My cable internet service went out for about half of last week, which served to remind me how important Internet access really is, and how little choice I have in my area. In the last eight years, I’ve had uninterrupted cable internet service, but thanks to mergers and market trade-offs, I’ve changed cable companies four times. The last time, it was when Comcast and Time Warner Cable divvied up a competitor and decided to trade customers in certain markets, just like that. I can’t imagine any other industry where this is possible, can you? It’d be like you had a flight booked on American Airlines, only to be told before your plane left that you’d actually be flying on Continental, and you didn’t really have a choice about it.

The problem turned out to be a loose connection, most likely caused by a TWC installer when a neighbor of mine moved out. I hate dealing with cable installers, I’ve had plenty of bad experience, and I always loathe to call tech support for any reason. At first, the customer service rep thought it was a bad cable modem – although why a perfectly functioning modem would just suddenly die ever made any sense, I don’t know – so I went to a service center to swap modems. It of course, didn’t work, so I had to schedule a technician visit. The technician was an hour late, even though the problem took about five minutes to fix, and I could have fixed it myself if the cable junction in my apartment complex wasn’t such a mess.

This situation only served to remind me how little choice I have when it comes to broadband and pay TV service. Even though two-thirds of my city is covered in Verizon’s FiOS, the fiber-optic Holy Grail of broadband service, I live on the side of town with AT&T lines, so that’s just not a possibility. AT&T’s competing service, U-Verse, is an IPTV based solution. While the internet service offered by U-Verse has been noted as top-notch, the TV service just isn’t up to snuff, and has several fatal flaws that make it inferior to cable. Although it’s a moot point, since AT&T hasn’t rolled out U-Verse in my area yet, either. For internet service, I could go with DSL, but that means signing up for a service agreement (euphemism for “contract”) and a useless landline. And after bundling discounts with TV service, I’d end up paying much more for slower service with DSL over cable.

Without a phone company option, that leaves me with two choices for pay TV: cable or satellite. Except, as I said earlier, I live in an apartment, and I don’t have a south-facing balcony. The apartments won’t let even a professional installer set up a dish on the roof, and there’s no law preventing them from having that restriction. So, in a highly de-regulated market that’s supposed to breed competition and customer choice, I essentially have none. Something seems terribly wrong with this situation.

How about you guys? Do you have a similar situation? Feel free to sound off in the comments below.