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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

But what does it mean to "cut the cord"? If your IP connection is still coming from Comcast/Verizon/Time Warner, you've still got a cord and a corresponding bill.

The real question to me is whether the cable providers can turn $150 "Triple Play" (phone/internet/TV) bills into $150 IP-only bills. If I were them, I'd keep prices on the 'next generation' (100Mbit+) of IP-only plans very close to those that include traditional TV service, and offer bundles of discounted (unmetered?) third party services. "Cutting the cord" won't save you very much money as long as there's minimal competition in the physical infrastructure.

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I never took the "cord" in cord cutting to be quite so literal.

What I hope (and of course it's not by any means a done deal) is that the content producers are going to be coming out from under the control of those who own the last mile distribution.

That's why net neutrality is so important. If HBO has to ask permission of Time Warner for me to access HBO Now then we've gained nothing. With it, we can expect more competition, variety and choice of content.

I hope.

I know where you were going with your example, but amusingly you chose Time Warner, who actually owns HBO. Which illustrates a totally different problem in the IPtv world. :)

In your example a better choice would be Comcast.

Nice catch, and pretty funny.

Time Warner Inc. (the content company that owns HBO, Warner Bros., etc.) and Time Warner Cable (in the process of being acquired by Charter) are 2 separate companies, so his example was actually fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Warner_Cable

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Warner

The telecoms fight this because they don't want to become just a "dump pipe" that delivers data to you. At that point, their product/service has been commoditized and it's a race to the bottom.

Considering the options out there cord cutting may not be they best financial choice for some customers. Be careful because its easy to saddle yourself with forty to fifty plus dollars a month of selected content.

And they can keep playing that game, because at some point millennials will be tired of paying for stuff they don't want and old enough to finally make municipal broadband a real thing across this country.

$150 IP-only bills

That is only going to happen if they can maintain monopoly pricing. Which is gradually being chiselled away at; maybe the US will even invent LLU.

Why wouldn't LLU have the same effect in the U.S. on cable that it had on DSL, namely causing essentially all investment in higher-bandwidth infrastructure to cease?

It was my understanding that DSL was at or around its theoretical maximum anyways in most places.

Gradually chiselled away? Where???

In my suburb of Boston, both Verizon Fios and Comcast have been available for a few years now.

Neither one has lowered its prices one cent.

The only positive change was a relatively minor increase in downstream (but not upstream) speeds for the same package price at Comcast.

Duopoly is usually not enough to foster real competition.

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