Telocity Wants Its Gateways Back

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Well, if you used to be a Telocity customer, perhaps like me you were unfortunate enough to be dropped when Northpoint exited existance, you probably still have a gateway laying around. Well, I hope you didn't start hacking it for a cheap web server or something because it seems Telocity, now DirectTV DSL (which is another story in and of itself I suppose) wants their boxes back..." Our AC describes the experience of cognitive dissonance as applied to ISP customers, and includes a quick word of advice.

"Friday afternoon I arrived home to find a box on my doorstep from Telocity. A little note inside informed me that they want their gateway back and... wait for it... if I failed to return it to them, they would charge me $499, as per their service agreement!

Now, I'm not claiming to be perfect, but I do like to think I would have noticed a clause saying I owe them $500 for anything! I tend to read contracts pretty carefully. Now, the last contact I had with these people was about three months ago. I've since gotten Verizon DSL (which is pretty lousy by the way, but at least it's available and I'm pretty sure not going bankrupt any time soon), I wonder if their mad? Kinda out of the blue to ask for the thing back.

At least they have me a pre-paid shipping package and Airborne was nice enough to come pick up the package this morning.

I called Telocity and had them make a note on my account stating that it was shipped back today and they noted the airbill number. I'm not going to risk them saying they never got it back, you know? I don't usually have a "spare" $500 laying around that I don't mind parting with!

I was getting set to start doing some hacking too, I figure that thing could have made a cheap web server or router or something. Would have been fun figuring out anyway. I'm sure I'm not the first person with that idea, I just hope no one did so because apparently those gateways were never ours to keep. Heads up folks!"

Is this a UL certified device ?

does it have a patent. I find it VERY HARD to accept that a solid state electronic device IS OK, when snoking....If this was my device I'd drop it in a metal box and let it run 7*24 until if vaporized, then I'd sue the hell out of them for supplying a faulty device. On the other hand maybe is it a GWB special, and it burns crude oil or diesel to save on electricity :)

Why not ask to see the contract?

They should be able to provide it, showing your signature on the contract.

You should charge them a storage fee

This is quite common. If someone leaves a piece of "valuable" property at your place under your care. You are obliged to take reasonable care of it. You should be able to charge rent for the sq ft it occupies in your apartment. In some cases, you might be safe to guard it and insure it. You might even consider adding on some dog food and insurance costs to the storage bill.

whew...

I started using Telocity in about August of 2000. And at that time they did have a clause in the agreement saying that upon termination of service by the customer within a year of opening the service, the customer is obliged to return the box or pay $500.

Also, it wasn't clear from the post whether Telocity wants ALL their gateways back, regardless of whether you are a current customer of now DirectTV, or whether you've since switched to some other ISP. Which, upon reading the heading initially, sent me into a panick. But then I realized that it only applied to people who are no longer subscribed. So, a clarification for the anwary may be in order. Max

Re:You, too, are a fucking dumbass.

You are an ignorant fuckwad -- but then, that's why you posted as Anonymous Coward at 0 and my non-anonymous post was modded up to 5. Moron.

It's not the user's responsibility to spend his time, money, and phone bill trying to track down where to send a DSL gateway that was left at his house after Telocity yanked his service! Maybe your time is valueless, but other people's time is not. If I had signed up for DSL through Telocity and they yanked it, keeping their friggin' gateway would not even come close to paying for my time and aggravation to find another broadband provider.

And just because you are too much of a dumb-fuck to be able to find a use for a gateway (which you ignorantly refer to as a "modem"), does not mean that everyone is.

Now, pretend you're a man and post with your name rather than Anonymous Coward.

Re:Why not ask to see the contract?

The box is their property: they loaned it to you for you to use while you had a contract with them. Now that the contract has been terminated they have a right to get it back. I don't think that this has to be spelled out explicitly in the contract.

However, it seems to me that you have grounds to sue them in your local small claims court for breach of contract. You can seize the box as compensation.

Bah!

Attack of the poorly written writeups!

"...Telobity customer..."
"...Telovity, now DirectTV DSL..."
"...from Telocity."
Which is it?

And one of my favorites,
"...I wonder if their mad?"
No, not theirs, but mine. My mad. My mad at people who can't write/proofread!

(Sorry, I sometimes hit my quota of bad writeups I can read on /. without going ballistic. Go ahead, moderate me down so nobody has to learn to write correctly. It's not like that is a needed skill in real life...)

get this

Oh, that's nothing.

I called Telocity in February 2000 about getting DSL to my apartment. Signed up, gave them a credit card number, they were supposed to get back to me in a few days about a service appointment.

I called them back several times and each time they were unsure as to why I hadn't been contacted. Nobody came by, no gateway unit sent, not a peep out of them. In late May I called them and told them to forget it.

