The Cable TV Industry Is Getting Even Less Popular (fortune.com)
Aaron Pressman, writing for Fortune: It seems nobody loves their cable TV or home Internet provider. Wireless carriers, however, are on the upswing.That's the news from the huge annual survey of 43 industries from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. In 2017, cable operators and ISP tied for last place, with an average customer satisfaction rating of just 64 percent. The wireless industry was still near the bottom of the rankings, in 38th place, just below the U.S. postal system. But its 73 percent score was up almost three percentage points from last year. Many of the same companies, like Comcast and Verizon, dominate both fields, ACSI noted. And neither industry offer much choice to consumers, with most localities having only one or two cable and Internet providers. The cable industry's rating slipped 1.5 percentage points from last year, while the rating for ISPs was unchanged.
The only service I have through Mediacom is internet. Their service is ok for the price. But their customer service is horrible, they talk down to you and treat you like you're the enemy. I got a DMCA violation for downloading a CD that I owned. So I cleared all copies of it out of everywhere. Yet somehow it happened again. They insisted that it can still be uploading even if I don't have a bittorrent client installed as long as I have the .torrent file. They shut off my internet. So we got a new account in my girlfriends name at a different address, we had an official 2nd address with an A at the end through the town. After a couple of months they shut her off because the post office forgot to actually register the 2nd address and they had her voice recorded calling for support on my previous account. Finally after enough ass kissing they turned on her account, but she had to agree not to let me put any of my devices, not even my phone on her service. The only other alternative is a DSL provider who will sell you a 7Mb package but you'll be lucky to get 1.
... with gasoline.
It's another disinformation campaign that's been going on for some time. There are a few congressional members who have been aiming to rid us of the Post Office and sell off pieces of it to their buddies. They've been making sure that the PO's budget can't balance through making them pre-pay pensions for a very unreasonable amount of time as well as shrinking the amount they can charge for stamps.
That doesn't even get into the political battle over letting the PO act as a bank for low income people. Which it did at one time but was removed in the late sixties and completely shut down by 1984.
It's another disinformation campaign that's been going on for some time. There are a few congressional members who have been aiming to rid us of the Post Office and sell off pieces of it to their buddies. They've been making sure that the PO's budget can't balance through making them pre-pay pensions for a very unreasonable amount of time as well as shrinking the amount they can charge for stamps.
That doesn't even get into the political battle over letting the PO act as a bank for low income people. Which it did at one time but was removed in the late sixties and completely shut down by 1984.
The US postal system is also one of the largest single union employers in the country. Yet another reason that many are trying to "drowned it in a bathtub."
The Post Office is additionally hamstrung by Congress micro-managing it. Want to get rid of Saturday delivery? No. Want to raise the price of a stamp? No. It's really quite tragic. Like that story about the boy who keeps commanding a grasshopper to jump and pulling off legs each time it fails, then loudly proclaiming that it must be deaf.