Slashdot Mirror
Americans Hate TV and Internet Providers More Than Other Industries
An anonymous reader writes "According to a new report by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, subscription TV providers and ISPs were the industries Americans disliked the most over the past year. 'Over-the-top video services, like Netflix and Hulu, threaten subscription TV providers and also put pressure on ISP network infrastructure. Customers question the value proposition of both, as consumers pay for more than they need in terms of subscription TV and get less than they want in terms of Internet speeds and reliability.' Unsurprisingly, Time Warner Cable and Comcast are the companies with the most dissatisfied customers. The ACSI said, '[I]t's a concern whenever two poor-performing service providers combine operations. ACSI data consistently show that mergers in service industries usually result in lower customer satisfaction, at least in the short term. It's hard to see how combining two negatives will be a positive for consumers.'"
The industry I hate the most is the fossil fuels industry
Not just because of global warming, but mostly because they control the politicians and stop anything being done about it.
It's a joke when Comcast uses the claim that TWC covers separate parts of the country as justification for their merger when this should just make it obvious that they were never competing in the first place.
> 'It's hard to see how combining two negatives will be a positive for consumers.'
If you multiply them, then it all turns positive (you just be careful to always use them in pairs).
All will be well.
Hateful industries include lawyers, politicians, washing machine repairmen, insurance companies, heating engineers, telemarketers, car salesmen...
Surely they come before ISPs and TV providers.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I would put the telecom second and the media distribution mafia first.
It is pathetic, true, how the telecom providers have been selling a commodity service on mass scale for 20+ years, yet the pricing and service quality are on "novelty" levels or worse. Your cable bill has no good reason to be higher than that (local) phone bill 30 years ago. One of the reasons for the pathetic prices are the unreasonably high media licensing fees and unbreakable channel bundles. The cable companies then cut costs on everything else, which gives you multiple week waiting times to connect, half-hour wait times on support lines, and clueless staff.
And the media mafia also criminalizes everyone for downloading a few songs on P2P and threatens with lawsuits.
We have so much bullshit in our gentrified business community, how could any of us pick just one area we think is the worst?
or other for no other reason than they have to pay them. over the decades they have hated oil companies, drug companies and i forgot who else. i even made up a formula
take product A that people love and is sold at high margins, but needs a product B or service to work that is sold at low margins.
product A is SUV's, smartphones, high margin products people love and like the companies
product/Service B is ISP's and oil companies and are both relatively low margin. Apple has something like 15% net margins and comcast around 5%. car companies used to sell SUV's at insane profits and people somehow hated the gas companies after buying these behemoths
This is because it is too expensive. In europe, this is different. An article was written associated with a video explaining why it is much better in Europe :
TV and Internet Providers in UK
I can't open my own ISP. If I do (let's say I want to run a fiber-based ISP), I will face many legal hurdles simply because that's the nature of the business; one may need to rent space on towers or get right-of-way permits from the town and the whole mess will be overseen by the public utilities commissioner of the state I'm in.
That's all normal ISP business stuff, but the giants have so much power that they are guaranteed to put me out of business through lawsuits. They shroud anything that they don't like in a giant neon sheet of "UNFAIR COMPETITION" and bury the little guy in legal red tape and paperwork. Little guys cannot win the battles of attrition in our legal system against gigantic corporations as it is, but these bastards have managed to lobby so hard that the law is heavily on their side as well. If I get financial assistance from a local government to build my ISP, I'll get shut down because of "unfair competition" since there are laws in many states now making municipal broadband de facto illegal to run and the funding could be construed as attempting to skirt those laws.
There is no competition in broadband services today because the largest companies have slanted the laws so hard in their favor that all competition is legally shut out.
I guess the majority of them (and that probably doesn't apply only to Americans) are not doing much then either watching TV or surfing YouTube and Facebook etc.
So that makes a lot of sense.
The business only insiders with no love for radio, gutted the coffers for personal gain and bloated payouts involving grandiose plans to the point of near bankruptcy.
Their solution to pay off their near infinite debt is to constantly interrupt the programs with endless commercials; most of which are bordering on snake oil and work at home scams. There's no high end quality products or any class to the presentation -- just a loud, fast talking spiel, hammering away with drums and horns to end in repeating 3 or 4 times a toll free number. The music channels aren't immune. They're starting to lose their shine as they get interrupted 3 or 4 times an hour with a station ID that may include an occasional short ad for web-based satellite radio or other channels that are channels with commercials.
