maybe I should have said ‘in California’. You call and ask for new service. You give them your address, and then they tell you if they service that area. If not, you are out of luck, even if the service the addresses directly across the street. The territories have been carved out for them.
I love Comcast but then again my alternative CenturyLink.
Does anybody actually work at the FCC and/or the FTC these days?
(Actually, in all fairness, AT&T Mobile’s acquisition of T-Mobile did get squashed, thank Og, because i would have lost the cell number I’ve had for almost nine years. Maybe this will get tanked, too.)
This is starting to sound like “Don’t you hate it when gigantic company A gets taken over by even bigger company B?”
Ack! No no no I don’t want Comcast again!
We had them for a while when we lived in TN, and they were AWFUL. Every time it rained hard we’d lose service - it was a fault in one of the junctions down the road from us. Every time I called to report the outage I had to go through the diagnostic rigmarole despite my saying that I knew it wasn’t on our end. Always had to set up a service visit, and usually within an hr or two service would be back & Id have to call again and cancel the visit.
Finally the local electric co (EPB) got their fantastic FiOs service to our area. I was so very happy to tell Comcast to stuff it. Moving away from EPB’s service was almost a deal killer…
Now here in SC we have TWC, which is ok but not spectacular. We don’t have cable, just internet & a VOIP line. Currently we’re on hr 20 or so of no internet thanks to the ice storm that rolled through. I live in the rural outskirts of the major city - we’ll see how long it takes to get service again. I have an iPad and we get LTE here at the house, surprisingly, and it’s fine for general cruising but there’s some work stuff I really need my desktop for.
There is apparently U-verse available one town north of us, but for now TWC is our only option - I’m going to be very sad if it ends up that Comcast is our only option!
Of all the places where I might have guessed you have a choice of cable providers, “a small town in South Dakota” was not one of them. I didn’t think you people even had cable. 
Why would you have lost your cell number?
I am very happy with TimeWarner, and between the two companies, Comcast is by far the shadiest, IMO.
Some of the analyses I’ve read of this deal point out that for television service, Comcast is competing with AT&T/Verizon and DirecTV/Dish Network. One article said that in the past few years the phone companies and satellite providers have gained more customers than the cable companies have lost. And of course some people are choosing to “cut the cable” and forgo pay television entirely. But doing that generally requires a fast broadband connection, which is a big part of what Comcast is providing.
In most places in America, your only choices for broadband are the cable company or the phone company, but neither really offers truly fast internet and there are bandwidth caps. Ideally, gigabit Ethernet would be more widely available, from a provider that delivers net neutrality. Because what if Comcast throttles Hulu or Netflix?
Maybe he should dig out his 1.3 meter parabolic antennae.
One suggestion; if the merger is approved, as part of the process, pass a law that requires net neutrality on all cable and telecom providers. (Because whether or not this merger occurs, in most areas of the country, consumers only have a choice between the cable or the phone company for fast internet access.)
Yeah, but they spend most of their time working to prevent another Janet Jackson Superbowl Nipple Tragedy. We still have not fully recovered from the JJSNT, another one would tear this nation apart!
Not really. As a general rule, there aren’t any complaints to investigate, but occasionally the PTC tells all the Jesus freaks to go bitch about a show they didn’t watch.
Lieberman better not take Comcast’s side or the junior Senator from Minnesota will shut him down like last time.
[QUOTE=Sen. Franken]
You’re time is up. Sit the fuck down, bitch.
[/QUOTE]
Why can’t it be like what its like in the UK, where they only have the one cable operator instead of a confusing choice of operators? :smack:
Yet something else America fails at and the UK knows how to do properly! :smack:
I admit that i’m not an expert on UK cable policies, but a quick internet search suggests that your claim regarding a single operator is untrue.
And if you’d bother reading the fucking thread, you would understand that, despite the fact that there are a number of cable providers in the United States, a chief concern is that individual customers, in most cases, do not actually have any choice at all about who their cable provider will be.
Most markets, and especially most large markets, have been divided up among the cable providers so that each provider holds an effective monopoly in many large urban areas. I would, in fact, be quite happy if i had a “confusing choice of operators,” because then there might be some performance and price competition.
Comcast already owns several of the providers, lol
Other nations have fiber optics for $50/month because they have competition and regulation. In the US in the cities that have it you can get it for $70/month (TN and Google fiber). I pay about $70/month for 25Mbps comcast internet. I could get fiber optics for that price in many other places.
What bothers me is how comcast said the fact that there is no competition between time warner and comcast is why this is not a monopoly. No shit, that is because the companies agreed not to compete. How is any of this legal? Businesses agree not to compete, then say ‘we don’t compete, so there is no risk of a monopoly if one buys the other’.
In some parts of the UK you can get 1Gbps fibre connection for the equivalent of less than $50 a month! 
Hah! Comcast’s UI is horrendous. Here’s just a few that I can think of right now:[ul]
[li]If you watch something On Demand, you can only rewind or fast forward at the slowest speed vs. 4x with normal recordings. And even with that it’s much slower to respond than normal TV, so you never get to the spot you want.[/li][li]If you forget you’re watching something On Demand and click the “go back 30 seconds” button, well sucks for you, because in On Demand mode this button makes it go back five minutes - and now your only option is slow fast forward (see above).[/li][li]If you are bulk watching lots of episodes of a show On Demand, and you finish one episode, you are returned to the main screen. So you must navigate all the way back to where you were. HD / TV Shows / By Title / T-V / scroll down…select show…scroll down through every season and every episode until you get to the next one.[/li][li]Sometimes for no reason it will not let you rewind normal TV - you get the [symbol]Æ[/symbol] icon. Sorry![/li][li]There is only one Live buffer - you can’t switch between two shows and go backwards - only the channel you’re on. Archaic.[/li][li]When you’re recording something and watching something else, an alert pops up covering half the screen that says “Your recording is finished.” Yeah, thanks for that important message.[/li][li]Inexplicably the default position on the giant alert screen at the end of a recording is “Delete recording” and not “Don’t delete recording” - this is problematic if, to take a random example, you just finished Downton Abbey and clicked off the annoying screen before realizing you deleted it before your wife has seen it and is now probably going to kill you in your sleep.[/li][li]The delay in simply paging up / down through the Guide is dreadful.[/li][li]If you are searching a few hours or days ahead and looking for something to record, then Get Info and that show and see that’s not the one you want and click Back, you are back to the Present, and must start all over again.[/li][li]If anything runs over…well you better have thought of that ahead of time. Good: It suggest you record with extra time if you’ve selected to record a sporting event. Bad: it does not do this with anything else, like, to take a random example, the Oscars, which then when you’re watching later cuts off one minute before your wife gets to see who won Best Picture and is now probably going to kill you in your sleep.[/li][/ul]