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Comment by blackearl | Hacker News Reader

Same as any other monopolistic company. Comcast isn't necessarily good at providing internet, in fact most of their customers would say they're shit at it. But most people don't have a choice.

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Most people can choose only phone company or cable company for internet (some people only get 1 or the other).

There are LOTS of search engines to choose from that are freely available. DuckDuckGo is pretty great these days.

Microsoft is even is making a search engine now, I've heard! /s

Google has a near monopoly on search which is unrelated to their competence serving adds.

So, Google could theoretically be terrible at advertising and yet still make insane profits from it. Just as Comcast’s internal IT systems might be a mess. This is why monopolies tend to be less efficient over time, nothing is forcing efficient operations.

In this analogy the "cable customer" would be the ad purchaser. I don't know enough about that industry to know if the analogy works, but just saying.

i shake my head every time i think of the sheer marketing power of the bing brand...

Hey man, i googled that chick in marketing last night and found her facebook account. Really??? well i binged her and found her pornhub account. Bing... Find what you really are looking for.

I am forced to use Comcast, and I really wish I had another option. I have numerous complaints about them. But I have to say -- the quality of their internet service is not one of them. It's been consistently solid and well-performing for me for years.

Their upload speed doesn't bother you?

Not really, no. Their price tag and their billing shenanigans sure do, though.

I guess, but the price tag seems intertwined with the quality of service? Hard to separate them (at least for me).

The pricing is much higher than equally good service that can be had from other companies in other parts of my city, so I consider it overpriced.

But the bigger problem is that you have to scrutinize every billing statement from them, and then when they start charging you for things they shouldn't be (every 2 or 3 months), you have to spend a couple of hours on the phone with them to get it straightened out. Until the next time.

I feel like we need some precedent here - billing errors in the volume Comcast hands them out are essentially contract violations that go entirely unpunished - you don't get a discount if you have to wrestle with them to correct your bill, you can't charge them for your time, you just come out the other end with what they had originally offered you.

I'm hoping the recent CenturyLink/Minnesota situation gets more scrutiny over telecom bills. You may find this to be relevant [0]. I work in telecom and CTL is one of our vendor partners, I feel like I'm on the phone with them at least twice a week raising flags about billing statements.

[0] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/01/08/centurylink-to-pay-...

The upload speed does suck, but it truly does affect only the 1% of the 1%, and is an infrastructure problem. They could and should update the infrastructure, but truly the number of people who demand a serious upload speed and are residential customers is incredibly small.

I don't like Comcast, but at least in my experience, others I know and companies worked at, it's been surprisingly reliable. Used them at multiple locations over the past 15+ years and could count the number of outages or other issues on one hand. Is that unusual?

Do we know what the data says about it? Statistics on uptime, ping, speed, customer response turnaround...

I used them in college in Chicago ~ 4 years ago and we have 12+ outages in a single year, several of which took multiple days to resolve, and we never got close to the speed we were paying for.

There’s a certain irony that you ask for data instead of anecdotes to chastise /u/blackearl’s claim, then provide a personal anecdote to support your claim.

This seems like a reasonable start to build a case against Comcast:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Comcast

Just questioning, not chastising. Nor making a claim based on anecdata. I thought that would be obvious by asking for actual data.

I included my anecdote simply to question the narrative.

What I'm looking for is proof.

When I used comcast (which was several years ago) the actual service was fine - it was the terrible customer relations that really got my goat, and it's harder to quantify customer satisfaction but the fact they aren't the absolute worst company isn't a mark of honor, showing up on customer surveys as one of the worst companies is enough of a black mark - the ranking is less important than being on the top ten at all.

This is just anecdote:I have two houses with Comcast: one in Palo Alto and one in the sierras. The one in the sierras is pretty fast though had lots of multi-hour outages that stopped a couple of years ago.

The one in Palo Alto goes out a couple of times a week and is quite slow.

Luckily they haven't implemented the mooted usage caps: last year I was traveling for a few months but somehow managed to transfer tens of GB over the network in the sierras, according to Comcast's site.

They have a lot of good network engineers but the work at the edge is inferior.

Comcast has a physical monopoly or duopoly in most markets. Customers don't have much choice even though Comcast does a shitty job for a premium price.

Google's competitors are literally a click away. Google couldn't get away with Comcasting the web.

Google is more of a monopsony than a monopoly

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