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New home, no broadband? Prepare to negotiate

Rob Pegoraro
Special for USA TODAY
Be sure to verify a home has access to broadband Internet before moving in.

Q. I moved into a new house that I thought had broadband; instead, Comcast says I'll have to pay $2,000 to get service extended. Is that my only option?

A. The agony of being outside an Internet provider's coverage has been in the news the past few days, thanks to Consumerist's tale of a man in a suburb of Seattle who discovered his new abode had zero broadband options.

This story isn't as painful and does have a somewhat happy ending, but it's still not that pretty.

Automotive journalist Christian Moe had been a Comcast customer for four years in the farther reaches of the Knoxville area, and when he was considering a place four miles closer to town, Comcast said it had service there too. But after he signed the lease, Moe learned otherwise.

He was told he'd have to pay to have Comcast service extended from the nearest pole -- at $8 a foot, a total of "just over $2,500," he wrote. And no, he could not hire somebody else to do the job.

What about DSL? AT&T's could go no faster than 6 million bits per second, but its reps disagreed over whether the lines to his house allowed even that.

After I asked Comcast PR to look into Moe's case, the picture initially got worse. The Philadelphia cable giant sent technicians to his house and reported that he'd actually need "1,200 feet of new extension and over 300 feet of aerial cable to service your home."

The revised deal he was then offered: commit upfront to two years of a higher-than-usual level of service, and Comcast would cover the cost of extending the line.

(I'd share numbers, but these negotiations took place with USA TODAY's thumb on the scale; your results without that influence may vary.)

Meanwhile, Moe's separate conversations with AT&T had yielded a backup option: A technician extended the line to his house at no charge. But again, 6 Mbps DSL rates as slow broadband.

If you find yourself in a situation like this, the first thing you should do is read the cable company's local franchise agreement. (It may be posted on your city or county's site, or you may need to call to have a copy sent to you.) This sets out how it must extend service to an unserved residence -- and each one varies, said Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas.

In Knox County, Tennessee, Comcast can charge a "premium" rate to bridge gaps greater than 350 feet -- although if 10 potential subscribers all within 1,000 feet of part of its system request service, it should connect them at no cost. It remains unclear whether Moe's first estimate complied with that provision.

You should also talk to whoever in your local government oversees this agreement. Your bargaining position usually improves if it's not you alone against a telecom conglomerate.

But the most important thing you can do to avoid getting stuck in a bandwidth-deprived state is to verify upfront that a potential future home has high-speed Internet access.

Checking at a cable or phone company's site may not suffice, and a lack of broadband has yet to rise of the status of, say, lead paint as a hazard that real-estate agents must disclose to sellers. Instead, get confirmation from current occupants that they don't have to sip the Internet through a dial-up straw.

Tip: A second opinion on your Internet connection's speed

For years, I've been recommending the Speedtest.net site and its mobile apps to check an Internet provider's performance. And for most purposes, Seattle-based Ookla's tools work fine, quickly estimating ping times (a measure of responsiveness) and download and upload speeds.

But Speedtest.net also goes heavy on the ads and gets confused by extremely fast services: At a Google Fiber exhibit at SXSW in Austin two weeks ago, the site clocked that billion-bits-per-second connection at a low fraction of its speed, just as I saw it underestimate gigabit fiber in Sonoma County, Calif., three years ago.

And even on slower connections, a second opinion can enlighten.

Fortunately, my traditional fallback option -- the Network Diagnostic Test from Measurement Lab, a project of the New America Foundation, Google and others -- no longer demands the security risk of running Java in your browser. Like Speedtest.net, "NDT" now only requires Adobe's Flash plug-in. (It's also available as an Android app.)

On my own FiOS connection, no news was good news: M-Lab reported only slightly slower figures than Speedtest.net.

Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.

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