I worked at TCI prior to the certification of Docsis 1.0. Back then if you wanted to go from 512k to 1M we would "roll a truck" because we needed to check that your signal was good enough that you would not only get service, but that we wouldn't go broke every time it rained and the signal would degrade.
Basically you needed to have 20% better signal than was needed for the service so that you wouldn't fall off-line when something created a small amount of interference.
I suspect Comcast is doing something similar. Not really charging to do the "install" but charging to certify that you have enough signal for the service.
It can also be that they want to check if they need to pull a new cable to the edge of your house, or upgrade the Amplifier at the "block".
You probably can convince them to not do all of these things, but your service may suffer in the long run.
Back in the day we would do "no SLA" installs and if your cable went out it was yours to deal with. When your choice was that or a modem, lots of time you took that rather than having a 33.6k connection.
I thought that can be done remotely? On one of my old ISPs I could change every setting on the modem on the company's website. It was quite scary, actually, how little privacy I had in this regard. They could easily check the signal strength to the modem that way...
It absolutely can be done remotely.
Every one of these modems does SNMP, exports everything it has in the way of statistics, and they can read it remotely
The modems are nowadays configured to only allow requests from certain ip space with certain passwords because you could actually accomplish a lot in the docsis 1.0 days by messing around with SNMP.
Depending on the modem manufacturer, you can still poison them with your own locally-loaded TFTP configuration file to override the speed configured from your cable provider.
Disclaimer: The FBI was cracking down on people who were doing this.
You could do a signal check remotely. You couldn't certify the line. How would you pull a new coax, or check that the end user didn't have a splitter between the modem and the tap?
If you call tech support they lose a lot of money, and people at the bleeding edge tend to be the ones who call the most and take the longest to trouble shoot.
Basically you needed to have 20% better signal than was needed for the service so that you wouldn't fall off-line when something created a small amount of interference.
I suspect Comcast is doing something similar. Not really charging to do the "install" but charging to certify that you have enough signal for the service.
It can also be that they want to check if they need to pull a new cable to the edge of your house, or upgrade the Amplifier at the "block".
You probably can convince them to not do all of these things, but your service may suffer in the long run.
Back in the day we would do "no SLA" installs and if your cable went out it was yours to deal with. When your choice was that or a modem, lots of time you took that rather than having a 33.6k connection.