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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

The whole idea of "cord cutting" hurting cable is insane. If you don't subscribe to cable and you subscribe to internet based streaming services, you're still getting content delivered to your home via either a cable "cord" or the phone company. Netflix at most gets $12/month per subscriber. Comcast will get $80 - $110/month for internet service. Comcaast also has either no competitors in their market or at most one.

Comcast owns NBC and bunch of cable companies and has an ownership stake in Hulu. Comcast gets your money either way.

Netflix has to spend money on content and only has one way to recoup the cost -- subscriptions. Comcast also produces content via its TV and movie studios but makes money off of content via broadcast networks, cable companies, video on demand, and licensing to streaming companies and pay tv.

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> The whole idea of "cord cutting" hurting cable is insane. If you don't subscribe to cable and you subscribe to internet based streaming services, you're still getting content delivered to your home via either a cable "cord" or the phone company.

Right now, people pay $150+ for a package with all the TV channels, while you can get the broadband for $50 or so. Cable companies could dramatically raise prices on the basic broadband service to compensate. But that’s not going to fly in this next generation with 5G and satellite competition.

The average Netflix user watches 600 hours per year, or 50 per month. HEVC is 1.5 gigs per hour for 4K, so that’s under 100 GB per month. If data caps for 5G increase at about the same pace as for 4G, wireless data caps will be within that range within five years. Heck, AT&T’s fixed wireless is already at 160 GB per month. And Verizon has publicly stated its 5G service wonkt have the kind of data caps its 4G service has: https://www.pcmag.com/news/357374/verizon-no-4g-level-data-c....

The idea that cable providers can raise prices to compensate for lost TV revenue is predicated on the assumption that there are no alternatives. That assumption ignores just how much bandwidth 5G gives you to play with.

Comcast has hiked standalone broadband to $75 - http://stopthecap.com/2017/12/21/75-month-broadband-pricing-...

Interestingly, you can get a cheaper promotional rate if you bundle local TV channels (cheaper than $75/month for both internet + tv) so Comcast can inflate its video subscriber (to boost their stock price) amount and they hope you forget you're on a promotional rate your bill jumps $30-40 after you drop off promo. You're free to negotiate (most people do) to get back on the promo rate; many people have success with this, but it's just a cat/mouse game and a hassle.

And Comcast also has a 1TB monthly usage cap. When the era of 2160p + HDR arrives in the next few years, people will chew through that cap rather quickly.

Comcast will continue to jack up standalone broadband prices to hedge against fleeing video subscribers. Why? Because they can, and have very little competition in most markets.

> Comcast will continue to jack up standalone broadband prices to hedge against fleeing video subscribers. Why? Because they can, and have very little competition in most markets.

That's coming from the perspective of an HN reader, for whom wireless isn't "competition." (I get it, I've got two fiber lines to my house; 3 gigabits total. My daughter uses it to stream Magic Schoolbus.) But for the typical user, 5G wireless services (say 50-100 mbps with 100GB data cap) is going to be enough. We're already at 15% of households making $100k+ ditching wired Internet for 4G. That number is growing, and will explode when 5G service rolls out.

My Comcast went down yesterday for about 18 hours (I have zero other options at my apartment for high speed Internet) and I tried tethering on Verizon LTE to play some games. Latency was between 60ms and ~900ms with some random disconnects. This is in TF2, which runs on the Source engine. Anything above about 400ms is pretty unplayable.

Bandwidth caps are yet another issue. 4G is NOT a suitable alternative for me today, and won’t be in the foreseeable future. Maybe if I had a dedicated antenna transceiver on the roof (also not allowed at most apartments) and they massively upgraded tower capacity had a 10-100x increase in bandwidth caps, but....I’m not holding my breath. If Verizon can keep getting >$100/mo ARPU providing 5GB of data with Comcast getting the same for providing 1TB and both have monopoly / duopoly conditions, they have no incentives to compete or upgrade their infrastructure.

There is aggregated data on this, based on millions of data points: https://opensignal.com/reports/2018/01/usa/state-of-the-mobi.... Average latency for all four carriers is under 70 ms.

As to bandwidth caps: for $100 including fees, you get unlimited on Verizon, which has a 22 GB soft cap per line (in practice, you can use way beyond that).

