Is Comcast Heading the Way of the Dinosaur?

CasualRepartee writes "Comcast has been one of the most successful cable companies in the world; in many parts of the U.S., Comcast sits pretty on huge user bases that don't have many viable high-speed internet alternatives. However, poor customer service, slow speeds and generally poor business practices could make the once-great internet giant another extinct dinosaur, no ice age required. The fact of the matter is this: Comcast is no longer the biggest and the best. Cable is taking a distant back seat to Verizon's FiOS (fiber optic service), which delivers speeds up to 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds. Unlike Comcast, FiOS delivers the full range of bandwidth to each user, whereas Comcast users are forced to share bandwidth with other users on the same coaxial cable, causing speeds to fluctuate dramatically with usage."

Comments

I hate Comcast

[The Breeze]

Dealing with their bureaucracy is a nightmare - especially if you are trying to get a clarification on whether their commercial TOS allows paid WiFI hotspot access. Inconsistent policies, customer service from hell, a pricing structure more suited to the "we're the phone company - we don't care - we don't have to" days...I can only hope that Comcast is indeed due for a long permament swim in a nice tar pit.

Re:I hate Comcast

[$pace6host]

We had Comcast for years, and they took advantage of their monopoly in this area, raised rates to ridiculous levels, offered poor signal quality, and were slow in improving the infrastructure. My favorite Comcastic tactic is charging your existing customers twice what you charge your new customers -- unless the existing customers threaten to leave. Then they can find it in their hearts to offer an existing customer that price, too. Guess most of their customers don't notice there are two prices. We ended up on DSL instead of cable modem because it took them so long to offer broadband in the area. Now, I won't say Verizon is saintly, at all, but the customer service has been at least equivalent, the picture quality is incredible, we have tons more channels, and we're paying about the same as we used to pay before (for DSL from Vz + analog cable from Comcast). Comcast needs to wake up and smell the competition. We need them to stay around to serve the same purpose to Verizon when Verizon turns around and screws us in a few years. Oh, don't worry, they will. Let's hope the Comcastasaurus can adapt.

Talk about choosing between two evils.

[COMICAGOGO]

I have at various times been both a Verizon and a Comcast customer. I must say that having to choose between the two for fast internet service is like being give the choice of having you right arm and leg cut off or your left arm and leg (not talking price per say.) You are pretty screwed no matter what you pick.

Any body else have the dubious honor of having been with both of these companies?

Mistakes in reasoning

[Kohath]

This story assumes two things:

1. That FIOS is available for people. The actual availability is limited.
2. That, since you are really interested in the latest Comcast news about P2P, a majority or even a large minority must also be interested. They aren't.

That second one is a hard lesson for people to learn. Just because you care about something doesn't mean anyone else will care or should care. Don't mistake your wishes for reality.

Slashvertisement

[TheSpoom]

Oh, well, I'd better go get Verizon right now!

*sigh*

They don't even really try to hide it any more, do they? This "article" reads exactly like a DSL ad.

Anyway, no, Comcast isn't going anywhere. They have a monopoly in several markets like a lot of other cable companies and so they wouldn't be going anywhere regardless of their level of suck.

Here we go again.

[TrailerTrash]

One of the most annoying aspects of internet culture is the constant following of this formula:

1) Determine who is the market leader, or at least very large and strong
2) Declare them DEAD. EXTINCT. HISTORY.
3) ???
4) Profit!

How exactly is ComCast supposed to die? Everyone gets rabid about their service, and goes... where? FIOS is only in a tiny percentage of Verizon's US installed base. If you're not in a major metro area, you may never get it.

Cable has solved the last mile problem. DSL is pretty much everywhere, too, because POTS laid the last mile as well. Alternatives? Municipal wireless? Seems to be dying rapidly. Satellite? Very slow.

OK, that's enough. Back to the blind, knee-jerk, ill-fated shrieking of doom already in progress... ("Microsoft? DEAD. MPAA? EXTINCT. RIAA? DINOSAUR. Proprietary software? HISTORY.")

Re:Why censorship?

[stonecypher]

Where do people get the idea that censorship is the sole domain of government? A business/school/church/organization/publication/etc. are all capable of censorship.

No, they aren't. Censorship doesn't mean "we choose not to run your piece." Censorship means "you may not run your piece anywhere." No business, church, school, organization or publication can prevent me from publishing my work; all they can do is decline their own involvement. The word comes from the latin "censura" meaning judgement, and became attached to the judgement of morals and ethics in 1592. The role of censura in Roman government was to evaluate whether or not a piece may be distributed: a publisher would go to the censura, and ask whether they may disseminate the author's work, after they'd decided that they wanted to. This was one of the mechanisms of suppressing anti-governmental or anti-praetorian text, and was frequently the means by which revolutions were crushed.

Of course, given that you're insisting that something you believe is true, ignorant of reference work, I'm willing to bet you're a descriptivist, and that you have no idea what descriptivism is. Giant shock: the language doesn't change just because you're no good at it. You can, in fact, be wrong; just because a group of people misuses a word doesn't mean its meaning has changed.

