Why does signing up take two seconds, but canceling takes weeks?

About two to three years ago, I tried to cancel my Xfinity service. At the time, I was dealing with at least a dozen outages a month and what I considered an unreasonably high bill. I wanted to switch to a faster, cheaper provider, but Xfinity retained me by matching the price — so I stayed, mostly because switching seemed like more hassle than it was worth.

Fast-forward to 2026. My bill has crept up from $35 (with my own equipment and autopay) to $55, and once bandwidth overage charges are factored in, my monthly total has been running between $111 and $155. Then in April, without any notification, the base rate jumped to $89 before overages.

That was the final straw, so I tried again to cancel my 400 Mbps plan — a plan that, in practice, never exceeded 200 Mbps down and 41 Mbps up, with frequent outages. As before, there was no self-service option to cancel online, so I started a live chat.

What followed was, frankly, absurd.

Over the course of three hours, I was transferred between six different representatives. Each one assured me they would "make me happy" and then proceeded to pitch offers that made no sense. The first offer was $6 more than I was currently paying for service that was 100 Mbps slower. I genuinely don't understand the logic of trying to retain a customer by offering them less for more.

I made my position clear with every rep: unless they could match or beat $45/month for 1,000 Mbps down / 1,000 Mbps up, with no equipment fees and no overage charges, there was no point continuing the conversation. That didn't stop them. They kept offering slower plans at higher prices, tried to upsell me on add-ons I didn't need, and pitched bundles with Hulu and Peacock (which I already get free through other services) and a phone line (I already have five). Each rep promised the next person up the chain had the authority to make a better offer. None of them came close. The best I was offered was roughly a quarter of the speed for three times the price — essentially what I already had.

Then, ironically, my Xfinity internet went out mid-chat. This happens often enough that I have a dual-WAN router set up with a 5G backup service for exactly this reason. The IP change ended my chat session, but when I reconnected I managed to get the same sixth rep back. I explained who I was and that I'd been dropped because of an Xfinity outage — and he immediately started the whole pitch over again, offering more expensive plans at slower speeds.

After I made it extremely clear that I had spent three hours and spoken to six people just trying to cancel, he finally told me Xfinity service was simply the best available and other providers couldn't match it. I pointed out that I was, at that very moment, using my backup service because Xfinity was down.

At that point I told him I was finished — six people and three hours was enough. I asked him to cancel my service. He then admitted that cancellations have to be done over the phone, not through chat.

I was stunned. I asked why none of the previous five reps, or he himself three hours earlier, had mentioned this. He said he would "add a notation to your account so you don't need to repeat yourself." I asked him to also note that paying 200–300% more for a quarter of the speed is unreasonable, and that making customers spend three hours on chat to cancel is worse.

A few days later, when I had time during business hours, I called. Whatever notes were supposedly added to my account were nowhere to be found, because I was greeted with the same script: slower plans at higher prices. At one point the rep offered me an autopay discount, noting that I wasn't enrolled. I explained that I had been on autopay for years, but I'd just disabled it because I was concerned I'd keep being billed for service I was trying to cancel.

Eventually, after far more time than this should ever have taken, the rep "allowed" me to cancel and gave me a confirmation number.

That was last month.

Then a bill arrived for $89 — which was confusing, since it covered only half a month of service, and everything I'd read online indicated the final bill would be prorated. Today, I received another bill: a $13 late fee plus another $89 for the following month — for service I had already canceled. Total: $191. (At least there were no overage charges, since the service was canceled and therefore unused.)

The comparison that motivated all of this

Xfinity: $155/month for 200 Mbps down / 40 Mbps up, plus $40/month for the 5G backup I need because of the outages = $195/month

New provider: $45/month for 1,000 Mbps down / 1,000 Mbps up

The math wasn't hard. The cancellation, apparently, is.

At this point, if the cancellation is ever actually processed as I was told it was, and if the billing is ever straightened out with the late fee removed, I don't believe I should owe a cent for that half-month of service. The amount of time, energy, and aggravation I've spent simply trying to get permission to stop using a service I no longer want has been genuinely mind-blowing. I have never experienced anything like it from any other company.

I'm posting this here because I refuse to be put through another round of being manipulated, talked over, and treated like I would believe paying more than double for less than half is a great deal — over the phone or in chat — just to ask, once again, to cancel service I don't want.

Please, just cancel my service as you had promised.