Your point about duopoly is completely divorced from facts. The cell carriers are in a market with four competitors, and invest massively in infrastructure (tens of billions of dollars a year). Cellular has improve way faster than many other areas of technology over the last decade. 10 years ago, I had a Core 2 polycarbonate Macbook and AT&T 3G service. The former is still a perfectly serviceable computer (the new Macbook is maybe twice as fast). But my Verizon LTE is probably 10-20 times faster than my 3G service.

What else do you use that is 10 times better than it was a decade ago? Google Search? Gmail? Facebook? iOS?

>> What else do you use that is 10 times better than it was a decade ago? Google Search? Gmail? Facebook? iOS?

Heh, ironically, the "wired" internet is surely 10X or more faster than a decade ago. Anecdotally, I have a 1 Gbps connection now; year or two ago I had a 250 Mbps connection, and 2-3 years prior to that it was 50Mbps. Ten years ago it was, what, 5Mbps or 2Mbps.

You (and I) are one of the lucky few who live in area with gigabit internet. The average speed is 55Mbps (https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-data-...).

But the price of cellular data has come way down. For instance when the iPad was first introduced, it was only available in the US on AT&T and was $25 for 2Gb of data per month. Now I'm paying an extra $20 a month on T-mobile for unlimited data for my iPad.

The cellular iPad wasn't even worth it for me until I could get unlimited data for $20. For that amount the extra convenience of not having to tether and basically having a second phone is worth it since you can get and receive regular phone calls to your paired cell number from an iPad even if your phone is dead.

Nice. Myself, I did not see price drops -- I've been paying ~ $100/mo for cell phone plan (5GB data) for some years now -- 3 years at least maybe 5 years or more.

In the US?

I pay a total of $180 a month for 5 phone lines unlimited data on each + an iPad, unlimited 512Kbps tethering on each + 10Gb of high speed tethering on one for my son who uses his cell phone for his only internet. This is with T-mobile. They also throw in a family Netflix plan (4 simultaneous streams) with it.

Canada. Looks like unlimited cell data plans are not a thing here, at least not yet.

Wireless can't compete because if everyone is on wireless, it will be dead slow, unless you make the cell size incredibly small. Small cell sizes require far more radio towers (often a non-option anyway due to zoning restrictions). And even if you do get microcells setup on traffic lights every half mile, you will then need the last mile infrastructure that comcast has for backhaul, unless you want to build your own land network. So I don't see the competitive advantage over another company just coming in with landline.

The other idea for small cells is femtocells, but in that situation you are running traffic over home internet connections so it is definitely not a way to cut out comcast.

Even at 5G speeds and 100 GB data caps, home internet being run over wireless would completely overload most of our current wireless infrastructure. The cell sizes are just too large for that kind of capacity.

Small cells will be a critical part of 5G deployment. The FCC is projecting they’ll need to approve ten times as many cell sites for 5G as have been approved to date for all previous technologies. They’re working to reduce the regulatory barriers to doing that: https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/22/fcc-votes-to-streamline-5...

Small cells are still way cheaper than building land line. I had Comcast run fiber to my house recently, and it was very interesting to see the process play out. Aside feom waiting months for a permit, running fiber along the main street was quick. Running it down my weird little side street took just as long as running it half a mile down the main road. And running it through my yard took just as much time as that. Getting rid of the last 1,000 feet is a huge benefit.

I'd argue that with more than two people in a household and everyone switching to streaming services, you'll need to offer at least 400-500GB data caps for fixed wireless 5G.

Several of my renters are single, and their streaming usage for an individual is ~450GB/month.

You need 400-500GB to accommodate who? According to Comcast, median Xfinity data usage in 2H 2017 was 131 GB: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/data-usage-average-.... That's going to be squarely within the range of 5G (analysts are guessing around 200GB caps at first). Also, expect to see video content be zero-rated (it makes technical sense--watching Netflix from one of Netflix's co-located CDNs puts a lot less load on the network).

Remember, 5G doesn't need to be an alternative for everybody to wreck the ability to raise prices to compensate for lost TV revenue.

> According to Comcast, median Xfinity data usage in 2H 2017 was 131 GB

Given their recent push for data caps (and make money off of overages), I'm sceptical of their numbers. They have a pretty obvious incentive to misrepresent (if not understate outright) the value to make their caps appear generous.

Also, is median (same as 50th percentile, right?) really the right statistic to consider? I'm not sure any one number is sufficiently meaningful, as the shape of the graph can be particularly informative.

More importantly, how has that changed over time, as compared with the penetration of 4K TVs versus 1080p ones (or the availability of 4K content or some similar metric)?

