How to Eliminate Two Monopolies in One Day
By: BJ Lawson
Many of our friends have commented on poor customer service provided by our two local communications monopolies, Time Warner Cable and AT&T (formerly Bell South). Over the past few years, we have increasingly resented the monthly cable and telephone bills, and last month we finally took the initiative to do something about it.
We have long been displeased with cable television, and the fact that we pay $120 per month to have hundreds of garbage-ridden channels pumped into our house so that we can access the six or seven we occasionally watch. We’d heard reports that AT&T was going to be offering individual channel pricing for television service, and had been waiting for the opportunity to switch over the past year.
However, that promised offering from AT&T never materialized, so we had settled for just eliminating our landline telephone, and signing up with Time Warner digital phone and a downgraded cable plan to keep our overall cable bill the same. That would save us about $40 per month, and eliminate one source of poor customer service.
I spent 48 minutes on a telephone call with Time Warner trying to accomplish that switch, and finally was able to get a package worked out that met our financial goals. The customer service representative scheduled us for their first available phone installation, about two weeks later. However, after hanging up the phone, we found that our cable and internet service had been cut off. I then spent another 52 minutes on the phone, transferred through various levels of technical support, only to find out that the first Time Warner representative had canceled our existing service in setting up these changes.
So after two hours of phone menus, hold music, and staring at the ceiling, all I had accomplished was disconnecting our cable and Internet for the next two weeks. There had to be a better way, and Time Warner wasn’t it.
A friend then mentioned a wireless broadband provider named Clearwire. Since quality customer service is so important to us, I wasn’t going to commit to their service blindly over the Internet. Fortunately, we have a friendly wireless store around the corner, Future Wireless. I called them up, and they happily provided a demonstration unit to validate that Clearwire would work in our house.
Briefly, Clearwire uses cellular towers to provide high-speed wireless Internet access. For less than we were paying for our cable modem, we received a simple antenna with five lights that show the signal strength. I picked up the demonstration unit, placed it next to a window, plugged it into a wall outlet and our wireless router, and we were instantly live with high-speed Internet. It couldn’t have been easier.
For us, it’s been a perfect solution. I’ve spoken with a few folks since who did not have good reception with Clearwire, so I highly recommend working with friendly folks such as Jody and Rob at Future Wireless on NC-55 to try before you buy. We then added Internet phone (VOIP) from Packet8, which gives us unlimited local and long distance calling for $200 per year (prepaid).
Honestly, we haven’t missed Time Warner or AT&T at all. Telecommunications, like medicine, is about as far from a free market as you can imagine, and the slowly-eroding monopolies providing local service have little incentive to care about their customers.
The best way consumers can fight back against these monopolies is not to press for more regulation — that just makes the problem worse, as customers ultimately pay the compliance costs for bureaucratic mandates. The best way we can fight back is to advocate for more choices and competition, and to stop empowering businesses that don’t earn your business. Pull the plug — you’ll discover that you can survive, and thrive, without cable television.