Yes, if you go to AT&T’s page for Gigapower the three things they highlight are: 1) Download 25 songs in one second; 2) Download an HD TV show in three seconds; 3) Download an HD movie in 36 seconds. Sounds great, but I don’t really do any of those things.
100Mbps up/down for $40/mo is just awful. Awful, I tell ya.
I feel so jealous of areas in which the FCC has ruled that nobody but our glorious Comcast/TW/whatever overlords can provide Internet service. The truly have our best interests at heart.
This is one of my least favorite Dems, but no one deserves this.
Right now I have the local Telco as my only hope to save me from Charter. Or Earthlink which is just rebranded cheaper service.
I switched to Earthlink several years ago because UVerse is terrible by comparison to TWC/Charter, and haven’t been disappointed at all. TWC’s service has been generally great here, and being able to get it cheaper through Earthlink was great. I even managed to get them to extend the promotional rate several times. We did get switched to Maxx last year, and there were some headaches with bandwidth dropping during the evenings leading up to the Maxx upgrades, but I haven’t had a problem with Earthlink. There is some bouncing around of calls every now when dealing with tech support because I think Earthlink has it’s own first tier, but I don’t need to call them that often.
Having once upon a time worked in customer service, I also feel for the rep. It can be an awful, constricting, soul crushing experience.
The problem is that these companies own the cable infrastructure and they currently do not have to lease those lines to competitors. Competition is supposed to come into play from the the phone line companies like AT&T and Verizon and from satellite TV.
The municipalities do not want multiple lines of cable being laid so there is no way for Charter to compete with Comcast or Cox, etc. If Cox and Charter and Comcast and Mediacom were all competing in the same area and each had to have their own cable infrastructure, it would be a mess.
The way Retention works with these companies is the reps are rated on how many accounts they can save and on how little they give away to save the account. Really, I get the frustration on the part of the consumer, but the rep isn’t doing his job if he doesn’t attempt to keep the customer from cancelling the service. It just needs to be attempted in a nice way. Don’t make the customer say no a dozen times, but do go over the benefits of the service and make sure the customer is aware of what she is giving up. Some reps really dig in and are too tenacious.
Probably because their jobs often require them to do so.
Or to break up the monopolies. The real problem with the typical libertarian “small government = free market” idea is that absence of government leads to bullies controlling the market, not free competition. If you were able to break the monopoly power of cable (either by nationalizing the physical cables and allowing all companies to use them, or by inventing an internet delivery technology better than fiber optic cable that doesn’t require massive fixed costs to reach people), then net neutrality would represent a drag on the ability of cable companies to optimize their product.
To be fair to Charter, they have been pretty great as far as a Cable company can be. No word of putting on bandwidth caps, service has been fairly speedy. Not many outages that have lasted too long. My speeds now are as advertised, and they stopped charging for modem rentals (which sucks as I have my own modem). (They try to upsell you on a wireless modem, which has a charge)
Having done telesales work in my youth for all of the cable companies. Comcast was the most fucked up. Charter and TWC seemed to have their shit together a lot more.
I have Charter. They’ve renamed their 160 dollar month package a half-dozen times now. No longer allow customer purchased modems. Provided a cheap internet only TV package to only some of their customers. They purchased several competitors around here and then declared bankruptcy, and my favorite… they under cut a city run broadband service here and as soon as they put them out of business, raised our rates by 75%.
Charter is a terrible company, and they get my business because there are no other cable companies for me to choose from here.
I have my own modem, and I have Charter. It was a bit confusing setting up, as Charter now bakes the modem service charge into the price of the service, so it costs the same whether you use their modem or your own. I was able to set up my own modem over the phone quite easily.
The thing is, with cable companies, is that they are often franchises, so one territory might be terrible, and another might be excellent (depending on prices/competition)
I don’t want to say that they are amazing, but they are the least terrible option I have seen. All cable companies are … difficult. And the monopolies they have are borderline illegal, but it is all we have really. I would much rather have charter/TWC than comcast.
They flat out told me when I purchased this house they do not allow customer purchased modems. If you go to the website you see the same information. I purchased my modems originally for a reason, and it was only partially about price; the other part about quality. The little crappy blue boxes they handed out before were terrible compared to the Motorola cable modems.
As for the company, no, their quality might vary from territory to territory but a company that buys up the competition, drives out the municipal offerings and then just bankrupts itself to do it again is corrupt. The US has the sad state of broadband it does because people keep excusing this sorry state of affairs and don’t call their local reps instead…
To be fair, their local reps are usually the first ones bought out by said cable companies. Local politics, in my experience, is far more corrupt than national. There is basically no oversight and little to no recourse if those in power decide to screw everyone over for the benefit of themselves and their friends.
Sure you can vote them out… maybe. But at the local levels damage is a lot harder to repair. If you blow the entire budget giving your buddy a sweet contract on something no one wants, well… that money isn’t coming back, you aren’t the Feds you can’t just deficit spend for a few years.
<Slightly bitter because my little town is corrupt as shit. One guy tried to make a difference and lost to smear tactics, back alley deals and voter apathy. But at least we’re wasting millions of dollars on something no one seems to want (in a town with less than 8k people).
There was nothing wrong with the broadband in the city I used to live in except it was not available outside the city limits. The cable company claimed they weren’t trying to push them out, but as soon the city reduced services, Charter raised it’s rates by 75%. I want you to pick a few of your bills that you pay each month and raise them 75%, and see how you feel about it. After you realize that’s a huge increase, ask yourself whether you think it’s right of a utility company with a near monopoly status to force all it’s competitors or buy them out and then declare bankruptcy in a few years after taking on too much debt. Int he end, the cable company is still standing because we don’t allow them to fail like that… but all the smaller companies they took out isn’t.
how exactly is that not corrupt? In the end, Charter got what it wanted, a real monopoly even if it went through bankruptcy to do it.
STAND DOWN CITIZEN
THIS IS ALL FOR YOUR OWN GOOD
I figured it was time to start using a thread dedicated to Net Neutrality again, now that the US is about to kill off our version of it.
Presumably what we’ll end up with is something along the lines of “let the industry regulate itself”, at which point this little history lesson becomes interesting:
It really is disappointing.
Broadband in the USA was finally, finally starting to get better after being stagnant and anti consumer for so long. Monopolies turned in to duopolies (still bad) and ISPs started to get their act together.
I fully expect data caps to get more common and smaller and “free data apps” to become more common now that the writing is on the wall. The USA will not only not increase its position in having quality internet (which was already quite low), but it will get worse relative to other countries.
About the only innovation assholes like comcast come up with is a way to secretly use your internet to sell wireless access to people near you.
Truly the best government that money can buy.
And sell your information to companies and organizations.
They’ll also likely come up with new ways to charge you more for what you already have via internet “fast lanes” and the like.
The 2020 election is going to be super-important. Anything Trump does, it’s going to take 2 years minimum due to lawsuits and things of that nature- in 2021 with a Dem president and Congress you can legisilate this away. (and they won’t do anything before 2020 because they won’t want to make it a campaign issue)
Hopefully this can be defeated otherwise, but I’m super-doubtful. Ajit Pai won’t listen to the people the way Wheeler did (he was anti net-neutrality originally, he got his mind changed)