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AOL/TW Plans for $230 Monthly Cable Bill
Jonathan Campbell writes: "According to the article, subscribers will get over the sticker shock preferring convenience over price." Yay, it'll be so convenient having one company control my television, internet access and phone service. I can hardly wait.
$230-$80(Cable Basic&2 premium)-$50(DSL)-$30(local phone)=$70
What additional services will they provide for $70?
A pay-per-view p0rn0 and a hooker?
AOL is smoking crack. Provide reliable desirable services first, then decide what you are able to charge for each one.
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Isn't that the same bet that fired off the dot com craze?
And we all know how well that worked out.
they have to provide a midget to change the channels for me, and serve me food.
I look, for instance, at the menu of services we consume here:
Cable Internet (AT&T) - $50
Local telephone (with all the services but voicemail - Verizon) - $60
Long distance (AT&T) - $50
Cable television (AT&T - local channels only) $14)
Alarm monitoring (ADT) $26
That's $200/month worth of services that are coming in on two wires to my house. And we don't get any of the more advanced cable services - just analog antenna service. If I want analog basic cable, it's another $20. If I want premium channels, the total bill hits that $230 mark and only goes up from there.
What I don't really do at this point, though, is take advantage of any service bundling yet - though AT&T has been pushing real hard in this area to get local and long distance bundled with my cable line. I haven't bitten yet but if I do it'll save me about $15/month. It's just not worth the trouble yet. So I use two wires instead of one.
I have no issue with the total price, so long as they save me money over the cost of buying all the services I need separately from separate vendors. I'll stick to multiple bills if there's no price reason to switch.
I guess the real interesting thing is how much communications takes out of the monthly budget. I look at that $200 figure I cited above, and that doesn't include our cell phone ($35), OmniSky ($29, but it's getting dumped this spring), and my Blackberry ($40, paid by my work). All together, that's a lot of money for communications service of one sort or another. And remember, my cable TV bill is tiny. A lot of people pay for premium services - equivalent to adding my OmniSky to the cable bill.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that the average household communications total bill comes close to that $200 mark already. If AOL starts offering things like security monitoring over their wire as well, the $230 is probably a reasonable goal.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Basic Cable: $60
3 Premium Channels: $25
DSL Connection: $45
Basic Phone Services: $30
Some hellspawned idea about "convenience over price": $70
A monopoly and the knowledge you can get away with the latter: Priceless
There are some things money can't buy. For others, there's AOL
At one end of the curve you have people who have made enough money to afford this service, but they have become lazy enough to pay the extra $70/month for the "convenience."
At the other end of the curve are the people who can't afford the service but are stupid enough to believe it's of value, so they subscribe anyway.
The distribution of people on this curve is great enough that the service sells and becomes a model for other other companies to copy.
So you get all your information from the same AOL/TW source, delivered by the same company... can you say "Vertical Integration" children? I knew you could...
The problem with this isn't just that the company can charge whatever it wants...the problem is that it can report what it wants to report and ignore what it wants to ignore. IOW, don't be surprised if the news coming out of the member companies -- CNN for instance -- starts to become blatantly biased.
Incidentally, when the hell is the FTC going to wake up and start giving a damn about anti-trust and consumer protection once again? First, you have AOLTW. Next, you have oil companies merging left and right to eventually form the next Standard Oil. (Were the companies that are merging -- Phillips/Conoco and Texaco/Chevron -- formed as a result of the Standard Oil breakup? If so, then there is NO WAY they should be allowed to merge. That would be just like allowing the broken-up pieces of Microsoft to merge back together should that breakup happen, which I unfortunately doubt it will.)
