Greetings all, long time lurker, first time poster, love your show.
Having just moved into a new house, we needed to get new internet service. I was disgusted at how much cable modem service was. I had cable service before but the price has gone up AND there is a penatly for not being a cable TV customer. I had satellite installed instead of cable TV simply because I am fed up with the poor customer satisfaction of the cable company and my only weapon is my money, so I choose not do business with them. That being said, DSL is just too slow for me and I prefer cable speeds.
I paid my way through college as a waiter/bartender and my day to day existence depended on my customer satisfaction skills. I am appalled at the current state of customer satisfaction skills across the board, all industries, but for some reason the cable company has come to typify this trend for me and I feel obligated to rant. I know I have not made any significant, specific claims against them, I just don’t like them. So this leads me to a couple of questions
Are there multiple cable providers in other areas? I live in a large metropolitan area but there is 1 and only 1 option.
What is the overhead in providing cable TV service? Hasn’t the “cable” been in place for something like 30 years now? The smell-o-vision promised to me in the 50’s has not arrived yet and I am not seeing a lot of super high tech innovation that justifys current price levels, so why are they charging so much more than satellite providers?
Welcome aboard!
It a lot of cities, there’s just one cable company. Since they have a monopoly, they can (and do) charge whatever the market will bear.
I pay $42.95/month for my cable modem. I also have the very lowest level of cable tv service (channels 2-14) and that’s another $8±. If I did not have the tv service, the modem would be $57.95 per month. So I have to pay $8 to save $15.
Only one provider here and our rates keep creeping up. If they go up again, we’ll probably cancel. Paying $60 a month for Basic Digital with couple movie channels (Encore movie channels! Not even the good ones!) is just not worth it. The only reason we keep the movie channels is we wind up watching 2-3 movies a month and otherwise, we’d have gone to Blockbuster, so it saves us some cash there.
When you were a waiter and bartender, there was more than one other restaurant and bar in town. And your customers had the luxury of choosing to eat and drink their own food and drink at home, instead of depending on you to hustle the goodies around.
You’ve already said it. You don’t like cable TV, and you don’t like DSL. That leaves you with some rather limited choices. I guarantee you that if there were as many as three cable providers in your area, you’d see some damn SERVICE!
There may not be many advantages to living in Tacoma (at least, according to Seattlites) but we do have one: municipal cable. This originated about ten years ago—does anyone remember “energy deregulation?”—when the decision was made to allow for real-time monitoring of electric usage. How this was supposed to make things more efficient is still hazy to me, but the result is that every residence in the city has a fiber-optic drop available.
So, in addition to Comcast (which was begotten by AT&T, which was begotten by TCI), we have cable television run by a subsidiary of Tacoma Public Utilities* and our choice of three cable ISPs. I pay 26.95/mo for service rated 1024/128 (which at last check was actually 1351/190). Similar service from Comcast would be, IIRC, approximately twice as expensive.
Okay, so I’m bragging. But as I said, opportunities to look north and go “neener neener neener” are far and few between.
*There was more than a little howling from the free-market purists about gummint competing with private industry. What they ignore (or forget) is that the city tried to franchise out the cable TV operation, but couldn’t find anyone willing to take on the 900-pound gorilla. They had better luck with cable internet, and last time I looked were still trying to find someone to handle phone service.
Does anyone else have cable only zones in their city? When we bought our new house about 3 years ago, I could only rarely get online with dial up service(something to do with living at the end of the ancient copper phone lines in town) I checked out cable and DSL. Cable was $45 a month but the cable company didn’t supply modems, you had to buy your own. Modems cost about $200 at the time. So I checked out DSL. It cost $30 a month. However, they inform me that that can’t run a line to my house because my city govt. has zoned parts of the city for cable only. In other words, if I wanted to be on line I had to pay the cable rate. I was not pleased.
What chaps me is that paying 60 bucks a month doesn’t mean I’m going to get a decent product. The cable we have is always freezing frames and dropping audio. It sucks when I’m trying to watch a cooking show and I miss a crucial five seconds of the instruction. Plus the channels seem to lost signal entirely for several minutes with more and more frequency. Just now I missed the final three minutes of the show I was watching because “this channel will be available shortly.” Fuckers.
