Held hostage by cable
May 5, 2008 | Filed under Misc., Rants
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.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:01 am
TWC gave us the worst customer service ever… and when Verizon knocked on our doors, we hastily pulled the gentleman in and signed whatever he put in front of us.
Although the service is so much better [and very helpful on the phone]… the wifi signal is crap. I need to get an Airport Extreme to boost the signal.
June 18th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
[...] mentioned before the issues I was having with my cable internet service. Well, now that I’m no longer an [...]