Before this crap, it was an amazing experience with a unique feeling found in listening to long conversations or uninterrupted musical genres. Now all I do is spend a lot of my time channel surfing to avoid the obnoxious experience of being reminded of AM radio. It's interesting, but no longer unusual enough to be worth the investment considering the other choices now available.
When I read of mergers like this, I imagine two large garbage trucks colliding at speed -- the result is inevitably twisted smoking debris strewn wide, and oh God, the smell.
I find, as a metaphor for large mergers, I have yet to find a more accurate one.
Ian Ameline
Number one for me is the insurance industry. Health insurance, especially; although auto and life insurance aren't much better. They are all giant legalized Ponzi schemes, IMHO. In 2010 the health insurance industry demonstrated how much power they have over the federal government when they managed to make us all obligate customers as an alleged mechanism of "reform". I could go on about how an insurance company that I had about a decade ago tried to drive me bankrupt with practices that are far beyond immoral.
Number two for me (literally and figuratively) are private impound lots. There are some cities (I happen to work in one) where auto theft is essentially legal if you happen to be a private impound lot. The amount of power those animals have over regular people is disgusting, they basically have an unlimited income stream that they can open and close at will.
I don't care for my cable company, but I love them in comparison to either of those.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I have Time Warner and about an hour ago I woke up to an outage. Needless to say it has been cleared up, but outages are routine and expected with their "service". I learned a long time ago that calling their customer service\tech support is futile. Also, I barely break five-megabits down. Unfortunately there has been no alternative and I have been stuck with them for fifteen-years. I guess you can suck that bad and not care if you are a monopoly. Two-days ago I received an email from Google letting me know that Google Fiber will be available to me pretty soon. Yesterday large spools of fiber optic cables showed up on my street. There is one right next to my house. Despite my misgivings about letting Google provide me with internet access, I am absolutely going with them. Time Warner has been flipping out since the roll out started in my city last year, yet no aspect of their service has improved. I am convinced that they have been a monopoly for so long that they literally don't know how to compete. Good riddance to them.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
My only experience is with charter. Their service itself is usually pretty good, but I hate their website. You can't find straightforward information on what individual services cost, and even finding a channel listing is difficult. On more than one occasion I've searched for services available at my house--where they make me enter my exact address--and their website tells me that they do not service my area.
It really frustrates me that the companies that run the internet don't care enough or aren't required to make basic information about their services available.
The question you need to ask yourself is: If being an ISP means you have no competition, can overcharge your customer and they have no recourse, you never have to upgrade your network and you just rake in all this free cash... why aren't the big ISPs like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T buying up all these ISPs? It's just free money right?
The same reason Lipton isn't buying out your kid's lemonade stand.
It ain't fucking Brisk, baby.
You seriously think it's "free" money to buy up a bunch of shitty regionals? Deal with the money blown on negotiation/buying stock (if it's even issued) to force the issue? Dealing with FCC asshattery for each purchase? Conversion of customers? Wonky foreign kit? Potentially different services entirely? (It's 2014, and many tiny regionals are DSL. Re: It's 2014. Buying a DSL provider is like buying a dialup service.)
Nobody gives a shit about these ISPs, because there isn't money there, not on the scales that Comcast, Time Warner, ATT, Verizon or the other players even notice. Shit, the gross income from these outfits wouldn't even cover a day of C-level blow.
I hate my local cable provider, and Amazon.com comes in a close second, god damn amazon prime made it unpissable to opt out of amazon prime, i went through the motions and jumped through the hoops and they still charged my credit card 70 bucks, i wrote amazon.com a nasty email and they replaced my 70 bucks, one of these days i will cancel my cable TV/internet provider with joy, i will call them up and tell them i am NOT paying them for services anymore and canceling so they can pull the plug any time they want
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
People complain about private industry. Until they have to deal with a service the government provides - then they complain about that even more.
Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
And the Obama administration quietly backs away from its campaign promise to uphold net neutrality. Instead, it takes millions from the big ISPs and uses tricks of the language to appear to support net neutrality while letting it die.