Conversely, I think mobile data is also more likely to be significant as competition in multi-person households, even with the caps you mention, because those have a chance of being per person/handset (absent family/share plans), while Comcast is likely to be one cap per household no matter how many people/screens stream at one time.

Agreed, I think the histogram would be bimodal, split between people that solely watch cable TV and cord-cutters that solely stream.

For comparison, in Sweden right now you can get a 500 GB cap 4G broadband plan for $50/mo.

I currently pay Comcast $35/month in suburban Chicago for 25/4 (down/up). This is without a contract. With 12-month contract is $25/month.

All of the major cell carriers are already offering unlimited internet with SD video streaming. My older son doesn't have home internet service at all. He streams everything either from his phone or his PS4 and tethers from his phone. That's good enough for him.

Right now, people pay $150+ for a package with all the TV channels, while you can get the broadband for $50 or so

I pay $70 a month for AT&T's gigabit internet and on top of that I pay $35 for DirecTVNow and $12 a month for Hulu without commercials. I would be paying $13 a month for Netflix, but it is free with T-mobile.

The actual price of TV service is a wash. I won't go back to TV via the cable company because of the BS fees -- cable box rental (for us it would be $50), Broadcast Access, Sports Access, Regulatory fees (that aren't mandatory government fees) add up to another $80.

On top of that DirecTVNow+Hulu is a lot more flexible. We can watch from anywhere. That's a big deal for my wife. She has a split shift and when she isn't at the gym she can catch up on TV on her phone.

70 + 35 + 12 = 120/ month that's much cheaper than cable + internet. A 1 GB connection is also overkill for just about anyone.

Yes 1Gbps up and down is overkill. In the real world, (outside of speed tests) the best I was able to get was around 100Mbps u/d when connecting to my company's colo via VPN after business hours. Even Amazon limits my connection to my AWS resources to around 70Mbps.

WiFi the best I can get is around 400/400 when standing right by the router on either my phone or laptops.

Video needs at most 20Mbps and I don't know how much bandwidth that my son's PS4 or Xbox can't take advantage of.

Every bedroom in our house, the living room, the gym, and my office are wired. But my 3rd Gen AppleTVs only have 100Mbps connections, my Roku sticks/TVs are WiFi and only the game systems, my computers in the office and my one 4th Gen AppleTV actually have wired gig-e connections.

On the other hand, the gigabit plan is the only one that doesn't have a cap.

But if I had XFinity (thank God I don't) even thier gigabit Service is limited to 35Mbps upload.

A basic HD cable package on top of my old Comcast Internet subscription added MAYBE $20 to the cost of my Internet plan due to the bundle discount. Oh, and Comcast threw in HBO for free, which is worth about $15 a month.

To get the equivalent channel access as such a service, you've got to pay for YouTube TV or PlayStation Vue or the like, and you're looking at $40 a month there.

Obviously, prices vary by where you are, but in a lot of cases, cord cutting actually removes efficiency. And note that Netflix is rapidly abandoning the "buy all content" model in favor of just having it's own shows. So you'll need Netflix + Hulu + CBS All Access + Disney's new service, etc.

True, Netflix had the first mover advantage, but that's about it. Netflix will not have most of the entertainment content that is available in the world. As long as people have diverse interests, they have to continue paying subscription costs in one way or the other; instead of cable subscriptions it will be streaming subscriptions.

Is that a straight $20 or $20 + Broadcast fee, regulatory fee, cable box rental, "HD Technology Fee"....

Inclusive. It used to be cheaper to have TV than to not have TV because of the bundle discount (which is why I had initially gotten it, despite never watching TV on the actual box), particularly before I upgraded to HD. The broadcast and regional sports fees are really what brought it up to costing an extra $20 or so, they raised those fees a lot in the last couple years.

(Insert pet peeve about paying a regional sports fee if I don't watch sports here.)

> The idea that cable providers can raise prices to compensate for lost TV revenue is predicated on the assumption that there are no alternatives.

Which is increasingly correct, since the same entities that sre cable operators not only largely own the fixed consumer internet connections, they also largely own the mobile broadband providers and satellite broadband providers, and, even if they didn't own the pipes, they own a lot and are in the process of buying up more of the video content channels and the content itself.

No, it’s increasingly less correct. Right now, Verizon and AT&T don’t compete with each other, or with Comcast in most places. With 5G, you’ll have 3-4 entities offering broadband in almost every market.

