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Comcast Says There's 6 Million Unhappy DSL Users Left To Target (dslreports.com)
Karl Bode, writing for DSLReports: As we noted last week, cable is effectively demolishing phone companies when it comes to new broadband subscriber additions, and Comcast still says the company has plenty of room to grow. Comcast and Charter alone added 500,000 net broadband subscribers last quarter, while the nation's biggest telcos collectively lost 360,783 broadband users during the same period. With AT&T and Verizon backing away from unwanted DSL users, and Windstream Frontier and CenturyLink only eyeing piecemeal upgrades, the bloodshed is far from over. Speaking this week at the Nomura 2016 Media, Telecom & Internet Conference, Comcast VP Marcien Jenckes stated that the company has plenty of unhappy DSL customers left to nab. In fact, Comcast says the company still has around 6 million DSL subscribers in its territory, many of which are likely frustrated by outdated speeds.
Comcast and the like have come down my street several times taking surveys asking if we would subscribe. Since many don't want cable TV, and the ones that do already have DirecTV or Dish, they decide it's not worth it.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
What about the 20+ million unhappy Comcast subscribers? Shouldn't they target some of them for better service?
Wait, this is Comcast. Those people are already in the gallows.
Give me that $20 to $40 a month 40 Gbps internet speed any day of the week that the rest of the Free World gets under their "socialism".
1000 times faster. 10 times cheaper.
There's the sweet spot.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The happy Comcast customer is a myth, just like Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Sure, there may be some unhappy DSL customers remaining to poach, but thanks to their legally-regulated monopoly, Comcast's own service is unreliable, awful and badly, badly overpriced too. These customers are jumping out of the frying pan, and into a bigger frying pan. Switching to Comcast will likely make their internet faster when it works, but it will also make it much more expensive and their happiness won't improve one iota.
three times now. Even offered to handle the last ~800 from the road to no avail. Meanwhile Windstream keeps raising price -- now nearly $80 for a measly 6-Mbps.
disclaimer: im a comcast engineer.
what tfa fails to mention is that there's 6 million unhappy DSL users left to target with our fresnel laser of doom. rest assured, (and we've tested this,) customer complaints are a thing of the past after exposure to the futuristic beam of a laser that blots out the sun.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Comcast is delusional if it thinks speed is the major bottleneck between subscribers and happiness. It is but one of many issues, though it is somewhat significant. By far, the bigger issues are:
1) Price. High speed Internet access in America is way over priced, and way under-delivered.
2) Lack of choices. We need the municipalities to own the infrastructure, and multiple, competing private companies to administer it. It's the only model that works.
3) Availability. High speed Internet is available in probably 10% (or less) of America, despite decades of massive tax cuts to Internet providers for the sole purpose of connecting America. The corruptions needs to stop, and we need to get our money back.
I have DSL that used to be cheap but they made me get a phone line and it almost doubled in price. (i don't need or use the phone line). I called comcast and they said i can get internet only for 44$ per month. I don't need tv because i get all i need from an OTA and the internet. Is that price for real or is there hidden prices that despite my asking about will still get tacked on my bill. I'm in central NJ, only choices are Verizon DSL(what i now have) and Comcast.
Have gnu, will travel.
How much of those numbers are outdated? For instance, Centrylink is very aggressively replacing all coper lines with fiber lines in the Pacific Northwest. 8 months ago I could sign up for DSL service through them still. 7 months ago, I couldn't, because they made the switch in my neighborhood to fiber, and now no longer offer anything lower than 40mbps fiber connections with no option at all anymore for DSL. Upon finding this out, I promptly switch from cable (municipal ISP) over to their gigabit fiber, because, well, the local cable ISP is still debating if/when to upgrade their network and moving "at the speed of government"
It's hilarious that they think I'm unhappy. Since I canceled my Comcast service I've never been happier. My 20Mbps Centrylink DSL is fast enough and reliable.
As for them being "slow" to roll out new service. They offered fiber at my condo in Salt Lake City six years ago. It was expensive and I had to spend $1500 to run it from the pole but it was available. From what I understand they're upgrading the lines in my current neighborhood to fiber as well.
Funny how things work when there is competition. My condolences to anyone with no options.
My girlfriend and I finally reached the breaking point with Time Warner and cancelled our "working when it wants to be" 100 megabit service for a perfectly stable 7 megabit DSL connection. It was a matter of maintaining sanity and we are much happier with it. Also, no more burning up mobile hotspot bandwidth every time it flaked out.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
I switched off Comcast a few months ago to a regional ISP that's deploying fiber-to-the-premises all over the place. Their current offering in my neighborhood is FTTN, which is basically fiber to a box near my house, then DSL from that box to my living room. I have two DSL lines bonded for a 50Mbps down, ~8Mbps up connection (that is, faster than Comcast in uploads) for about a third what I was paying Comcast. That's to tide us over until the ISP gets around to replacing that last mile, which they've actually been doing and not continually deferring to some distant future.
