #2: Obsolescence is the second way to get rid of your Comcast modem rental fee. The downside when they do this is that they can no longer charge you a rental fee. Comcast will eventually write off older router/modem/gateways as “customer owned” because they don’t want to support them anymore. In recent talks with a Comcast support tech, I found out that this is quite common. Shortly after, I noticed that Comcast stopped charging me for the modem rental fee on my old Comcast-owned gateway completely. I ignored the messages for a bit out of laziness. To celebrate, Comcast wanted me to “upgrade your cable modem for free”. In short, DOCSIS upgrades permit faster download/upload speeds. Lesson #1: Negotiation is the first way to get rid of your Comcast modem rental fee.Ī year or so later, I started receiving voice mail that Comcast was upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 (more recently DOCSIS 3.1). I called Comcast customer service, and threatened to drop the service unless they stopped charging me the rental fee. That is, until the increased their rental fee again (they do this every year or so now). I couldn’t find any for sale online at the time and thought they could only be had from Comcast. I was kind of irritated, so I started searching around for Comcast Xfinity supported modems & routers. That’s right – for the privilege of paying them $40 a month for internet service, I also had to pay $3 per month to rent the equipment to do it (that price has now skyrocketed to $14 per month recently for a standard gateway and $25 per month for xFi Complete). I didn’t know it at the time of installation, but on my first bill, I noticed that Comcast started charging me $3 to rent this modem. As part of the installation, Comcast put in a Netgear cable modem that also dubbed as a wifi router. When I first moved to my existing home, I signed up for Comcast Xfinity high-speed Internet, with wireless networking (wifi).
How I Found 3 Ways to Get Rid of Comcast Xfinity Modem Rental Fee
COMCAST XFINITY SELF INSTALL KIT NOT RENTING MODEM HOW TO
I’ve written more broadly on how to get rid of your ISP modem rental fee (if you’re not with Comcast).
If you don’t have Comcast and have another Internet service provider, the same advice may also apply. If you have a long-seeded disdain for Comcast or other greedy corporate giants, like I do, you will enjoy this how-to story. It’s also a tale of how Comcast has increased their gateway rental fee to a whopping $14 per month ($25/month for “xFi Complete”) over the last few years, in order to turn it into a profitable revenue stream for the company. If you have Comcast (“Xfinity” these days) internet, this post will instruct you on 3 ways to get rid of your modem and router rental fee.