Rich Bergeron: New taxes and fees on cable bill only benefits shareholders

To The Daily Sun,

Inflation is hard enough to deal with these days without companies resorting to classic price gouging. Recently, many local residents may have seen cable and internet provider Atlantic Broadband change their name to "Breezeline." The takeover by the new regime has been anything but a breeze for customers. Suddenly, there is a whole new section on our bills labeled "taxes, fees and surcharges."

I watched this section of my bill grow to nearly $50, which is almost a third of my base rate for cable and internet services. I've had some technical issues with this service, and they have not improved at all since the buyout. A technician spent half a day at my house trying to fix the issue only to have it come right back weeks later.

My taxes, fees and surcharges are broken down further in a line item only referred to as "taxes and fees." There is no sales tax in New Hampshire, so it is all fees. I took the time to ask a representative this week about these fees and why they were not individually listed and described on my bill. She was surprised they were not listed and took a long time to list them out for me on her end. The ridiculous names for these fees all sounded very arbitrary and not anything that they are forced to absorb, so they have to pass it on to us. An example was the "sports delivery fee." How is that not already wrapped into the channels I subscribe to that cover sports?

Breezeline is acting in a manner that betrays a need to make the buyout amazingly profitable for their new owners. We are paying their shareholders' dividends at this point. I will be switching providers, and you should, too.

Rich Bergeron

Belmont