Comcast Corp. is planning to walk away from its proposed $45.2 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable Inc., people with knowledge of the matter said, after meeting with opposition from U.S. regulators.
Comcast’s board will meet to finalize the decision on Thursday, and an announcement may come as soon as Friday, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.
Great news for American consumers.
From my personal experience, there is only one cable company WORSE than Time Warner…Comcast!!! I for one will not be shedding a bitter tear on this news bite!
I’ve been quite happy with Time Warner myself… but honestly I don’t have anyone to compare it to except Verizon who had terrible service and told us to use McDonald’s wifi when we tried getting support.
LOL! That’s what we tell sales guys when they bitch that the VPN doesn’t work in their hotel room wifi.
Seconded! I can’t stress enough how god awful Comcast are. THey’re the only option where I live (thanks a lotw city government zoning) so I have no choice. My latency is through the roof, service is intermittently interrupted, and hope to hell you never have to call them for any reason. That’s not including their underhanded move to turn everyone’s modem/router combo into a hotspot without warning (which is why I bought my own modem and I already had a router). I suspect regional monopolies, propped up by local legislators, are the only way they can possibly stay in business. I still say if we want the internet in the US improved, forget harmful things like our pathetic version of net neutrality and dissolve the regional monopolies. These are monopolies, in the truest sense, because they are held in place by our local and sometimes state governments.
(This may come off as bragging, but that’s not my intention. I’m just stating this as a point of comparison.)
My ISP, without telling any of its customers, worked through the last winter to upgrade their networks and now they just without much fanfare more than doubled all of their customers’ connection. There’s a small news item on their website about it, stating things like online gaming, 4k streaming, people running their own game-servers or various cloud-server as the reasons for this upgrading. I went from 100mbps in/10mbps out to 250mbps in/20mbps out, and the monthly fee stays the same.
In similar news, the Finnish government raised again the minimum speed requirement that a teleoperator must offer locally a minimum of 2mbps in within reasonable price-ranges, with the plan of raising the minimum speed annually to 10mbps by 2021.
Similar post with similar intentions…
Our city has municipal fiber (LUS Fiber – Lafayette, LA). It took years of political fighting, beating down a massive astroturfing campaign by the local cable monopoly (Cox), and winning a few lawsuits to get it, but we finally did about 5 years ago and it is frick’n great. Current monthly pricing:
3Mbps – $19.95
25Mbps – $35.95
80Mbps – $54.95
Standalone 1 Gbps – $109.95
1Gbps bundled with TV or phone – $89.95
1Gbps bundled with TV and phone – $69.95
Those are all fully synchronous – people don’t realize how much of a difference this makes, and no data caps. The 3Mbps service it is often much faster than even 15Mbps offered from most cable companies, because they almost always heavily throttle upstream traffic. Any kind of ping-pong type traffic flies on our service, and generally sucks on cable (regardless of the speed). Sub 30ms pings to damn near everything that matters is heaven. No obtrusive firewalling either – they only block SMTP to control spammers (and you can get it unblocked as needed) – you can host websites on it – they don’t care.
On top of that, there is no throttling on in-loop traffic. So traffic between you and any other LUS customer is 1Gbps regardless of your pricing package.
There is no modem, it is fiber to your house. They install a box outside and wire (1 or more) ethernet jacks into your home. They also offer IPTV service with full house DVR, phone service, etc. And there support is absolutely awesome, I usually get a human (a local human) on the line within a minute or two tops – and they usually know what they are doing.
My only point (besides an excuse to brag on our city) is that there are at least a handful of areas of the US that are not stuck with the status quo of shitty broadband… The Google Fiber lottery is not the only answer – all you have to do is get a good mayor and attack the issue head on.
Yeah, I know – harder than it sounds. We got lucky.
You’re lucky. The loser ISPs are all fighting against municipal providers. They want it to be flat out illegal across the board. But then that’s not surprising. They’ve been allowed to rape customers for a long time, why would they want to stop now?
No doubt. They fought us hard. Every dirty trick in the book. We almost lost too. Even though great effort was put into doing everything by the book legally, their lawyers found something (of course) and sued over it. Probably would have won to had they not made a clerical error and filed a brief with the courts too late…
Very lucky indeed.
If you want the whole history (more or less): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUSFiber
Good news would be if both Comcast and TWC were being liquidated.