First, oppose laws and homeowners associations and landlords and zoning that don't provide the ability to put up a TV antenna, and I mean a big one so's you can get TV signals from different cities. Then, put one up. No monthly charges ever again, and you can fix anything that goes wrong with it all by yourself. Get your movies over the innernetz and by mail via Netflix, and no, you don't NEED to watch Game of Thrones live as soon as it is aired. You can get the internet via a new satellite company called Excede, the only drawback to that being that it isn't responsive enough to do gaming over the internet. But you can download a whale of a lot of info. Problem solved - no more cable.
I have observed that you also are very enthusiastic about your hatred of your phone companies.
If half the stories I hear are true, it is totally horrendous!
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
MS invested in Comcast years ago and then they sold their stake - years ago.
It's sad that the state of affairs in this country has us discussing the MERGER of two hated monopolies, rather than busting them up into overlapping pieces like they should.
I went through this with a cable ISP many moons ago. I lived in central NJ and my connection would drop all the way down to 50KB or less.
The way I've solved it was to upgrade to business service. By contract, they had to come out and fix the outage within.. 24 hours I think it was. They came out, fixed something on the pole about 100 yards down the road, and that's all it took. Not sure if I got a better technician (or magician) or just better quality service. Needless to say I've reverted back to residential shortly after. The connection has been stable until I've moved out.
YMMV
I worked for Time Warner for about six months. It was probably the worst job I've ever had. The amount of frustration we dealt with for a solid 8 hours a day was unreal. Just in our area we lost 5000 customers a day and gained 5000. The attitude from our managers toward the customers and any issues was "we don't care."
I received death threats pretty much daily which explained why the building had various stringent security measures. These guys take over an area and once they do they give up on even trying to provide a decent service and raise rates continuously. There is no competition.
We need some regulation and some trust busting and we need it yesterday.
Justin Playfair was right, the phonecops did try to kill Dr. Johnny Fever!
But now Moriarty has subverted the cable company for his nefarious deeds.
Then move to a sensible country.
How do you recommend that a U.S.-born U.S. citizen currently residing in the U.S. qualify for a work visa in what you call "a sensible country"?
and how do you plan to get your free movies over the "innernetz" without doing business with the same monopolies? Who cares about cable TV. Its cable internet that doesn't have an alternative in most places. TV's easy to replace, the internet is getting close (not the same, but slowly creeping up) to being as important as electricity.
Obama's a Muslim, foreign, atheist, commie he should just nationalize all of them under the National Security Act.
And think, that would actually be hope and change!
I an a FIOS customer, and they have 3 plans of issue here: Select HD, Prime HD, and ExtremeHD. Select has every channel I want. Prime adds some channels, but takes away others, namely BBCA. Extreme then is Select+Prime+more. I'd be happy on Prime if it had BBCA, but as a result, I pay a price difference of $340 a year for one channel. I could deal with dropping it and going Amazon and getting the BBC shows that way, but there are severals hows on there that I watch. (And I'm not referring to St:TNG reruns)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Well, I don't know about killing the railroads.
Seems like "big oil" is trying to blow up the railroads lately (Lac-Megantic, Lynchburg, Lasalle CO). Which would indicate that they're sending the railroads lots of business of late, with shipping oil from the Canadian tar sands and all.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I guess you missed it above. I said "Excede", which is a satellite internet provider that has the speed of cable and ain't cable and _is_ available even when the cable is not.
http://www.exede-sales.com/
Now, it _isn't_ cheap, for that you might have to go to your hated cable or maybe phone company, but it is available and its only major drawback is latency that would keep you from playing FPS games, but not something like poker or chess. But you can do movies for sure. You'd have to be in some remote parts of Alaska where the Excede satellite does not shine in order to not have this available, barring the local quirks like apartments and homeowner's associations hating your antenna, but you can move, and its your own fault for moving into one of those Nazi-run places in the 1st place.
1. Find out who the politicians that have taken bribes, i mean, donations, or have been lobbied by the telecom industry are
2. Find out their voting record
3. Vote out the ones that are shady and sketchy as hell based off it
Don't forget, if we do nothing, Net Neutrality will die. The cable companies will continue to provide mediocre, crappy service, and nothing would change.
We're receiving a faint transmission in an ancient Earth encoding...
Intriguing, the message indicates it's from a time before CVS.
You can get the internet via a new satellite company called Excede, the only drawback to that being that it isn't responsive enough to do gaming over the internet. But you can download a whale of a lot of info.
Not without running up against your monthly cap. Satellite caps are just slightly less oppressive than cellular caps.