In August, I received this same letter, demanding the immediate return of the gateway unit I had never received! I called them up, waited about an hour on hold, explained the situation -- I am not and never have been a Telocity customer, you never even called me back, etc. I never sent them anything and they never charged me.

I considered sending them a consulting bill for the 3-4 hours I wasted on the phone throughout the ordeal.

I came to the conclusion that apart from leaving a bunch of people without their DSL service, Telocity and Rhythms are bad companies that deserved to tank or get bought out. But they're still better than Ameritech. I'm now a Speakeasy.net customer, and dealing with them has been a joy so far.

Is this useless hardware they're asking for back?

Just curious. My cable provider upgraded it's adapters several times in the first year of service threatening huge charges if the old hardware wasn't returned. When I went to the office to turn it in and asked what was happening to my old adapter they said "Oh, it will be destroyed."

Why were they going to charge me $300 for something that's essentially garbage?

when i cancelled

When I cancelled they told me they would be sending me a box to return the gateway, no problem. A month passed, I called to ask where the box to ship it back was since I didn't want to be charged for this piece of crap modem. THey said well you just cancelled and it take 6 to 8 weeks to get the box out to you. So I was like no big deal. Well its been three months still no box. But I've been holding on to the modem in the event they send me a box and try and get $300 out of me or something.

On a side note, the first modem I had from them started to billow smoke at one point, I called them up and told them it had started to smoke and that they needed to send me a new one. To which the woman replied "Was it just a few puffs of smoke or was it continuous, because sometimes the modems will let off a few puffs of smoke and they are still ok." Sorry, but my equipement smoking shouldn't be 'normal'. From then on I never left there modem on when I left to go to work out of fear of it burning down my house.

Destroying the secondary market ...

Some posters have asked why companies would want to have their boxes back. My suspicion is that like all good potential monopolists, they want to destroy the secondary market. To help explain the economics, bear with me as I go through some MBAthink.

Basically the real value of any capital good is the price that the *next* buyer is willing to pay, ie the resale value. It doesn't matter if the house you bought at auction cost you $1M if the next person (given a free choice) is only willing to pay $500K. This disconnect between (sunk) cost and (future) value has been the downfall of many speculators (cough*dot con shares*cough).

Now for a good/service/title to accurately priced, there must be enough instances around so that potential future buyers can evaluate their utility and alternative factors of consumption. Thus for something like land, it could be zoned for residential, business, recreation, mixed, etc and different people would value each according to their needs. The secondary commercial leasing market allows much more flexilibility than just risking a big lump sum on a potentially unsuitable structure.

Another reason the secondary market arises when primary purchasors want liquidity, ie they find that they wish to redeploy capital (e.g. second mortgage for startup business). So even if you bought that house but can't make much use of it due to excessing work hours, you can lease it out. The biggest example is the share market which was originally a mechanism for the investment banks / underwriters to offload risk of being caught with an investment that was going downhill (after of course getting the best profits for themselves due to insider information, etc). Secondary markets are important in the sense that if they are large enough, they actually give very good price signals (cf efficient market hypothesis, random walks, etc).

Now how does this apply to the consumer services model? Basically the problem (from the business point of view) of computers (hardware) is that they can be used for anything and everything (software). Unfortunately the issue with any new technology is convincing users that they have a need for that junk ... err ... status symbol (cough*Palm*cough). Thus to convince people to adopt (google bridging the chasm), they tend to create loss leaders or subsidised on-ramps (cf bundled plans for mobile phones) to convince the potential users that the price is really affordable. Now as any hacker with half a clue realises, any electronic device with an unsecure interface (cough*cuecat*cough), can be refactored into something more practical and thus useful. So the combination of refactorable loss-leaders and a savvy user population tends to create parasitic markets where you cannabalise sales from one segment into a lower-margin one. Hence the desire to eliminate competition for themselves by offering closed devices, dumbing the user base (by hiding stuff or increasing complexity), as well as the standard retail devices of deliberately having a short shelf-life and guaranteed obsolescence.

Now the incentives for destroying the secondary market is that people don't have a chance to properly value/price the alternative uses and that liquidity is removed increasing barriers to competitors, allowing the corporation to get away with a higher priced primary market (and the all important profits, options and return to shareholders). This can be seen most clearly in things like the technical textbook market where the Doctrine of First Sale means that publishers prefer coming out with new editions (and incompatibilities ... err erata) rather than allowing students to resell their textbooks to other hardup students. IBM was the classic case of a monopolist that deliberately leased their gear to prevent a secondary market (google Amdahl/IBM marketing practices). If you read any standard MBA handbook, you realise the mind-boggling sales tactics at work which is naturally anthema to any self-respecting engineer who wants to look under the hood before buying ... alas engineers are not a majority of the sheeple population.

