Fox News wants Time Warner Cable to pay $1 per subscriber for its content.
On this particular issue, and possibly no other, I'm on the side of Fox. Fox News is little more than the propaganda organ for the Republican party, but on the other hand, I'm not a big fan of cable companies, either. They enjoy near-monopolies in most markets and charge outrageous fees while shortchanging the content providers. I would like to see cable companies get the squeeze and stop intruding into areas where they lack competence, such as the Internet and VOIP. Leave VOIP to experts like Vonage. When cable companies venture outside their core competence, customers are the ones who suffer.
I subscribed to Charter cable and received abominable Internet service. I didn't know how bad it was until I switched to AT&T and experienced 99.99% reliability for the first time. Over the eight years that I was subscribed to Charter, they made one substantial investment in the service. They installed a device beside each house to filter the television signal from the Internet signal, so that subscribers like myself could no longer pick up both television and Internet, but were compelled to subscribe to each of the services separately. My Internet became unavailable while their technicians were working and remained unavailable for many days afterward. No one notified me. This was just another in a long series of rude interruptions from Charter. I was grateful, because it made my decision to cancel their services an easy one. I remember going for a entire week without service, because of an unexplained technical difficulty. No adjustments were ever made to my bill for the dozens of unannounced outages, although the CSR's at the help desk would always promise to adjust my bill to reflect the downtime. They lied.
Every two weeks, Charter still sends me marketing fliers in the mail offering me "television, VOIP, and Internet for $69.99 a month." Their fliers are deposited in the trashcan without being opened. I received an email from a Charter Representative once, in response to a blog post of mine, that recommended that I log onto the Charter web site and provide my address so that they won't mail me fliers anymore. Why should I take time out of my day to do that? I do not care whether Charter wastes its money mailing fliers to me. Maybe it helps the Postal Service, which seems to be struggling financially these days, according to media reports. I like the Postal Service, because they provide a useful service in a reliable fashion at a modest price.
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