Don't cry for me and my DSL connection. Our download speed is theoretically slower, but in practice it's just as fast, utterly uncapped, and far cheaper. I somehow think we'll scrape by.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I was an unhappy cable customer who switched to DSL. Best thing I ever did for my internet connection. Sure, cable can be faster... when it works. But after many weeks of it going down several times a week, usually at least once a day, and many service calls, I had had enough. DSL that works 24/7 is far better than spotty cable even if it's a bit slower.
On the plus side, I also get to work with a local company with legendary amazing(ly good) customer service, who are proud of their company and act it, and I now have 50 Mbit/s down, 25Mbit/s up DSL that is more than fast enough for our needs and is cheaper than cable. And if I need faster, 100Mbit/s DSL is an option.
I'm extremely rural, but amazingly both cable and blazingly-fast DSL are an option for me because our local telco is five stars. To such a degree, limiting ourselves to their service area was one of the top priorities when shopping for this house... no lie.
I've had sucky ATT DSL here in Chicago, - 6Mbps, for years. We could get comcast but it would mean changing to new email domains, which I am too lazy to do. If Comcast weren't just as sucky, customer service wise, there might be a compelling reason to move.
Offer a cloud server of the user's choice of operating system with every signup, and you'll have DSL customers beating down your doorstep.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And what does it say about Comcast as a company when there's 6 million people willing to suffer through crappy DSL rather than have to deal with Comcast?
I'm a VERY happy Comcast customer (so they do exist) but I'm an enterprise customer and not a residential customer, so YMMV. Something like 3-4 hours of unscheduled downtime in the last five years on the HFC circuit, and the GigE private circuit that I have for one of my remote sites hasn't seen any downtime since installation last year.
I'd like to say that "service with big telecom improves as you spend more money" but AT&T still sucks no matter how much money I give them.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Sickrage works fine with nothing more than thepiratebay, and the only monthly fee you need to pay is for a VPN provider.
Comcast cable tv sucks next to all other systems.
There internet is good but there HD lineup sucks + now they are doing rate shaping as well. Also there channel map sucks.
What's the beef? With modern compression algorithms, DSL is plenty fast enough for video streaming, who needs more than that? If I wanted, I could potentially stream 250 GB a month, imagine what that would cost on a wireless contract. DSL reliability is incredible; in 10 years it's been out maybe 3 or 4 times for a few hours. When the power has gone out for days at a time, DSL still works, as does my landline phone. There are no rental charges; my modem was free and it still works. Best of all, I don't have to deal with Comcast and their incomprehensible rate structure. Even including all the phoney landline charges, it's less than half what I'd pay otherwise. DSL now, DSL tomorrow, DSL forever.
There is one exception - when Google Fiber comes to your city, and then suddenly it's a whole new Comcast.
Google Fiber has only begun to deploy here in Nashville, and already Comcast has run new cables on the utility poles in my neighborhood, and offered everyone a no-contract $139 / month Xfinity X1 package with 300 Mbps service. Before Google Fiber, my Internet dropped out a couple of dozen times a day. Now it's rock solid. Phone support is still abysmal, but I can go to the local Xfinity store and actually have someone competent address any problem I might have. Plus, I'm paying less per month than I did before I upgraded.
Of course, I'm still going to switch to Google Fiber once it gets to my street. For now, it's just a matter of getting the best bang for the buck until I can rid myself of Comcast forever.
Why anyone would switch TO Comcast for ANY reason is beyond me; their lousy service is only eclipsed by their lousy CUSTOMER service!!
Release countermeasures! Take evasive action!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Most services typically face periods of sluggishness. Based on my experience with slimy telecom marketers, they'll suggest that those periods are due to not having high enough "speed". Naive customers may just fall for it.
In reality, those periods of sluggishness will likely happen regardless of "billed" speed. I've purchased higher speed mainly because it was bundled* with something else, but I still get periods of sluggishness, especially on weekend evenings. They all oversell capacity, probably with DSL also. (It's not Comcast, but I've read similar complaints from users of ALL the big telecom's. Oligopolies usually suck, period.)
Thus, speed is probably being used as a sales gimmick.
* I hate forced bundling, but that's a different evil-telecom subject.
Table-ized A.I.
We're one of three houses on our street (in Brookline, MA) that Comcast won't serve because we're too far from a utility pole. They don't seem too interested in doing anything about it; we've called repeatedly. So we're stuck with damnfool 1500/368 (kbit) DSL. Feh.
with each other. They have exclusive franchises granted to them in exchange for paying for the infrastructure up front ( Yeah, I know they didn't really pay for it since they got tax credits almost immediately to offset it on top of tax cuts to further offset it, but hey, that's America for you).
