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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

In the US do people really pay hundreds of dollars a month for cable? I could never in a million years justify spending that much for entertainment like that when you can get internet for £30 and Netflix for £6, and we're famously overcharged in the UK I thought!

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Comcast have a large monopoly here, I only have one choice of high speed internet provider. They charge me $110/month. This gets me hundreds of TV channels and HBO, which I don't want and I have never used. If I buy the "internet only" package, they downgrade from 100Mbps down to 5Mbps.

Comcast + Verizon are essentially a criminal cartel.

In a civilised country the government would force Comcast to share infrastructure and would set maximum prices regarding what they can charge for it.

My parents pay Comcast $219/month for cable TV (with HBO/Showtime/Netflix) + internet + landline. I've told them multiple times that this seems outrageously high but they're remarkably blasé about it.

> $219/month

This is effectively a small second mortgage. That is absolutely bonkers.

Just a thought what does attending a play, movie, or sporting event cost. On a per hour basis, cable TV is cheap.

I really hope that the cord cutting alternates start to drive prices down from the legacy satellite and cable providers. It seems they haven't yet.

It must be a generational thing. Most boomers I know must absolutely have their deluxe cable plans. A lot of them grew up with TV being a very important part of their routine, and now many of them have lots of free time now that their kids have left the house.

Yes, sadly. ....b/c Comcast, ATT, and a few others have been allowed to control all the pipes (including access to the internet). Most places only have two options. Where I live it is either Comcast or ATT. So if you want to "cut-the-cord" on cable guess what...you are still going to pay one of those two companies for the internet. ...And guess what if you don't buy a bundled (tv+internet) package? then the individual price of internet only goes up ...and comes with bandwidth limits (ie overage fees). Solution? Buy the fast internet option, bundled with lowest TV package (literally emergency services level tv). Cost $70 month @100mps with unlimited bandwith (b/c you now have a bundle). Then add a SlingTV package. Couldn't be happier with this setup. The Sling package is even better than the cable package I had before. Still....all the hoops to jump through is ABSURD.

The cable ISPs can and will gate higher speeds (think anything even halfway tolerable) behind "triple play" packages.

Which company does that? There aren't any plans like that in my area. Both Comcast and Verizon have gigabit a la carte here.

In regions where you don't have that choice (no alternatives at all), IIRC Comcast will top out around 300/5 or 100/5.

It must be awesome. I live in the 'ritzy' part of a capital city. I have 150/5 from Comcast, or 40Mb dsl not sure the upload) from Centurytel. I am really hopeful for 5g, or even Starlink. I really want more upload bandwidth.

Do they offer higher speeds with a triple-play? That's what I was questioning.

My point wasn't that I have good speeds. My point is that you can get the same speeds a la carte as you can with a package.

Where do you get internet for £30 a month, if I may ask?

Given I have to have a BT line installed, I can't get internet for less than £45 a month unless I untether and go Mobile only (which I'm sorely tempted to, because F— BT).

I think 20 Mbps unlimited TalkTalk is just £20 a month including a line?

https://www.zen.co.uk/broadband/superfast-fibre-broadband

Huh, now there's a name I've not heard in a while!

Thanks for this - £30/35, line rental included? And a static IP? And a lifetime guarantee of static prices (unlike BT's bi-annual price creep to cover their purchase of football-coverage rights or whatever other bullshit it is I have no interest in)?

I think they'll have new customer soon...

I do pay for cable still as part of an internet bundle, definitely not hundreds per month. The #1 reason is because the Orioles (maryland baseball team) are only available through cable packages — the games aren’t broadcast over the air, they created a network and it will only sell to cable companies, no internet streaming, etc. It’s miserable, almost as miserable as actually watching the games.

Same here. If I want to watch the Mariners on TV inside Seattle, I pay a TV provider. I do, so I do.

I don’t mind it very much because I get deals on the handful of streaming services I use so the bundle rate for TV isn’t much of an added entertainment expense. The value I get is a suitable exchange and I don’t have a visceral “I will never pay a cable company one red cent ever again” feeling so it works out acceptably for me.

Yes people pay a lot in US for Cable TV and also for health care and post secondary education. A lot less for gasoline/petrol grocery in general. IMO there is no general systemic reason for this. It is just whichever supplier came in first they decided they can extract this much money from consumers and it became norm.

Notice how the things you listed as cheap have lots of competition.

The expensive things have government granted monopolies or psuedo-monopolies.

And before anyone says healthcare providers don't have a monopoly, it that case, the insurers have a defacto monopoly due to the enormous regulatory moat that was built around them.

Yeah, my rate started cheap, and then even after the promotional rate, it just kept creeping up. When it hit $250, I said enough is enough, and cut the cord. At this point, I've saved thousands. Having 3 major streaming services AND the internet is expensive enough, but not as expensive, and the price is more stable.

America is a large country. Cities and towns are large and expensive to wire up. So in the early days a lot of cities granted exclusive contracts to the phone and cable utilities in return for making the effort of wiring everyone up, not just the neighborhoods that were more likely to afford it.

Those monopolies (cough cough, sorry, franchise agreements) are now coming back to bite the consumers because, lo and behold, you can't string up fiber in a town that has an exclusive cable television franchise granted to another company. You're letting people view TV over fiber internet? That's a TV service and you're violating the agreement.

So no competition means high prices. Hopefully the advanced wireless technologies will break some of that hold, but it's not quite there yet.

I think the people that pay "hundreds of dollars" are people with large houses that need like 6 cable boxes all over the place, each with it's own dvr and whatever.

30 pounds is not really overcharged. This is 34€, I pay 45€ for 1Gbps/300Mbps fiber.

There are cheaper offers, but they will be of that order.

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