Not when the phone company hasn't built their fiber network into your area.
You could choose another area in which to live.
Take a little time to check a few music sites like reverbnation or unsigned and you'll find that the bands range from crap to I can't believe they are not already signed. You may just find your next favorite band is a bar band that paid for pro studio time.
The sort of geeks that inhabit Slashdot might have time for this. Most people don't, I imagine. Plenty of people want to just board the bus (or hop in the car) and play an already-vetted variety of tunes, and many don't want to subscribe to a $400 per year cellular data plan in order to stream to a vehicle. And there are enough people willing to accept whatever FM radio gives them that the record industry retains its political clout.
No one wants to be forced to purchase packages with state run media. msnbc, cnbc, cnn...etc. But the cable companies only sell you packages because they want you idiot to continue absorbing the white house talking points.
Many of us grew up in an era in which everyone got the same TV shows and that was it. Then things started to diverge. A few people got color TVs which seemed to work poorly and wear out way to fast but these folks got to see things that most others did not due to color. Then came cable TV. All of a sudden content was locked to the size of your wallet. Then we had premium channels as well as pay per view. Also some cable companies started to offer higher speed services for more money. Now we also have HD channels which require a more expensive TV. Denial of equal content is so dangerous to a nation that I should not have to define the issue. But it is all too real. By the way in my two there is zero TV without cable or satellite service and I am between two large metropolitan areas but both point their broadcast antennas away from our town as they fear interfering with each other.
The TV industry tries to brainwash us with their constant propaganda, and the Interned Industry are trying to control what we see and say.
For a smoker who is addicted to nicotine --- anything that interferes will be hated.
For an alcoholic who is addicted to alcohol ---- anything that interferes will be hated.
For TV addict and media consumer --- anything that interferes will be hated.
Bringing facts to Slashdot is as pointless as bringing a daisy to a knifefight
"I started paying for cable back in the late 70s to early 80s, with the intention that my monthly bill was a replacement for having to watch all those stupid advertisements-- exactly as advertised-- with the perk that I would have more reliable and higher quality of service."
This is getting sad. I see this posted somewhere in the comments of every article about cable television on Slashdot. Aren't people on Slashdot supposed to be smart enough to not accept facts without question simply because they support whatever argument they'd like to make?
It does seem some people on the internet are smart enough to question the story: link and link.
Others seem far too blinded by their desire to believe the story to realize just how likely it is that it is complete bullshit, like this guy who even put "fairy tale" in the title of his story. At first I thought maybe he was presenting it as a fairy tale, but with no argument against the story being presented, I can only conclude that he believes that commercial-free cable television did exist at one time, but has now become a "fairy tale" as it no longer exists.
So don't overload the mini van
Not overloading a minivan would require making two trips. If an SUV uses 25% more gas but requires half the trips on average, the SUV saves money.
1) public transit? At least buses?
Buses in Fort Wayne, Indiana, stop running at about 8:45 PM. They also routinely have 60-hour planned outages because they don't run on Saturday evenings, Sundays, or major holidays. For example, they will stop running at 6 PM on Saturday, May 24, and not run again until Tuesday, May 27. The buses to more remote parts of the city have even longer outages because they don't run at all on Saturdays. They stop running on Friday evening, don't run on Saturday, don't run on Sunday, and don't run on Memorial Day. (Source: fwcitilink.com) Besides, I don't see how one can use a bus or taxi to "move a couch, or pickup some lumber".
2) taxis?
I was under the impression that taxi fare was cost prohibitive for regular use. The fare for a trip to and from my previous place of employment, for example, would exceed how much I would earn in one day after federal and state income tax.
4) Zipcar or other car rental services?
To what extent is car rental available to people who have no car insurance because they own no car?
I found a few more issues to discuss. First, earning "good qualifications" to get a foreign employer in another anglophone country interested in sponsoring someone can take years. The excuse becomes "I have to suffer with poor Internet for the next several years until I finish retraining for a skilled career for which another country has a shortage and then finish building verifiable domestic work experience so that I can qualify to leave the country." Second, shortages change. By the time one retrains for a skilled career for which another anglophone country has a shortage, the other country may no longer have a shortage in that position. Third and finally, if tens of millions of Americans go through immigration to escape abusive home ISPs, how easily will other anglophone countries be able to process all this paperwork?