Competition is Good

We’re not the only ones in the blogosphere who think having a choice for cable is a good thing. Popular blog RedState has a pretty good run down of how a competitor comes into a market and speeds go up, choices are added and, best of all, prices go down or remain flat with new services added. Broadbandblog thinks the same way – make the big companies compete and let the consumer choose.

Comments

[Marc]

Perhaps they would hold water if they were not perpetuating myths. They espouse identical positions that this web site has - which have been debunked time and again. Of course they also fail to mention where speeds have increased with no price changes elsewhere. Or how the phone companies have failed to respond to competition by failing to lower the price of their phone service in any market.

[Joyce Smith]

On December 1, 2005, I discovered that overnight about 20 of the film channels in the movie “packages” I had been paying Comcast for for about four years had disappeared from my screen. I called Comcast and was told that these channels had been “freebies” and would no longer be appearing on my screen, nor would there be a concomitant reduction in my quite considerable digital cable bill.

I checked with friends in my town who also have digital cable with movie packages; they had experienced no reduction in channels. I asked whether they had been using the “On Demand” service for movies that Comcast has been pushing at $3.95 per film; they said they had used it quite a bit. My husband and I had never used it. We can only conclude that we were singled out for the channel reduction to force us to use the even more expensive On Demand service.

Over this past weekend, several more channels seem to have been rescinded in addition to 3 or 4 about 2 months ago.

I feel Comcast should be investigated for singling out people simply because they refuse to use an optional extra service at an additional cost.