“Been enjoying your reasonably-priced home internet connection recently?” Chris Mills reports for BGR. “Don’t get too comfortable. US cable companies, led by Comcast, are all set to start increasing broadband prices dramatically, with price hikes of double current rates expected in the future.”
“‘We have argued that broadband is underpriced, given that pricing has barely increased over the past decade while broadband utility has exploded,’ New Street’s report said. “Our analysis suggested a ‘utility-adjusted’ average revenue per user (ARPU) target of ~$90. Comcast recently increased standalone broadband to $90 (including modem), paving the way for faster ARPU growth as the mix shifts in favor of broadband-only households. Charter will likely follow, once they are through the integration of Time Warner Cable,'” Mills reports. “Those increases could be as much as double the current price, New Street notes.”
Mills reports, “As people start eyeing internet-only cable packages combined with a live streaming service for TV, the cable companies can cut the price of the cable bundle to appear competitive with streaming services, but raise broadband pricing to compensate.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Too many customers have no options for broadband internet service. Monopolists are historically bad with pricing and customer service. If you drop your overpriced cable/satellite service with its awful UI, they’re going to recoup their “loss” on your Internet service.
What solves this? Competition. In markets where consumers have a choice, competition keeps prices down and customer service up. In all other markets, where competition is absent, prices will naturally go up, while customer service will decline.
Concerned consumers in the U.S. should contact their elected representatives and demand to know what they are doing to promote competition among ISPs. Without legitimate competition, abuses are guaranteed.
They are just opening themselves up for massive disruption in a couple years with Cellular 5G and Elon Musks sattelite network. Those alternatives that seems too expensive will become cheaper and better while the coax going into your house will become useless.
Oh, just wait. Wait for what? 5G to double in price!
And this is exactly what will happen since the fed let Charter and Time Warner combined. Less competition, less incentive to provide good service, more fees, etc etc. Spectrum has already nixed digital converters and raised cable bundle pricing. Honestly, we pay over $250/mo for cable, hbo, showtime, and broadband. Plus they shove a landline phone into the mix even though we don’t have the physical phone.
Enough already.
“What solves this? Competition.”
competition is choice, choice is liberty…economic and political freedom are two sides of the same coin.
Bot, as usual, you are SO CLOSE to realizing something of substance, but then utterly miss it because you are blinded by conservative dogma.
You know the saying “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” But it applies not only to our basic freedoms, but also to free markets. Competition DOES NOT ensure a free market. It’s the other way around. And the way you enable competition, and thereby free markets, is via government regulation.
We have local cable monopolies precisely because conservative dogmatists think you can just let competition run unfettered and some magical invisible hand will protect it, despite that that’s demonstrably false.
I think you are close but have it a bit wrong. What the government needs to do is NOT regulate, it simply needs to blindly enforce the laws of the given marketplace. What gives capitalism a bad name is when government officials get corrupted and permit unfair advantages. That problem is as much a liberal as it is conservative. The WORST way to promote competition is for the government to regulate an industry. If you believe that Inam wrong please give me some examples.
Monopolies are the antithesis of “competition.”
Utter tripe! Government regulation has nothing to do with it. Free markets do not require government regulation, only assurance of a free market. Bot is correct, while you blather that false narrative. The U.S. had simple regulation from the founding until FDR, and now we have regulation without representation. And i’m sure you agree with that as well.
Time-Warner and Charter served separate markets and didn’t compete anyhow.
Matters not
Ah, the politicians work for the ISPs, so there won’t be any competition. Ever.
Yes, and term limits would fix this and most of our nation’s problems which seem to all be linked to our duly elected – then bought and paid for politicians.
Overpriced only when they have a monopoly. When competition is lively Comcast can surprisingly offer their service at much lower rates and retain a profit. Amazing how it all works.
Competition would be wonderful, but building a network capable of delivering gigabytes to its end users is spectacularly expensive. That’s why fiber-to-the-home or office is so rare outside areas that are both more densely populated and more prosperous than the average town in America. Fiber is much more common in other countries, but they typically have high densities and big government subsidies.