I’ll believe it when I see it. I very much doubt that the incumbents will let that happen, be it through legal chicanery or otherwise.

The TV channels cost massive amounts to the cable company, too, though. Internet prices wouldn't have to change much. Comcast is a particularly special case because they own a bunch of channels (NBC Universal), though - others have much smaller footprints.

But agreed that the realistic threat isn't Netflix or Youtube or Sling or Hulu, it's wireless broadband. I'm not as optimistic as you, though, based on my experience with cell phone service in my apartments. :|

Really curious to see the technology that develops in response to the latency introduced by wireless internet.

I'm not familiar with domains that have a huge dependency on latency other than high frequency trading (who are already next door), but I imagine it's a problem we'll have to solve at some point.

Wireless latency is not bad at all. It’s already not noticeable on LTE (around 20 ms) and on 5G the air interface latency will be less than what’s added on the transit network.

Netflix 4K is "up to 7GB per hour", so likely 5-7GB on average. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87

I pay my provider (in Germany) 29 EUR/Month, and that's for a premium offering (it's actually a business contract, not a consumer one).

Sooner or later, despite the ridiculous monopolies, the lobbying power, the borderline illegal obstacles to newcomers, regardless of how deeply entrenched they are, these ridiculous $100/month providers will eventually be disrupted.

So I see Comcast's revenue source under a considerably more realistic threat than Netflix's. Moreover, both have fixed costs but I'm sure Comcast's are higher, having to maintain tons of last mile connections to individual homes.

So yeah, that multiplier disparity may be excessive, but not by much. If Comcast hadn't invested in Hulu, some might even had considered the disparity too small.

People are always comparing ISP offerings in Europe/Japan to the US and saying it doesn’t make sense, but the scale of deploying service are just not the same.

US: 9.8 million km^2, 33 ppl/square km

Germany: 350 000 km^2, 231 ppl/square km

Average population density is borderline meaningless, it's the distribution that counts. A single cable between long stretches of nothing won't be the deciding cost factor, it's the net that has to be weaved afterwards. (Although - without having hard data - I'd guess that US-style sprawling suburbia is quite expensive to provide for..)

These prices are not valid outside of the higher density neighborhoods (by German measurements). You won't get that Internet outside of a settlement. Yes, theoretically the cost of connecting smaller villages/town that are rather isolated to the next fiber hub is much more noticeable, but as long as you don't service a location where you can't get at least 1k homes from a single fiber hub with 'normal' 10km transceivers over single mode cable, bill the cable to the customer as a setup fee (1$/m should be feasible, and you can split the cost if you can share part of the distance between multiple customers, by splicing the customer lines to a trunk cable), and buy reasonably priced peering. Maybe bill at a like 80% or 90% peak billing (traffic get's averaged over 5 min time slots, the 20%-10% highest ones get ignored, and the maximum speed left after that gets billed at x$/(Mbit/s), each month. This makes it clear that it's only expensive to provide the Internet speed if it's not sufficiently averaged out over time.

But regardless, serving anything with a population density high enough for car-price-competitive bus service of once per hour, walking distance max. 10min, between 7am and 9pm, should not be more expensive than Germany. At least if you can get fiber deployed without superfluous fees enacted by NIMBYs. E.g., along other occasions where the street get's dug up.

Look at a US population density map some time. Cable services are provided where people are, not evenly distributed across the country.

Comcast makes $5 per subscriber in profits per month. Netflix with $12 per month revenue might end up making $5 in profits pretty soon. That is all that matters.

Also Netflix is not a Comcast competitor. Healthy Comcast network helps Netflix too. It is like saying SpaceX is bigger than Disney. Comparison makes no sense.

Netflix is not gonna hurt cable as much as ipod did not hurt FM radio. So I think people need to take a chill pill.

Netflix can have users world-wide, while Comcast's non-content-business is restricted to certain geographic areas. That matters.

Also, the comparison makes sense as long as Comcast is purporting to be anything other than a dumb pipe.

It's frequently the case than an industry gets disrupted by a company that's "not a competitor".

As for me, I stopped listening to FM radio when I got an ipod. Not a competitor? Uhuh.

Pretty sure you are arguing that NFLX is way overvalued. If so, I agree. The point about gross margin is what many have missed here.