The cable company here has had a lock on local cable operations since the late 1970’s, when cable was just a glimmer in its daddies’ eyes. They tell you what to pay, and you pay it – it’s simple. I pay forty a month for internet and eleven and change for the cheapest TV service. I could do without the TV, since I seldom watch it, but I’m hooked on the high-speed net now. What really burns my crust is when I have to talk to them about something – you can’t get them on the phone unless you’re willing to listen to bad music interspersed with the recorded ads for cable services and assurances that “your call is important to us” for fifteen to twenty minutes, at a minimum. You try to reach them online and find yourself dealing with a poorly-designed, slow-loading website with vague links that send you in circles. It’s what Master Wang-Ka said: if there were other choices, there would be some service.
Nope. If I lived five blocks further out from the center of the city, I can get DSL. If I lived 15 blocks closer to the center of the city I could get DSL. When my neighborhood was developed, the phone company did not yet have the ability to run underground phone lines. In exchange for laying the phone lines along with their cable lines, the cable company has exclusive rights in these neighborhoods until 2005.
I really get tired of correcting this misperception. The reason you have only one cable company in your area is because your city administrators have granted a franchise to operate in your area to only one cable company. Cable operators can, and do, overbuild each other. They just have to have the permission to do so from the local government body.
Quit griping about the cable “monopoly” and take it up with your city council. They’re the guys at fault.
To be perfectly honest, I can’t really complain about our cable company. The basic package costs us about $30/month, and we get about 40 channels, including the usual mix (TBS, TNT, CNN, USA, TLC, etc.), a decent selection of the specialty channels (AMC, History, Discovery, Food, TechTV, etc), three sports channels (ESPN 1&2, NESN), and a bunch we never watch (QVC, MTV, Comedy Central, Lifetime).
Once in a while the cable goes out, but for the most part, we are pretty happy with it.
Another company tried to come into town more than a decade ago. At first, they couldn’t even get the local government to listen to them. When they finally did, every form or procedure they followed just happened to have something wrong with it and the cable comapny had to start over again. After much hoop jumping, the cable company finally got the okay, then the parent company got caught up in some sort of banking fraud scandal involving a Saudi Arabian (IIRC) bank.
That was the last company to try.
As is typical in the South, the local legislature is run by a “good ol’ boy” network. They’re more concerned with themselves and their own business interests to worry about what the people want.
Exactly. The south is little different than the north in that respect, Trumpy. But again, your local government is at least partly culpable. Your cable company is taking advantage of an environment fostered by your local government.
slight hijack…
apparently smell-o-internet is almost here – it’s not smell-o-vision, but…
**YOU’VE GOT SMELLS **
*Device lets computer users send odours over Internet *
Kevin Restivo, Financial Post, 02/28/04
Computer users with sensitive snouts may soon have to plug their noses if a small Georgia company is successful with its new Scent Dome attachment.
The Scent Dome, produced by Trisenx Holding Inc., is about the size of a teapot and is designed to release up to 60 scents from one or more of 20 liquid-filled colour capsules. A wave of electronic signals are sent to the device, which releases one or more smells including coffee or perfume.
Trisenx says the Smell Dome, which connects to a personal computer much like a printer, will cost US$369 and should be available next month through some U.S. retailers and over the Internet.
sorry for posting nearly a third of the article – I have it posted on my own message board but the article is no longer stored at the National Post online.
Here is an update. My wife just called me to tell me that the installer has left. He walks in the day, surveys the area, and then says “Oh, you have satellite” with an attitude. Then he observes our rather large corner unit desk with tower residing below, and demands “is that where you want it installed?” No, you f-in mouth breather, could you please run 200 feet of coaxial to my toaster. He proceeds to trash our patio, moving all the furniture out into the yard as he runs cable along the house. My wifes asks him to put it back and he says “no, you are supposed to have all that stuff cleared.” Her response seems reasonable, “How am I supposed to know in advance what and where you are going to need things moved.” He begrudgingly does it but with much attitude. He then drills into our house leaving drywall and wood debris all over the place. She asked him to clean it up and he flat out says “NO, that is not my job.” She says you don’t have a small vacuum cleaner? No. Thats not my job. So you come into peoples home, knowing in advance that you will create a mess, but you cannot invest a small amount of time and personal effort to clean up after your self.
My wife just called saying that she had just got off the phone with customer sat. and the guys response was “so what is the big deal, can’t you just vacuum it up?”