Slashdot Mirror
Learning to Love the Cable Guy
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times and C|Net are reporting on new good will gestures from big cable companies. As service monopolies increasingly became the norm, quality of service began to decline across the board. Now, though, with a number of alternatives cropping up, cable companies are beginning to realize the need to ensure customers say with the often imposing service companies." From the article: "[As] service has improved slowly as satellite providers, upstart phone carriers and cell phone companies have provided attractive alternatives. And now that cable and phone companies are starting to sell similar bundles of phone, broadband Internet and television products--known in the industry as a triple play--they risk losing subscribers forever if they do not keep them happy."
Perhaps when the local cable company decides to stop having arbitrary, confusing, and most importantly secretive policies about what I'm allowed to do with their service and what I'm not allowed to do, I'll believe this, but they don't want me on their network since I actually use it.
;)) to account for this. Every 20 minutes it'd take a 10 minute break. Yep, capped again within two days.
Case in point: recently they upgraded my service from 10mbit / 2mbit to 15mbit / 2mbit. To do this, they had an unannounced, planned outage for 6 hours starting at midnight on a Friday night. I called and had to talk to someone before I could even verify that my service was interrupted, the person said that it was their policy to not announce these things since security systems might rely on the cable connection, and they wouldn't want potential thiefs to know when to strike. Oh, and even if they DID announce them, no one would listen (if it was on a web page) and they might not have the $(cable_company)'s email account so they couldn't use that either. Great, so now I can't find another way to protect my home (if my security system uses the cable internet / phone service), way to go guys.
The worse one though: If I use "more than my reasonable amount" of upstream bandwidth, I'll have said bandwidth capped to 20kbyte/s. I've had this happen to me, I called and they said they'd reply to this issue within 24-48 hours. 117 hours later (and three phone calls from me counting the first) they called me back and said that they sell "burst, not stream". They couldn't explain that any better, but said that long connections were against the rules and that games like World of Warcraft (I asked specifically) were ways to get capped. I apparently need to take a break every so often or else I'll have my connection throttled?
A friend has it happen to him, he actually got numbers out of the person. Outgoing connections (wtf?) can't last more than 20 minutes or else risk being capped, so he set his bittorrenting (probably not at all legal either
Screw cable, when they pull crap like this.. Now if only DSL here in America (Fairfield County, Connecticut especially..) didn't suck.
In the case of the shopping channels, most often you're not only not paying for them, the channel creator actually pays the cable company to carry the station. This is why the even the lowest tier offered by the cable company includes all of the shopping channels.
In addition, often times the content providers write into the cable companies contracts bundling requirements. For example, if a given tier includes ESPN, then it must also include ABC Family (not necessarily true for those exact two channels, but the idea is true). So in those cases, your cable company is contractually forbidden from selling you just one of the channels.
This comes up all of the time, and the situation hasn't changed.
Cable companies must carry local stations. If the specific shopping network is over the air, the cable provider(in the US at least) must carry it.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47