Comcast is America's perennial most hated company, so it's hard to imagine how it could get even less popular, but you've got to give the company credit: on the way to growing to never-seen size and profitability, it continues to lead its ever-more-unpopular industry in customer dissatisfaction!
It's hard to reconcile: how could a company so hated continue to grow? It's almost as though the firm enjoys some kind of regulatory monopoly in which it can gouge its customers for an essential of life while its regulator insists that it owes no duty to the public in exchange for this extraordinary privilege.
The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index Telecommunications Report reveals that Comcast has maintained its lead in shittiness, despite the sinking tide of public dissatisfaction sending the entire telcoms sector to a new low, chasing all ISPs to depths of hatred never recorded in the annals of American commerce.
That said, Comcast has stiff competition from the rest of the telcoms sector, whom everyone hates — just not with the ferocity that we reserve for Comcast.
As the nation’s phone companies refuse to upgrade their DSL networks at any real scale, companies like Comcast and Charter are only nabbing a greater monopoly over broadband. That monopoly lets them impose arbitrary price hikes and unnecessary usage caps designed to make switching to streaming alternatives as expensive as possible.Rampant media consolidation, which routinely prioritizes growth for growth’s sake over spending money to shore up lagging customer service, is compounding the problem. And after lobbying to kill net neutrality, these industry giants have been given the green light to give preferential treatment to their own services while hamstring streaming alternatives.
In an ideal world, cable operators would respond to the rise of healthy streaming competition by more seriously competing on price and customer service. But if history is any indication, it’s far more likely that they’re going to double down on all of the bad ideas that helped fuel their historic unpopularity in the first place.
ACSI TELECOMMUNICATIONS
REPORT 2018 [American Customer Satisfaction Index]
America Hates Comcast More Than Ever [Karl Bode/Motherboard]
