Time Warner, Comcast in Deal to Buy Adelphia

BlakeCaldwell writes "CNet reports that Time Warner and cable TV operator Comcast are set to pay $18 billion for bankrupt cable operator Adelphia Communications. The tentative deal, in cash and stock warrants, appears to beat off a potential rival bid by cable firm Cablevision Systems, which a separate source has said was preparing a $16.5 billion cash bid for Adelphia."

Comments

Adelphia

[Fade_to_Blah]

We have Adelphia here in Mass and I must say it has been pretty much rock solid since they announced their bankrupt. In fact, things actually improved after that. The cable internet has been nothing but great and the TV has been fine (though I am not too picky about TV as I dont watch it too often).

I have to say that Im not looking forward to this buyout....

Good Riddance Adelphia!

[bardothodal]

They are horrible where I live. Oversold broadband to the point where I actually uncapped my modem. The upload changed to whatever I wanted but the download speed never changed! 100 ms ping to the first second hop. Run ethereal and watch the garbage packets fly about! 5%-12% packetloss for over a year. They actually made Verizon look good. The cable tv is just crap too. the lower channels have so much attentuation the are in the constant state of static. My sisters digital cable goes out constantly. They told me at the local office the wait for HDTV programming was 3 years away! I have to d/l programming from Usenet to get an HDTV quality tv show that I can already watch in substandard definition . So sad. They suck. But don't take my world for it , go browse DSL Reports for 6 years of horror stories.

Re:How do you go bankrupt

[Anonymous Coward]

Do a Google search for the "Riggas Family" and you'll see exactly how. Of course, they are in prison now.

Outage galore, bad customer service, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

When it was ATT/TCI, I saw an outage maybe once a year. Now, It happens monthly (sometimes worse). These outages can last for anywhere from 10 minutes (these are fine), to several days. If you consider a crippled system as being out, then I have seen it last 5 days.

Their customer service sux. Rude. They do not know anything beyond their scripts ("Sir, you have to get your network neighbhorhood to work before we can help you"; Mam, As I said, I am running Linux. May I please talk to Tier 3). With that said, I will say that I have come across 2 people in their centers (out of some 20+) that had a clue, but they were probably old TCI people.

The Tv has outages as well, but we will not discuss that area.

You will learn to miss the adelphia that you have now.

Re:Outage galore, bad customer service, etc.

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"Now, It happens monthly (sometimes worse)."

That may be the case, but you are hardly a representative sample. Here in my town, I personally know at least 20 people who have Comcast HSI, and the only outage *any* of us have had since the transition from @home was the DNS quasi-outage a few days ago.

"As I said, I am running Linux. May I please talk to Tier 3"

You don't get it, do you?

According to a friend who works at the call center of a local ISP (FRII), there are three types of callers:

A: Pepole who don't know what they are doing - and are aware of this.

B: People who know what they are doing.

C: People who don't know what they are doing - but think they do.

Type-A people are easy to deal with. The script catches the most common problems. Rebooting the system, rebooting the modem, checking the link lights - simple stuff that can catch bad cables, OS SNAFUs, bad DHCP leases, and stuff like that.

Type-B people (like you) are harder to deal with. They have probably already done everything that the script checks for. It would be best to elevate you directly to Tier 2 or Tier 3, but it can't be done because of type-C people.

Type-C people are the reason you can't be elevated immediately. To the Tier 1 CSRs (who don't have a lot of experience), they sound just like Type-B people. Type-C people probably haven't done simple stuff like renewing their DHCP lease, pinging their gateway, or resetting their modem. Yet, they are sure of their knowledge and of the fact that the problem is with the ISP.

If you elevate Type-C people, bad things happen. You waste the time of the Tier-3 people, and often issues are missed (the Tier-3 people assume that basic troubleshooting has been done already).

