- Always check whether your future home can get internet before you put money down.
There are a lot of unknowns when buying a house, and many nasty surprised can come along during the process. But you wouldn’t imagine getting an internet connection set up in a major U.S. city to be among them.
Yet that’s exactly what happened to a couple in Seattle. They discovered that they can’t get internet in their new home.
Well, that’s not entirely true. The house has never had internet cables connected to it, but they could ask for the work to be done.
But the operation would cost them $27,000 — minimum. That’s a bitter pill to swallow on top of having a new mortgage.
Let’s take a look at the bizarre and, frankly, sad state of U.S. internet services.
‘I Was Just Flaggergasted’
Zachary Cohn and his wife Lauryl Zenobi purchased a house in Seattle’s Northgate neighborhood. In July 2019, they closed the deal and started moving in.
But when they tried to get their new place connected to the world wide web, they received a nasty surprise. There was no way to do that.
“All six neighbors I share a property line with are wired for Comcast, but our house never was,” Cohn told Ars Technica.
And it’s not like Cohn’s and Zenobi’s house is in a remote location, like — say — rural Midwest where the nearest neighbor is 15 miles away. The Northgate neighborhood is at a prime location in Seattle.
The Space Needle, for example, is only about six miles away. The neighborhood has a major bus station, a brand-new rail station, schools… What we’re trying to say is that the couple had reason to expect their house to be cut off from the internet.
“I was just flabbergasted that a house like this, in an area like this, could possibly have never been wired for Internet. In the middle of Seattle, it didn’t even dawn on me that that was possible,” Cohn said.
Borrowing a Cup of Internet
Granted, Cohn and Zenobi could technically get an internet connection. They could get a DSL line from CenturyLink, but it’s just not up to modern standards.
The DSL connection could only reach a download speed of 3Mbps and an upload speed of 500kbps. To put that in perspective, a mobile 4G connection averages at around 8Mbps/5Mbps — and a lot of 4G users crumble about that being too slow these days.
The couple’s neighbors can get internet service from Comcast because the company used the overhead powerlines poles to extend cable service to the houses. But powerlines to Cohn’s and Zainobi’s are underground, so they never got those cables.
The previous owner of their home used to rent the house and had struck a deal with the neighbor to get internet service. They’d run a cable from the neighbor’s Comcast hookup across both properties and into the house.
But when Cohn talked to the neighbor about renewing the deal, he wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. According to Cohn, the neighbor had been “unhappy” with the arrangement from the beginning.
“I basically convinced our neighbor to continue that arrangement until we could come up with some alternative,” he said.
The Cost of Connectivity
Naturally, Cohn contacted Comcast as soon as possible to ask how they could get an internet connection for the house. But that proved an increasingly frustrating process.
At first, he kept smashing into a brick wall of unhelpful customer service representatives. In their defense, the agents probably weren’t qualified to answer questions about installing new internet cables.
After eight months of unanswered emails and voice mails, Cohn got in touch with Seattle City Councilmember Debora Juarez. Surprise, surprise — a Comcast engineer called Cohn in a couple of days and the company came over to do a site survey.
Processing the survey results took another few months, but in November 2020, Cohn finally got an email detailing how he and Zenobi could get internet. But the news wasn’t good.
Connecting the house to Comcast’s network would cost the couple $27,119. Further emails detailed that the cost of the entire project was closer to $80,000, but Cohn and Zenobi would only have to pay the quoted amount.
So, really, they were getting a bargain. But that wasn’t a bargain anyone would be happy with.
Cohn contacted Juarez again to see if there was anything the City could do to help. In April 2021, the couple found out that the City of Seattle has no authority to require Comcast — or anyone else — to connect their house to the internet.
The lack of cabling at the house, this email explained, was due to the strange shape of the lot. There was no way to slash the $27,000 price tag, and Comcast suggested the couple get a mobile wireless hotspot.
Out of Data
The irony is that Cohn and Zenobi have already been using a hotspot the entire time. But even that hasn’t been a good solution.
The service the couple got from UnlimitedToGo promised then unlimited, unrestricted internet access through an AT&T network. But the connection wasn’t as unlimited as it seems — AT&T won’t cut their connection, but they have undocumented data caps after which they severely throttle network speeds.
Both Cohn and Zenobi need to do about six hours of video calls each day for their jobs. As a result, their connection is pretty much constantly capped.
“My Internet connection would grind to a halt, typically in the morning and in the evening, to the point of being unusable even for like basic web browsing, let alone video calls or Netflix or something like that,” Cohn explained.
When the UnlimitedToGo service cuts off, the couple has had to resort to tethering their phones for connection. There are simply no other options, so they’re slowly starting to consider the deal with Comcast.
“I’m just very nervous about dropping $27,000 to lock myself into a company who can then jack the rates up. You just have to pay whatever they want to charge,” Cohn said.