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Not because people will be against having a sinlge company provide all their services (in fact I'm sure many want it), but because the price is outrageous. Let's take pricing on some local (Tucson) services:
Analogue phone line: $16/month
Basic Digital Cable: $45/month
Consumer grade DSL or CM: $50/month
All tolled that gives us about $111 per month, and yes I factored taxes in that. That makes the AOL package over twice as expensive. Now just for the sake of argument, let's assume they give you more than just basic service. In all reality we know that won't happen, but hey, we'll assume they give you something comparable to what I have:
Analogue phone line: $16/month
Extended Digital Cable: $60/month
Professional grade SDSL: $120/month
That's still only $196. To match the AOL price, I'd have to buy 3 premium networks per month (and with digital cable, that gives me about 10 channels per network). Plus, I really doubt they'll offer anything more than basic digital service and just normal CM service, making the first comparison more likely.
Personally, I think the idea of all-in-one providers is a good idea, provided there are several to choose from. However the reason it would be cool is that in theory it should save you money. Companies should be willing to charge you less overall in return for the fact that you buy more services form them. Cox already does this. You get a discount if you get both a cable modem and digital cable. It's been effective too, it encourages digital cable subscribers to get a CM instead of DSL, and encourages people with CMs and cable to upgrade to digital cable.
AOL is full of it if they think people are going to pay that much more for one provider service, espically since for most people it is probably going to be double the cost. If they want people to go for this they are going to need to make ti at the very least comparable and probably cheaper than getting all the services seperatly.
I guess you don't watch TV...
Cable Internet (AT&T) - $50
Local telephone (with all the services but voicemail - Verizon) - $60
Long distance (AT&T) - $50
Cable television (AT&T - local channels only) $14)
Alarm monitoring (ADT) $26
I pay $30 a month for my cable modem.
Local telephone service? I certianly don't pay $60 every month for it. Try $30, if that.
Long distance - are we talking about your calls, or the provider? I don't know of a provider on the planet that charges $50 just for their service - that's because they would be out of business so fast they would never be IN business.
Cable TV... wait... you said local? If You want local channels only (which defeats the primary purpose of cable television), I'd suggest you use an antenna. And that comes down to a cost of $0 per month.
As for the alarm monitoring, I have no idea, so I'l stick with your pricing on that. $26 per month.
If we add all that up, I only come up with a fine little sum of $86. Now, that's more like it. If you actually _NEED_ all that crap on your phone bill (460 way calling, or whatever it is now) then you can't possibly expect that everyone affected by this pricing scheme feels the same way. It's absurd to even assume a faction of that. Regardless, if people don't like the fees, they should learn to live with less - OR, get an organized complaint together and tell this monopolistic corporation to take a look at their business practices. I would NEVER commit to paying $230 per month for all that trash. I don't need half of it, and I sure would not want it from them.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
What, besides lack of marketing killed it? Bundling all that together made customers realize they were paying two hundred bucks for telecommunications! Guess what'll happen when AOL/TW tries the same thing?
If you were to invest $230/month at a 10% annual rate, compounded annually, from the time you were 20 to the time you were 65, you'd have two million dollars in the bank.
So, which would you rather have: AOL's ultimate media package, or multiple millions in the bank when you retired?
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
These discussions about american cable and internet access prices always shock me. In comparison to my country (Canada) the US has a much higher population density. And therefore, for technologies like DSL and cable which require more hardware per distance from the central office, it should be LESS expensive to deploy these in the US in comparison to Canada since on average, the american companies should get more subscribers (and revenue) per amount of hardware:
For example (In Canada, monthly costs:)
Cable TV (deluxe package): CDN$44.34
DSL (worst case): CDN$24.95
Phone Service (Sprint): CDN$19.95
Total: CDN$89.24 or US$55.93 for DSL, long distance and cable TV.
Now to me, US$200+ for all that stuff is a rip-off in the extreme. I honestly don't know how Americans have put up with prices being pumped up this high and not revolting. These prices are certainly more than inflated and you are well justtified in complaining.
Note (1): I pay abour CDN$30/month for internet access, but that's because I don't live in an area with broadband coverage, and my package includes dual-dialup multilink and a shell account.
Note (2): The deluxe packages for Canadian satellite TV are more in the CDN$40/month range.
This must be why I did so poorly in my econ class. I thought that allowing companys to merge and destroy competition lowered prices and improved service to customers. Good thing I got this cushy programmer's job:)
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