Edited 2015-04-24 01:05 UTC
As a former Comcast customer, I’d like to say every TWC customer should be thanking their god this didn’t happen. Even commenting on this is pissing me off reminding me of my experience with them.
Now we can expect to see a bunch of bat crap crazy idiots ( by which I mean their capacity for rational thought is not high, not merely that I disagree about a subjective point) who will argue this is some how a bad thing that the government regulation killed this deal.
This is a great thing, because comcast is the most hated company in the country. So it provides a great way for intelligent people inclined to believe that government has no role in regulating our economy, to see that there are some cases where its necessary. It also will cast aspersions on other things the idiots say.
Now, are the idiots saying what they say because they lack the intelligence to see it the other way? Are they being paid by lobbyists/political parties? Are they being used without being paid? I don’t know, but I do know they will be there. And most people of average intelligence and of any political persuasion will see right through them.
No, because Comcast got where it is today by lobbying, and by local legislators doing everything they could to hold up Comcast’s competitors as much as they could. We’d not be in this mess with Comcast where I live if the government had just said no. You know, like that thing they always tell us to do when we’re tempted to do something bad? Well, they could use a little saying no themselves. But hey, Comcast gave them more money, so they didn’t. Now explain again how we’re better off with the government interfeering?
You’re correct in saying that we already don’t have much choice in TV/Internet providers. Reducing the number of companies providing the services wouldn’t have helped anyone.
I really believe if you disagree with this you are either a true libertarian, a shill, or a person of lower intelligence.
While I don’t think that Comcast really cares about it’s customers, I think I’m in the minority of the customer base that is actually happy with Comcast’s service. I don’t have subscribed television through Comcast, but their Internet service has been very stable for me (only 1 real outage that I can remember, less than 3 hours). In my opinion, they are the lesser of evils in the American ISP game. AT&T just doesn’t offer good enough service, and it’s way too expensive. Google Fiber would be nice from a bandwidth standpoint, but I really don’t trust the company further than I can throw them. The real answer is for the FCC to break-up the ISP’s into smaller metropolitan networks, owned like co-ops, or at least by townships.
Comcast is great until you have a problem. We’ve had business class internet and consumer tv. They won’t let us bundle because of the different divisions. We only have business class to get static IPs and run servers (mail, web, etc) for my small BSD project.
Currently, we’re still on a docsis 2 modem/router even though they sold us a 50Mbit upgrade in January when we renewed for 2 years. We’re capped at 37Mbps because of this. We also can no longer stream Netflix traffic. Any attempt to use netflix results in many TCP RST packets coming back. Every other online service works fine.
I never use P2P traffic outside of blizzard patching and we limit our traffic aside from video streaming and light gaming. Most of it is SMTP or WWW traffic related to my BSD project. I know we use a lot of bandwidth but it’s all legit traffic.
Comcast couldn’t find our house to bring us the modem. They tried to shut off our connection due to bad wiring they did. They won’t let me buy my own modem because of the business + static IP setup.
I’m stuck in a 2 year deal and they aren’t honoring their bit.
We don’t have an official cap with our package and they don’t report our usage in the website either. It’s very frustraiting. Further, due to the comcast deal with TWC, they were going to get rid of the detroit market and spin it off with a joint venture with charter. They locked us into the contract so we would still be serviced by them rather than the new company as a way to work around that deal. The sales rep told us as much.
SitrucKram,
Maybe, but lobbyists have succeeded in having municipal ISPs banned in many states. It doesn’t look good but some municipalities are trying to fight back by petitioning the FCC to overturn the state bans on their right to deploy public internet.
http://consumerist.com/2014/09/03/att-municipal-broadband-should-be…
I had not seen these maps before today, it’s amazing how precisely these companies deploy their networks such that there won’t be any competition for consumers:
http://consumerist.com/2014/03/07/heres-what-lack-of-broadband-comp…
Edited 2015-04-24 16:52 UTC
Here’s my guess:
Thanks to the recent rulings for equal pole access from the FCC, TimeWarner can no longer rely on antiquated rules which denied competitors fair access to install competing infrastructure.
Thanks to the FCC rulings, Comcast will be able to _compete_ with (and marginalize) TWC while adding new customers for far cheaper than the $45.2 billion purchase price.
Edited for correct price.
Edited 2015-04-24 17:52 UTC