For a few of us with non cable pure internet ISPs at least, we really are cutting the cable. I use Webpass in SF, which does building to building microwave beaming and gigabit fiberoptics and that’s it... it’s plain and simple internet without TV or service bundling of any kind. Big cable hasn’t received a penny from me and if I can help it, never will.

Comcast owns NBC and bunch of cable companies. If you watch any of the networks they own or if you wtch anything produced by Universal, they are still making money from you.

Key detail; not as much as they would if you subscribed to cable.

One difference with cord-cutting vs. Comcast (et al) is that I have no idea how to watch sports on broadcast unless I come across it randomly channel surfing.

That is, for me, it's not about money so much as control over distractions in my home. People have been clamoring for a la carte cable for years if not decades, and since the cable services either decline or are unable to provide this, technology finds a way.

The $5-10 (or whatever) per subscriber that ESPN gets in kickbacks is commercially offensive to me (and who knows how much they get from home shopping providers), but if there's a way where I can avoid that whole thing, well that's worth the same amount I might otherwise give a cable company that would just as soon shovel a bunch of garbage I don't care about into my programming guide.

My solution to this is to realize that this is exactly why modern broadcast sports even exist; as a means to make money. All of the rivalries, drama, and theatre around it exists to reinforce the idea that you must watch to see who wins the Big Shiny this season. This ruins the fun of watching skilled humans competing in a game for me; they might as well have Slurpee straws as sticks, Oscar Meyer hotdogs as skates, bat around a Coke bottle into a Doritos net while skying over a giant Chipotle burrito with 14 different LED screens showing various logos. We’re not far off from this right now; big sports is an assault of advertising on the senses, and people PAY to go, clamor for “access” to watch it on TV, put up with hostile “blackout” policies, and buy tons of memorabilia. If we could get that many people to care about something that actually mattered, the world would be a better place. I really hope that my generation ends up killing this brand of professional sports.

One difference with cord-cutting vs. Comcast (et al) is that I have no idea how to watch sports on broadcast unless I come across it randomly channel surfing.

In 2018, why the heck is it that I can't click on something to indicate, "I want to watch this," then I get a notification when it airs, and have a list of shows/events now available to watch? If media companies want their advertisements to be worthwhile, why don't they get their act together and do this?

A la carte cable was a "grass is greener on the other side" thing. People asked why they pay $60 a month for 100 channels if they only watch a handful.

Now you can buy Netflix, Hulu, HBO, CBS All Access, Disney whatever, etc. each for $10 a month. You still end up paying $60 a month, but now you get six channels instead of 100.

You still end up paying $60 a month, but now you get six channels instead of 100.

And 94% of Comcast channels are trash. I have no problems with people who subscribe to Comcast based on the number of channels they carry, though. Personally, I don't need hardly any of them.

There’s also the difference of OTT services showing less ads, letting you watch what you want when you want, and having much more variety than a single channel. It’s not a valid comparison.

This isn't really true at all. When I had Comcast, I used their streaming website, which provided on demand access to any channel on their lineup you were subscribed to. Ad content was about on par with other online services.

My new ISP relies more heavily on individual channel streaming sites rather than hosting their own central portal for it, but again, the on demand experience is more or less the same I was familiar with from Hulu, CBS All Access, and other online sites I've used.

In fact, if there is any issues with the comparison, it'd be that a real TV service will let you watch things live if you want to, whereas streaming sites often won't carry something until the day after. And if you get a DVR, you can hold live TV almost indefinitely, whereas on demand services tend to expire shows after several weeks.

Hulu and CBS All Access have an ad free tier. I had CBS All Access when I had Sling but DirecTVNow has all of the networks live in my market (NBC,ABC,CBS, Fox, CW) I could deal with the ads and awful on demand features of DTVNow for the one or two shows I watch on CBS. For everything else I have Hulu and the Cwl

I still contend that in many ways, traditional cable subscriptions offer more for your dollar than a pile or cord cutter products. At the very least, the competition is closer than one might be led to believe.

Funny enough: My friends who never see television ads, I sometimes feel like they miss out on a lot of meme-worthy things. Sometimes I'll reference a commercial (like Grammarly, which is pasted all over YouTube), and people don't know what I'm talking about. It's weird. As annoying as ads are, they've become a significant part of our culture and it's odd when people don't see them.

Imagine if you happened to not know what the Geico gecko was or have heard the commercial from which the pronunciation "diabeetus" came from.