Now applying this impromptu MBA lesson shows that from a business point of view, it is easier to sell future goods/services if you can eliminate the infrastructure for any competitors (the so-called deep entry moat). Hence convincing the customer that *the firm* owns the gear (despite using the retail system) and thus can exercise control over recall (naturally at their convenience). Obviously with electronic stuff this is a problem because people think of it as a manufactured *good* (aka appliance) rather than on-going *service* (maintenance). Hence the serious pricing problems since when you outright buy a good, you usually do so if the price (present value) is less than the value of all the future services you expect out of it. This disconnect is going to cause a lot of sustainability problems in the long-term as the accounting rules for capital items and software don't really reflect the real cost of services (software stability, interoperability quality, service level), just like inefficient market for medical pricing results in invisibile costs such as long waiting lists.

At least with open source you know exactly what you are getting up-front, the right that your contribution will be reflected and amplified in future iterations and refinements of the software. This is not the case with commercial providers that vary the terms of usage at their whim (see the Sexual Practices of Licenses at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/06/21/18102 58&cid=66).

LL

My Telocity Experience...

First, I must say that I AM a Telocity customer. I have been using Telocity for just over a month now as DSL just became available in my area.

I called Telocity one week before the date that Bell-South claimed to have DSL ready, and by either luck (for me) or quick the quick action of Telocity, they had my DSL Gateway to me the very day DSL was supposed to be available. I plugged it in, turned it on, connected it to my router, and wham. It just worked.

It was a very pleasant experience, my connection is pretty quick and I have absolutely NO COMPLAINTS about the DSL service at all (knock on wood).

But it's been over one month since I signed up and you know what? I haven't signed anything!

I haven't so much as received a letter from them, much less signed anything. I've signed no such "terms of agreement."

A friend of mine asked "So, do you get to keep this thing if you drop their service?" So I specifically dug around for some terms on the Telocity web-site (note: one month ago the Telocity web-site WAS Telocity, and just in recent weeks changed to DirectTV DSL). I found no such statements. The fact is when I called to get the service, it was never expressed to me, neither verbally nor in writing, that when I cease to be a Telocity customer that they will get their Gateway back.

Does that mean I didn't suspect they would want it back? Nah, I figured they probably would. It probably wouldn't do me a lot of good anyway, since if I switch DSL providers they'll likely provide me with one. Besides, I already have a couple of pretty good routers.

The point is though, if someone really wanted to fight the $500 charge, I see sufficient cause for them to do so. The fact is quite clear. Those terms were never expressed to the customer, and some customers have never signed any single document.

Just one last thing -- When I called to get DSL service, it took less than 5 minutes on the phone and I gave my Credit Card Number to be billed monthly. The conversation was short and simple and mostly involved me giving my street address, phone number, CC#, and listening to the sales person try to convince me to go for the $59 package instead of the $49.


"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

News Flash from Captain Obvious

Reports from the field indicate that companies who rent you expensive equipment want it back at the end of the contract. Evil middle managers are even daring to send you a postage paid BOX to ship it back in, requiring no EFFORT on the customer's part to fulfill the CONTRACT. The devils!!

It is your right and DESTINY to keep rented equipment after the contract, and convert it into whatever you want (taco would convert his into a "sweet little mp3 server", like he does everything else). Fight the power!! Write your congressman! Donate to the EFF!!!

It's right in their TOS

For those of you who haven't bothered to check, sending the Telocity gateway back when the service is over is right in their service agreement:

http://www.directvdsl.com/products/agreement.asp [directvdsl.com]

If you say you couldn't find it on their web site, then you must not have been looking hard; I found it in under 30 seconds.

I've been a Telocity customer for a few years now, and I've been mostly pleased with their service. I *distinctly* remember the clause about paying for the modem if you don't return it. Read your contracts more clearly. There have been a few blips now and then, but all in all:

- they support linux (I got a RedHat engineer on the phone from tech support when I had problems DHCPing to my Telocity Gateway)
- they allow NAT (doesn't cost extra)
- they allow you to run servers (sshd, etc.)
- in some places (like Louisville, KY), you get a fixed IP

How can you argue with that?

The contract also said they would provide service.

If Telocity had asked for the gateways back at the time that they unilaterally stopped service, that would be one thing. But to leave this hardware in customer hands all this time would lead most customers to believe that Telocity did not want the gateways back.

If I had been a Telocity customer, I would demand that Telocity pay storage fees on the hardware that they abandoned at my home for the last few months. The contract you signed may have said you would return it, but it didn't say that you would store and protect it for free for weeks or months after they cut off your service.