Due to the expense, it is almost impossible for a new player to enter an ISP market that already has an incumbent in place. The alternative to a fiber or copper network is wireless, but providing adequate speed to thousands of households (each of which has two 4K TVs running simultaneously) is also very, very expensive.
A government might be able to afford it, which is why the incumbent companies have bought state legislatures to prohibit public ISPs.
The ISP’s would love nothing more than being able to squeeze from consumers $100 for cable TV and another $100 for internet service. Is not just that people are struggling, but they see no way out. On top of that they have retirement to worry about.
Is infowars.com a credible source of news?
No. It is a conspiracy site.
Yes. I mean if you’re comparing to outlets like MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Atlantic, etc.
You be the judge.
Infowars is the site that was pushing the notion that the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary were staged by the U.S. Government. Alex Jones did not adopt the simple theory that federal agents had shot the children and teachers to make a case for taking our guns away. No, he insisted that it was a complete fake. The school had been vacant for years and the “victims” and “bereaved relatives” were played by paid actors.
The power of the Deep State and the depth of danger to the Republic were illustrated by the fact that not a single person with personal knowledge had blown the whistle on this—not even one of the tens of thousands of people who must have been in on the conspiracy (including the entire population of Newtown, Connecticut).
My ISP is named Norbert, I have drinks with him sometimes, he owns the rights to run cables in my building in Warsaw, I pay about $25/month for very fast internet.
Had a client paying $500 per month for 50Mb/s down and 15 up. After Time Warner merged with Charter to form Spectrum, price dropped to $100 per month for 200Mb/s down and 15 up. Not sure what this means.
“…Concerned consumers in the U.S. should contact their elected representatives and demand to know what they are doing to promote competition among ISPs. Without legitimate competition, abuses are guaranteed…”
My elected officials are busy creating sanctuary states, making it legal to vote with no ID, raising taxes in literally every way possible, laughing at businesses that close due to minimum wage, and so on. California. We lead the nation.
Thelonious, I’d get the hell outta there if I were you.
I second that. You need to leave California. I lived there once in my youth. Terrible schools. Repressive taxes. Horrible traffic. The only saving grace for The Golden State is the geography and weather. Liberals and illegals have completely ruined the state.
Finally got AT&T fiber to compete with Comcast where I live. 100 MB upstream and downstream, $120, includes excellent cable package. And Google Fiber is just around the corner, so we will have 3 different internet options competing! Finally.
After this contract runs out, will prolly never sign up for cable again.
The downside to this is how many people will be forced to drop cable in response (who haven’t already) since they can no longer afford it. Unintended consequences. Not many are going to want to pay $200-300 a month for cable and Internet. Fragmentation ain’t just a river in Android Land. Cable channels & apps will (or are) be all over the place and ala carte. Less for more $$$ as many predicted.
I have bonded pair DSL from CenturyLink — I’m getting 100gb down, 10gb up … cut my Comcast bill in half.
The comments are hilarious. “Competition!” Try finding competitors in Montana. There’s a reason the electric cooperatives were made. We need the same structure for broadband, but with the current Republicans, all we can count on is Corporate Profit Uber Alles!
Comcast controls cable TV distribution, not high speed internet. To sacrifice the business that they control in order to compete in the business they don’t control would be suicide. Once they raise the price of interest to the point where people can’t afford TV anymore, consumers will drop Comcast internet in favor of CenturyLink, or ATT, or Verizon, or who ever is cheapest.
A long as they don’t double the prices of bicycle parts, I’m OK.
“Competition is so wonderful and will solve everything.”
Would that be like how gas companies compete against each other and keep prices down?
They are out of their minds, I am paying above $75 for last 3 years currently more as cost to higher speed is not much more as compared to basic, there is no competition, the price hike will come at the expense of dumping tv service if that happens.