I'm a cable cutter (I refuse to call myself a cord cutter), but I agree. I would have Netflix regardless of whether I had cable or not but I wouldn't have DirecTVNow or Hulu ($47/month) even with the bogus fees and when you consider the bundled discounts, cable is not a bad deal for most people. My dad came up and he fell in love with my Roku TV so I got him one for Father's Day. I had to go down and set it up for him because between the individual TVAnywhere logins, the flaky WiFi (they have both slow DSL and cable internet service long story), it was really confusing for him.

On top of that, they understand when cable goes out it just happens. But if thier internet went out and they couldn't watch TV, they would be really frustrated. Besides they live in a small town with a 150GB cap on thier DSL and a 300GB cap on thier cable internet. My family blew right through that when we stayed with them for the summer.

Not sure this is a fair comparative metric. One could argue that filtering on theme (crime dramas, docs, etc.) are effectively channels. More accurate comparison would be content count or hours of programming. I've not had cable in 3 years and between HBO, Netflix, and Amazon I don't ever feel like I'm at a loss for content.

And all of the networks offer most of their content free on the web a week after it airs without signing in, in the case of CW, within a day.

If you add the corresponding channels to Plex, you can watch them without commercials. Plex channels scrape the content from the official web channels in real time so while the networks may not like it, to the websites it looks just like you are viewing it on the web so it wouldn't be considered "piracy"

Are you confident this is still the case? I was watching CW shows on their website this week, and had to sign in with my cable provider to stream the full episodes. I've seen this as fairly hit or miss.

Absolutely sure.

For instance. This is the latest episode of The Flash. No login required. It's usually available the next morning

http://www.cwtv.com/shows/the-flash/

Many channels do not filter on "theme". Major networks like CBS, ABC, NBC, etc. are a good example of this.

Best article I've read about the topic....

http://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-a...

Or TiVo, or the internet. I'm not sure how this is different from how you watch sports on cable unless you come across it randomly. Either way you need to find a schedule somewhere?

Comcast has a very capital-heavy business, and their biggest competitor is the cell network.

They have poor customer sentiment, and their existing capital is an aging dinosaur waiting to die.

I would think delivering content over the internet point to point would be more expensive than cable since cable is multicast. Netflix has higher marginal cost and Comcast has higher fixed costs that can be spread among more customers.

Comcast has to constantly transmit all the channels, no matter who's watching. And their fixed costs are rather large. How many thousands of $$ does it cost to put up & maintain a single street's worth of cable? And how much can you recoup from that, especially when you have a massively variable amount of money coming from each customer (including 0 for those on the street who don't subscribe). Plus the license fees for all those channels..

Netflix can also multi-home closer to their customers to reduce bandwidth costs. Comcast is stuck burying cable.

In even a moderately lower middle class neighborhood, I would think that the majority of people have cable or internet. It's not like thier is much competition.

Some apartment complexes and even HOAs force all of the tenants/homeowners to pay for internet + TV.

When I stayed in an apartment part of the lease agreement was that you had to pay $100 for a cable + Internet package and then had to pay more for extra boxes, etc. the complex racked on the minimum payment as part of rent then you paid any overage to Comcast.

We had a 300MB cap and the only way we could get internet without a cap when they first started was to get a business account. But you still had to pay the mandated $100 for cable to the apartment complex and then had to pay extra for the business account. We moved shortly afterward.

One of the requirements when we were looking for a house was that Comcast was not the only option.

http://www.condoassociation.com/blog/is-cable-tv-contract-wi...

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2010-08-19/business/os-c...

> and their biggest competitor is the cell network.

This! Mobile data plans will make WiFi and cables obsolete.

It's hurting Comcast's TV business, not Comcast's ISP business. But they try to rip Internet users off to compensate for their declining TV profits (because of very poor competition and monopolistic position of Comcast as ISP in many places). That's exactly what they are doing by jacking up Internet plans prices, pushing nonsense data caps and so on.

They admitted as much themselves: https://www.mediaplaynews.com/comcasts-solution-to-video-sub...

Not sure where you get the monthly internet pricing from but my 250MB Comcast is $59.99 a month and 150MB Frontier is $40 a month.

After fees, taxes and all of the bullshit increases year after year, Comcast charges me 107$/month for 25mb (yeah, I'm not forgetting a zero). They have no competition where I am (the competitor serves across the street but won't do our building even though we agreed to fund the infrastructure).

Advertised rate is half that. It's a scam.

Two choices for high speed, wired internet? Outside of a few major cities, that’s actually very rare.

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