They’re coming for my cable, internet, and phone.
Please, please, for the love of all that is holy, let Congress nix this deal. Or whoever is responsible for approving these things. I like TimeWarner. I do not want to deal with Comcast, those fucking assholes waited about two seconds before the recent decision setting aside net neutrality rules to start fucking people over.
I’m certainly not a big fan of Time Warner’s TV service; I just have them for internet. I want nothing to do with Comcast though.
What a load of shit.
Yeeks. I’ve been very happy with TWC’s customer service for my phone and internet, way happier than I was with Verizon’s before I dumped them for cable. I hope that doesn’t change with the merger.
My understanding is that Time Warner Cable was being shopped around. Charter Communications was trying to make a deal but couldn’t. So I think one or the other of the existing cable companies was going to take it over. From Comcast’s perspective, it may make sense. It makes them the dominant cable company in the NYC area.
Well, no shit. These takeovers nearly always make sense from the point of view of the purchasing company.
The people who get screwed are usually the customers, as the oligopolization of national market, and the monopolization of many local markets, continues unabated.
I live in the 8th-largest city, the 18th-largest metro area, and the 6th most populous county in the nation. I’m less than 4 miles from downtown, in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood, in a building that’s about ten years old. And i have exactly 1 choice for decent internet service.
There are two cable providers in the city—Cox and Time Warner—but they have agreed (and been allowed) to split the city in half, with Cox serving as the only provider south of the San Diego River, and TWC as the only provider to the north.
And it’s not like i can go with DSL. Despite living on a busy street, in a relatively new building, the best i can do with AT&T is a 1.5Mb connection, which is completely inadequate in the era of streaming video. I get 25 Mb with Cox, and i’m on their third-tier program. If i had a big family and needed more bandwidth, i could opt for a 50 or 100 Mb connection.
I’m not complaining about my Cox service. I’ve been very happy with the speed and the quality. We’ve had basically no downtime in the five-plus years we’ve been with them. But if the service were bad, i’d have no real option to fix the problem. Just this month, my internet bill increased $7.00, and it’s not like i can call Cox and threaten to go with the competition in order to leverage a better deal.
Guess I might be trying U-Verse after all.
In the nation, really.
Fingers crossed the Feds rein them in somewhat, but I don’t see any way this deal won’t go through.
I don’t believe Comcast and Time Warner are competitors. They have different geographic regions they serve the same way AT&T and Frontier telephone do. This won’t make make Comcast a monoply it will just make them a lot bigger.
It may not affect their customers in the short term, but the more households they control the more they can dictate to content providers.
We had Comcast cable and internet for years - lousy, unreliable service. Every time I called to complain that the internet wasn’t working (about monthly) they would try to upsell me telephone service to my package! Fuckers! I think they figured that if I had Comcast telephone, I wouldn’t be able to keep calling them about my bad internet connection.
My elderly parents got the phone bundle and they were always having problems that took days to fix. They finally got rid of it because they need reliable phone for health emergencies.
It was a wondrous day when I was able to call them and cancel. We get DSL internet from our phone company now (TDS) and although we switched to DirecTV for a while (which was great) we finally dumped them too and now just watch streaming TV through our Roku, or over the air.
Yup. They swapped the Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston areas a while ago to consolidate their geographic footprints.
That was a headache and a half. It’s not so bad when you can get the old Time Warner employees in Houston, who are actually pretty good, but anything that gets kicked up the customer service chain in Comcast or to a newer employee sucks donkey balls.
I have my issues with Comcast, but overall, I’ve been happy with them. No major internet outages, blazing fast internet speeds (with continual speed upgrades. I move a lot of data, so I’ll take what I can get. DSL is much too slow for me.) That said, I would like real choice in the marketplace, for me, I don’t really have a choice. The only reasonable option that I know of for the speeds I want (upload speed is most important to me, and I get 10 Mbps up and usually around 30-40 Mbps down as reported by the various Internet connection testing sites) is cable. Despite not having any major issues with Comcast, I would like the choice in case I do one day become dissatisfied. Right now, I’m stuck.
Its Free Market (blessings and peace be upon it…) competition in action! Unless competition hinders the profit generating wonder of the Free Market (blessings, etc…). Even capitalists know that competition is only the qualifying heats to collusion, which is a form of collectivization, but the legit kind, not the bad kind.
Thankfully neither one is an option around here.
Same here. My only other option for internet is through a local phone company and DSL is just too slow for me. I have zero options for TV service though, as the way my house sits on a downward slope and with the tall, mature trees behind my house prevent me from getting satellite.
Despite my minor grievances with Comcast (mostly due to being unable to understand many of their customer service reps as that is outsourced to the Philippines), I pay $160 a month for their bundle, which includes HD tier, sports tier, on demand, unlimited long distance landline phone service and a blazing 50Mb down 10Mb up internet speeds.
I think what I pay is fair, and despite the few outages (and let’s be honest, EVERY provider is going to have an outage now and then) the service has been good. Heck, there was a time a few years ago where my service was down for three weeks when a train near where I live derailed and knocked out one of their fiber optic hubs. I called, they credited my bill for the entire month.
There is no competition in cable. Your street address determines which company you get. You have no choice.
TWC can suck my balls. Their customer service blows, their user interface is awful, their search function is idiotic. AT&T and Verizon were far superior. Now I have Direct TV, which is better still. I complained via phone (in India or South America, depending on the time of day you call) and by e-mail. They could give a shit.
One of my questions when looking at new places to rent is 'what is the cable company here and do you allow for a dish". If the answer is TWC and no, then I look elsewhere.
And I see that several members have stated that they ‘like’ TWC. All I can say is…I’m watching you!
All generalizations are wrong including this one.
I know of a few people here who have switched cable services at their houses and there wasn’t any problem.
Where is “here”?
According to this Gizmodo story from 2011, the last reliable statistic on competing cable choices is from 2003, and at that time about “two percent of Americans markets had a choice of cable providers.”
I can’t imagine it’s much higher now. Yes, there are competing services like Google fiber, Verizon FIOS, or AT&T U-verse, but those providers combined cover a very small proportion of American households.
That’s a rare occurrence though. Most of the time cable/ phone networks don’t overlap.
A very small town in eastern South Dakota. There are three regional cable companies that serve this town and they can sell to any house in town they want. None of those companies are Comcast or Time Warner as those two don’t serve South Dakota.