Comcast Urged To 'Ditch The Fees'

Consumer Reports launched the national “What the Fee?!” campaign on Wednesday by delivering to Comcast Corp.’s Philadelphia headquarters a petition with 110,000 signatures, asking that it be more transparent about buried fees in bills, such as monthly surcharges for broadcast television stations ($7.50), local sports broadcasts ($6.75), and DVRs ($10).

These fees add 25 percent to the advertised price for cable- or satellite-TV and climb even with guaranteed-price packages, a Consumer Reports official said in a rain-shortened news conference in front of the Comcast Center, according to philly.com.

Consumer Reports surveyed members earlier this year about which fees were the most loathed and the resounding response was those in their pay-TV bills, the group said. Companies many times don’t disclose the fees to consumers until after the service is installed in their homes, making it almost impossible to comparison shop.

One of those was Bernadette Freedman, who said that in January, she bought a Comcast package with high-definition channels but couldn’t watch them in HD quality until she paid an extra $10 “HD Technology” fee. “It seems like, ‘hello, there is a fee for HD’ even when those channels are in the package I am paying for,” she said.

“It’s time for Comcast and the cable industry as a whole to ditch these fees, and advertise the full price of their service so that consumers aren’t left asking ‘WTF?’ when they get their bill,” John Schwantes, senior policy counsel for Consumer Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports, said Wednesday. The nonprofit Consumer Reports is a membership organization that publishes a monthly magazine that rates products on price and quality.