Here's how to deal with CSRs:

- Ensure that the problem isn't on your end. Reboot your modem, get a new DHCP lease, ping the gateway. Do the basic stuff. Don't waste their time.
- Play dumb. You don't have a network, you aren't running Linux, and you don't know crap about networking.
- Let them run you through the script. If they ask you to reboot your system, wait 30 seconds and tell them that you did. Fake it.
- Be polite.

After about 3-minutes, you'll finish the script, and with the problem unsolved, you'll be transferred to Tier 2.

Once you reach a Tier 2 CSR, you can explain the problem. "I can't ping the DNS server", "The modem can't acquire a downstream signal", "I can't get DHCP".

Some ISPs are better. Speakeasy, for example, has knowledgable people. Remember, though, that ISPs like Speakeasy generally have a more knowledgable customer base.

It doesn't make sense to hire experts when most problems can be solved by a script.

"The Tv has outages as well, but we will not discuss that area."

Generally, if your TV is out, your internet will be out. If that's the case, you need to have a tech come out and inspect the wiring / box. It's not normal for cable service to go out - back when we had TCI, we had periodic outages. Eventually, it was traced back to a faulty distribution amplifier.

I don't hate Comcast. They provide a decent service at a decent price. Here, we have Qwest providing competition through DSL, which keeps Comcast sharp.

In my experience, Comcast HSI has good latency, good reliability, and decent oversubscrption ratios. It sure beats Qwest DSL.

As an Adelphia Employee

[d3ac0n]

All I know is that I'm not too excited about this. I work in upper level tech support for the High speed internet division here in Buffalo NY. Let me tell you, this last year since the bankruptcy was announced haven't been pretty. With all the uncertainty surrounding the bankruptcy we have been hemorraging people like crazy. Most of our best talent has bailed for other companies and/or other states. It's only within the last 3 months that things have really begun to improve as many long needed network upgrades have taken place, and we FINALLY got some more people here at level 2 support to help with the call load.

If this deal is indeed final (no offical word from the courts yet), I suspect that the talent bleed will begin anew since we will probably only have about 6 more months of employment at that point. The worst part about it is that the economy is so poor in the Buffalo area (despite having more IT infrastructure in place than many IT 'capitols' like Austin Texas) That for many of us, getting work in IT will be next to impossible locally. This means that we will have to try and sell our houses in a sinking housing market and make a jump to another area of the country. Alternately, we could make a bid for Self-Employment in one of the most business unfriendly states in the union, or up and quit the IT field altogether and start a new carreer in a new field. Frankly, I'm not excited about any of those prospects. Working for myself is by far the most enticing, but trying to create a sucessful small business in this state is alot like trying to "chop down the greatest tree in the forest with a herring." In other words, darn near impossible. At any rate, it's gonna be ugly. Darn ugly. I suspect that I will probably ride it out to the end, as we will probably be receiving good severance packages. But I would imagine that many others will be leaving as soon as they are able to get other work. Wish us all luck. we're gonna need it.

BTW, I will probably be commenting more about this in my blog http://www.wearyman.blogspot.com/ feel free to stop by. Just don't expect any real insider info. I won't be putting my severance package at risk just for a blog post!

Re:How do you go bankrupt

[bigberk]

How do you go bankrupt when you are valued at 16-18 billion

Good question! Now I don't claim to be a business expert, but I do spend considerable time researching public companies as a hobby (why? lucrative). There are some measures thrown around for value of a company. Market or share capital is the amount of money the company has raised through sales of its shares on the stock market. Hence, large cap, small cap. The second measure is assets on balance sheet, which lets you say, omfg, citigroup has $1.5 trillion in assets!

Now what you never hear about from the media are other key ingredients, cash and debt. You don't hear them because they generally are not impressive and conducive to investing. Generally, you go bankrupt when you have too little cash and too much debt. It might have surprised some to hear that General Motors is at risk of bankruptcy. How can such a "huge" company have that problem? Well they had incredibly large debt, and overvalued assets. In comparison, many financial companies these days, while they have HUGE market capital and assets, also have tremendous debt, very little cash... and (icing on the cake) assets that are artifically too high and liabilities that are hidden off the balance sheet.