Comcast Cares

Comcast cares! Heh heh - good one Comcast!

As reported - Comcast's customer service is widely loathed; their executives are always promising to fix the problem but at least they've taken the first step of acknowledging that they have a problem.

Cable Bills Explained

The Consumerist has done a very good job breaking down various cable bills from the major providers. Here's their latest - breaking down the Charter cable bill.

Earlier they also broke down the bills from the other major cable companies;

- Comcast

- Time Warner

- DirecTV

Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting and thought I'd share.

- Facebook's ad revenue provides solid evidence on the growing importance of smart phones, tablets and pads.

- Interesting analysis of Comcast's business model. Basically Comcast was a cable company with awful customer service but is morphing into a broadband provider with awful customer service.

- Cool 2-minute FiberFacts video

- 5 companies grab 70% of your online dollars

- Fiber based broadband the new greatest thing for electrical co-op's

Tiered Cable Data Plans

Interesting look at possible tiered data plans for heavy data users. My initial reaction is "big deal".

Near the end of the article it is mentioned that Comcast has a data tier that allows for "300 gigabits per month - or about 130 hours of Netflix HD videos." Think about that for a minute. That's 4.33 hours of HD video a day. Good chance someone doing that is probably a cord cutter - and why should the cable company subsidize Netflix? Plus - as encoding algorithms advance less and less bandwidth will be needed for the same amount of video.

If in the future both cable and telcos will be the equivalent of dumb pipe providers - why shouldn't they get to charge for how much you drink from the pipe?

Verizon Spectrum Deal Approved by FCC

"Welcome to my lair said the spider to the fly." That was my first thought upon reading that the FCC approved the Verizon purchase of spectrum from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Bright House.

Who are the winners and losers of this deal and why did I think of the spider and the fly? Let me explain.

Verizon and Comcast Deal

There seems to be two pieces of business common sense that are somehow mystifying to some people. First most business people would rather not do a deal than enter into a deal where they know they will lose money. Second - once a home has a high speed connection there is very little incentive for a competitor to pour the money into the infrastructure to put in a competitive connection. Its not brain surgery but some people just can't seem to get their arms around these two simple ideas. And as I explain below - these two simple ideas are the crux of the proposed Verizon Wireless and Comcast deal.