If what you said about censorship was true, then American censorship law would make no sense whatsoever. How could the government say that censorship would never, ever happen in this country, if any random company could censor?

Where do people get the idea that censorship is the sole domain of government?

From having a familiarity with a word borne of literature, legal context, or just knowing what they're talking about. Where do you get the idea otherwise? Your buddy Stan?

Re:Comcast CEO sees 160Mbps internet in 2008

[The Analog Kid]

The speeds great and all, but if they cap you for actually using it, what good is it?

Why I can't stand Comcast.

[Gothic_Walrus]

Right now, I'm stuck with Comcast - I live in a college-run apartment building, and that's the only option they offer. Unless I find somewhere else to live next year, I'm stuck with Comcast for at least another year and a half.

But after that, I'm jumping ship as soon as I can, and never returning as long as I've got the choice.

I'm sick of having my internet go down without warning, with no indication as to how long it'll be before I can get back online to finish my homework.

I'm sick of Comcast taking channels for no reason - CSPAN2 and one of the leased access channels vanished a week ago, and the four city-run info channels are about to become digital-only at the end of the year I can't say I ever watched those channels for more than thirty seconds at a time, in passing, but they do have their uses and I know that there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Comcast is replacing them with new content - over the past year or so, I don't think we've gotten a single new channel, but others keep vanishing, one or two at a time.

I'm sick of the fact that, in a Big Ten college town with one of the nation's most successful and popular football teams, Comcast is not only refusing to carry the Big Ten Network (the only cable or satellite company here that doesn't - but is running a smear ad campaign against them. I'm sorry, but it's hard to sympathize with your cost argument doesn't hold much water when you make over five hundred million dollars in profit. And no, carrying ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 doesn't count as a response for showing football games - it counts as a basic cable package.

I'm even sick of their advertising. Nine times out of ten, the Comcast ads are so painfully bad that I'll actually stop what I'll doing so I don't have to sit through them. Whether it's the smiling, emotionless Botoxed spokeslady, the "Just Ask Zak" ads where a kid breaks into people's homes to tell them how much better Comcast could make their lives, the previously mentioned Big Ten network attack ads, or the new musical style ads about their phone service (which are so awful that I haven't been able to sit through one of them once), the ads are almost reason enough to jump ship in and of themselves.

We haven't gotten to a point yet where buying shows on demand from iTunes or where watching things online legally is quite a viable option - iTunes is still missing a lot of content I'd like to see and is too expensive to allow for following multiple programs, and the network-run streaming sites have some quality issues. Since other alternatives arenn't available, I'll just have to live with Comcast for now - I need high-speed internet for my engineering classes. But between the service issues and the fact that they seem to go out of their way to make me dislike them even more than I do now, I can't wait until the day when I can finally make sure that Comcast never sees a dime of my money again.

Why all the Comcast hate?

[fzammett]

I have Comcast, have had them for some time. As a matter of fact, I've had ONLY cable internet and basic cable for a couple of years, I'm not one of the people that gets everything through them, so I would assume I don't rate as highly as others do to them.

I've got *plenty* of speed. I've had a *total* of maybe four hours of down time over the last year or more. I've had to deal with customer service four or five times in that timeframe and each time I received good service. To summarize: I'm quite happy.

Now, it's not perfect: I've never been able to run a web server (can't access it from anywhere but my house), and the Bittorent thing lately bugs me (although I'm an infrequent BT user, usually just to grab The IT Crowd episodes or the odd Linux distro), so that doesn't affect me a whole lot. The price could be a little better, but it's not awful. And while the speed is good, it could always be better (to be fair though, I've seen significant increases in speed over the past two years at no extra cost to me, both up and down speeds). And those hidden caps, while I've never been affected (and I have often downloaded what anyone would consider a lot some months) bug me that they even exist (that's probably my only big complaint with Comcast: just tell me what the magic number is, even though "unlimited" should mean *unlimited*, at least if you make the number public I can live with it, assuming it's high enough).

I don't know, I'm certainly what most would consider a power user, and I have no major complaints. By contrast, Verizon are a bunch of bitches AFAIC... they're selling something that is borderline bogus anyway (so what if I have fiber to my house... what difference does that make when I'm hitting bottlenecks after I get past their gateway anyway?), they make a mess of neighborhoods (have you actually seen the aftermath of a Verizon fiber run? *NOT* pretty) I just don't know what all the Comcast hate is all about. They may not be Mother Teresa, maybe not be perfection incarnate, but what's the big problem exactly, and where's the *clearly* better alternative?

Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere

[BosstonesOwn]

Fios users are seeing 20/20 speeds now , you might not have noticed it in the past couple weeks but they are becoming a symmetrical provider.

Fios is looking at the future , and gig connections may well become the norm once places like youtube start serving hd content. Verizon has this nailed , they are planning on rolling out a service that will need minimal upgrades for the next 50 years , Comcast isn't.

I have comcast and they are plagued by they just dont care and take customers for granted , i have 0 options besides them because of trees and distance from the co. once Fios is here im gone.