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but they can charge you extra for speed, it costs them virtually nothing and their sales reps can at least pretend you got something in exchange for the last round of price increase (up to $75/mo in my neighborhood, yay!). But hey, it beats that commie "municiple" broadband, amaright?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'm an unhappy DSL user with sonic.net but I'd switch over to two tin cans and a length of string before I sign any contract with Comcast.
Less popular channels are often delivered through "switched digital video" (SDV), which delivers only those channels that someone in a particular neighborhood is watching. It's more like multicast video-on-demand, such as pay-per-view boxing, than like traditional digital cable TV channels.
The people still on DSL are not Joe Sixpack. They prefer a slower line in exchange for the one thing that faster broadband can't give you- a static IP and the right to run a server.
Give them an option that enables them to run their own server, and you'll capture that market.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Well, truthfully, I switched a month ago, after having Verizon DSL since 1999 or so. I have no love for either mega-corp, but 150mpbs via Comcast is blowing the doors off my old 6mb connection (it's more $$ as well, as expected). Had Verizon actually rolled out FIOS in my area, for convenience I would've stayed with them, but a birdie from the company told me it's never going to happen. The sucky thing is, Verizon will never officially tell you that and keep stringing you along.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I've got the "boost" service (75Mbs, but am actually getting 90Mbs); I am paying $100 month, but that includes HD cable service, pretty much all non-premium channels. That beats the hell out of paying $80 for the boost service and $140 for DirecTV before I switched. I am also a VERY happy comcast internet user, having had little downtime for years, and upgrades in speeds... I use my own modem and they don't hassle me about it.
On the flip side, their TV people have overwhelmingly been just plain bad. A couple of years ago when I still had a pre-paid cell plan, I used all of my minutes waiting on hold (now they have a callback option and hey, they actually call back). $20 for their missed appointments hardly make up for the day I took off from work. When I recently switched and had problems, they wanted to send a tech out and I just said "no," I visited their store about five times over the course of the week to finally get working equipment, and it still cost me less time (and was more convenient time for me) than waiting for a tech to tell me what I already knew. Terrible, terrible, terrible.... but the internet folks were top notch.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Well, I'd been a happy 25Mbs comcast subscriber for quite some time, but was looking forward to the day that some company would run fiber into my neighborhood. Google announced the Atlanta area, but not in the suburbs where I live.
Then AT&T came through announcing their fiber in my neighborhood, and within weeks I got a letter from comcast telling me I could upgrade my service. Still, I haven't had customer service problems with comcast's internet folks, the uptime has been great. Competition is great. I may switch to AT&T, but I've heard such terrible customer service stories.... and I've heard stories about comcast that don't reflect my experience, so I don't know how much to make out of the complaints. Of course, people don't jump up and down ranting about good service, so the negativity always seems to over represent customer experience for pretty much every company, but I don't see why, with my upgraded speeds and (so far) great service, I should risk change.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I think it's like that everywhere - so I finally gave up spending $80/month for internet (75Mbs with my own modem) and nearly $140/month for DirecTV and combined TV with internet for $100/month from one company. I'm not quite as happy about the TV service, but it's over $100/month - TV's just not worth it.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
While there are a lot of people incapable of getting decent service with ADSL there are a lot of people like myself who have only ever subscribed to ADSL or Fibe (two places I lived I got fiber, and not from Verizon, but local companies or via municipality public utilities) because of the manipulative tactics of Comcast and similar cable companies. ADSL is better in that you get what you pay for (pretty much always, I've never gotten 4mpbs on 25mbps advertised pipes for example, unlike I've experienced numerous times with Comcast, during prime time hours) so long as you are within a reasonable range of the central office. Comparatively Comcast advertises speeds you can't *EVER* get by design. They know full well that they oversubscribe to such extremes (often) that when users actually want to utilize (during prime time hours) it the connection is unusable- worse than ADSL in many places. Now they mess with the connections to make people think they are getting absurdly fast speeds. But if you actually look at the facts they do all sorts of malicious stuff including shaping of traffic, throttling, disconnecting certain types of content (Torrents), etc.
I think you missed the point. In this context, customers refers to individual people and families. Corporations are more important than people, and so, by definition, get better service. It does not contradict the GP who says that a happy Comcast customer is a myth.
I'm the guy who deals with the sales guys, tech guys, field guys and manages the circuits on a day to day basis. To suggest that I'm not a customer is an absurdity. With regard to your schtick that corporte customers are more important because they're "not people" I think it has more to do with the fact that the check we cut Comcast every month probably equals what everyone else in a quarter-mile radius pays, combined.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Do they wish to make them even more unhappy?