Good ideas. I like the idea of a Bill of Rights for cable/telecoms customers.
Having been the guy who comes out on the trouble call, it is near impossible to give a precise time to the customer short of hiring a lot more technicians. You will not see that anytime soon, so a window is as close as it will come.
It would be great if there were contracted minimum data rates for customers, and indemnity for failure to provide. But you are talking Business Class service, and you'd be likely to pay Business Class fees to get it. Is it nice? Oh yeah. Even better when someone else pays for it. Build it into your cost structure for your clients, and you can get a guaranteed but rate. Money talks.
As for sensible pricing, people get intro rates, but in the end, the standard rate is the rate.
On the programming/content front: a great Cable Co. would make it really easy to watch what you want, when you want it, and only charge you for the stuff you watch. This is easily a FCC or local telecom authority issue. If you can mandate that RBOCs must bill local calls by the call (instead of unlimited local calling for a set fee), you can unbundle cable tiers.
If you don't, people will find ways to watch stuff that is off their tier without paying for it.
It is disrespectful of the customer to make him pay for stuff he does not want to watch, and then restrict access to channels he would like to watch, and then bundling in more channels he does not want to watch if he chooses to go up a tier.
Want near unlimited bandwidth? Figure out how to get the Cable Companies to run Fiber to your door. Maybe get your local authority to create a new standard: No new contract unless you will run fiber to the door.
That said, I do foresee a day when you choose feeds (channels) fro a website, and your Cable Co. streams them to you, on demand.
You think you've got it bad. I live in Dubai, and just want NFL Sunday Ticket. To come close via satTV, I'd be buying 3 different providers (Showtime, Orbit, and Firstnet), just to get 4 or 5 games a week. Instead I get it streamed over the internet on Yahoo Sports (for non-American audiences) for abot $280 a season. It's all I want for the whole year, so the price is not so bad.
Comcast, Time To Start Listening [View article]
Having been the guy who comes out on the trouble call, it is near impossible to give a precise time to the customer short of hiring a lot more technicians. You will not see that anytime soon, so a window is as close as it will come.
It would be great if there were contracted minimum data rates for customers, and indemnity for failure to provide. But you are talking Business Class service, and you'd be likely to pay Business Class fees to get it. Is it nice? Oh yeah. Even better when someone else pays for it. Build it into your cost structure for your clients, and you can get a guaranteed but rate. Money talks.
As for sensible pricing, people get intro rates, but in the end, the standard rate is the rate.
On the programming/content front: a great Cable Co. would make it really easy to watch what you want, when you want it, and only charge you for the stuff you watch. This is easily a FCC or local telecom authority issue. If you can mandate that RBOCs must bill local calls by the call (instead of unlimited local calling for a set fee), you can unbundle cable tiers.
If you don't, people will find ways to watch stuff that is off their tier without paying for it.
It is disrespectful of the customer to make him pay for stuff he does not want to watch, and then restrict access to channels he would like to watch, and then bundling in more channels he does not want to watch if he chooses to go up a tier.
Want near unlimited bandwidth? Figure out how to get the Cable Companies to run Fiber to your door. Maybe get your local authority to create a new standard: No new contract unless you will run fiber to the door.
That said, I do foresee a day when you choose feeds (channels) fro a website, and your Cable Co. streams them to you, on demand.
You think you've got it bad. I live in Dubai, and just want NFL Sunday Ticket. To come close via satTV, I'd be buying 3 different providers (Showtime, Orbit, and Firstnet), just to get 4 or 5 games a week. Instead I get it streamed over the internet on Yahoo Sports (for non-American audiences) for abot $280 a season. It's all I want for the whole year, so the price is not so bad.