If it’s not too hard to charge, it’s not too hard to list.
Not to defend ISPs too much, but I will say that it will be more difficult to quote prices than many expect.
I used to work for CenturyLink in customer support. I’d have callers from 20 different states, and thousands of municipalities. Each and every one of those municipalities had different rates depending on the services. One town would have a franchise utility agreement that has the City tacking on 2% in trade for granting right of ways. Another would have a $11 monthly 911 service fee applied to everything (911 still has to work on DSL so even internet-onlu customers had to pay it), where another might have a 50 cent fee. Everywhere was different, and any number of these fees was subject to change.
Something like a franchise agreement might not move with a fiscal year, or the city ordinance may have had a flat fee that was divided amongst the number of customers. We’d have a fixed rate for a service, but due to the constantly-changing fees the customer may have a different bill every month of the year.
Giving a precise quote in those circumstances was pretty much impossible. Our computer systems weren’t logged into some kind of live fee database of every state, county, and municipal government in the country.
In my job right now I establish fees for municipal government. There’s been some fuckery at the state level so that even I - the person in charge of setting the fees - can’t tell you what a permit will cost in 2 weeks. And my new fees that I have to pull out of my ass will directly affect the franchise fee rates for telecom providers, which is one of those variable fees we all hate.
The truth is Spectrum and Frontier legitimately won’t know what to charge the customers in my town until they’re sending the bill.
Those sound like internal complications of doing business. A well designed software system could solve a lot of those issues. That’s not the consumers problem. Especially when prices are high. If they want to charge fees instead of flat rates they need to say what they are.
That’s like a store that won’t tell you the price of anything until you buy it. Or a hospital lol for some reason we let that one slip
When you go to the store, the cashier doesn’t say “come back in 3 months for the same price.”
It may be more difficult than a relatively static price, but if they can figure out how to charge it, they can figure out how to display it. Any ISP sites I’ve used have you put in zip code anyway to view services. There’s no reason they can’t set it up to show the exact fee rates per area. I know you said you’re not defending them, but “it’s hard” isn’t really an excuse.
