Category Archives: Jeers

A new survey of customer satisfaction by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index shows that while satellite providers top the list for TV service, the industry as a whole stinks. Cable and satellite providers scored the lowest amongst all industries covered by the ACSI including incumbent phone companies. (There isn't much love there either; landline phone companies have been sliding in customer satisfaction substantially since the 1996 Telecommunications Act.) Echostar, DirecTV, Time Warner, Comcast and Charter all showed substantial drops amongst their customers. It probably has something to do with steadily increasing rates, a lack of a la carte channel pricing, poor customer service and, at least in the case of Comcast, capricious enforcement of the terms of service.

As further evidence of the cableco's disconnect from Joe User, Comcast is talking about letting you watch a movie in your home the same day it opens in the theatres for $30-50 per screening. While it might be nice to beat the lines and put that fancy surround sound and digital projector to good use, that sounds like a whole lot of crazy to me. What can you expect from a company that charges $3.99 for a pay-per-view movie that's years old?

(See full articles here and here. Check out the ACSI scores here.)

Prepare to have less choice for local phone service. Thanks to FCC rules, incumbent carrier are not required to share their new fiber networks with competitors the same way they shared their copper networks. Considering that upgrading to Verizon's FIOS is a one-way street (no going back to copper for you!), competing phone companies are rightly worried that they could be entirely pushed out of the market. More than ever, municipal networks like UTOPIA make more sense for bringing true competition into the market by remaining vendor-neutral.

(See full article here.)

In two related news stories, cable companies are clamping down further on network control by skirting around the requirements to support CableCARD and force DVR owners to watch ads. In testimony before congress, TiVo has alleged that cable companies are starting to use protocols and signaling that's incompatible with the uni-directional CableCARD standard. CableCARDs are designed to allow you to plug a digital cable signal directly into the device of your choice without a special box from the cable company, just like the old analog cable used to do. Bypassing support for "bring your own device" standards ensures that the cable company can keep you renting their equipment indefinitely, imposing significant trouble with using third-party devices such as DVRs and TV tuner cards for PCs.

Related to this is Cox Communication's recent announcement that they would no longer let customers renting their DVR to skip commercials for some content from ABC and ESPN, both Disney companies. I guess they missed the part where most people buy a DVR just for that purpose, eh? They probably also forgot to read the numerous reports that fast-forwarded ads are recognized just as much as ads played at normal speed. Boo on them for trying to force more ads down our throats.

Once networks like UTOPIA start breaking up the monopolies, maybe these companies will start to comply with interoperability requirements. 

(See full articles here, here and here.) 

Comcast recently posted an 80% increase in quarterly revenue on strong growth of triple-play services and reduced customer churn. This might also have something to do with jacking up my basic digital TV service by about $6 a month. The article also makes no mention of the bad PR they've gotten from cutting off Internet users who "use too much bandwidth" without telling them how much is "too much" or how much they've been using. Rumor has it that if you call in and threaten to cancel or downgrade services, they'll actually give you a big discount, sometimes as much as 25%. Still, I'd be much happier lowering my rates by switching to UTOPIA and saving about $30 a month.

(See full article here. Hat tip to The Consumerist for information on making Comcast give you a discount. More on Comcast shutting off high-bandwidth users found here.)

According to a survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the US has a laggard rate of broadband adoption, we pay too much for it, and we're giving up a ton of economic benefits by not having it. From a high of #4 in 2001, we've dropped to #15 out of 30 industrialized nations and pay over 10 times as much per megabit as other countries in the survey. The need for next-generation broadband is now, and I doubt we can depend on the incumbents to give it to us.

(See full study here.)