What's your worst nightmare? A Comcast, Charter cellphone network? Oh, it's coming Much-loved US cable giants Comcast and Charter, which both long to run their own cellphone networks, are teaming up to make their wireless nightmare, er, dream a reality. Under the terms of the partnership announced Monday morning, Charter and Comcast will together develop shared hardware and software backbones to support …
That customers already payed to have installed in their houses, and were configured to provide public WiFi by your friendly local cable leviathan's installers.
So you pay to get your WiFi router installed, and then you pay them again to leverage that same payed-for infrastructure to get your cable-approved cell phone service.
Nice business model, if you can get away with it.
P.S.--I think I'd rather be dragged through a vat full of razor blades and battery acid than buy cell service from these guys.
I don't have either provider, but from what I hear of them (here and elsewhere) they might be in for a surprise when their customers actually have the choice to not use their services. Such tends to happen when there is competition in a market rather than a physical monopolistic lock-in.
Correct, which is why they are talking about their various regions, which they can conveniently NOT be each other's competition for a period of time, so long as the market is paying through the nose for barely capable service, all of which is just subbed out to Verizon anyway. Any smart consumer would just go to the network provider/vendor, rather than these two crap-house middle-men. Here's my favorite quote:
"working together to take on the wireless kingpins"
Cute, but those are the same "kingpins" they are leasing the network from. If not Verizon, you can bet AT&T will bill there to be them, I mean be there to bill them. :P These two idiot-corps are just wanting to gain some market share from AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile, then sell of the lot to make 8 people fabulously wealthy. Win-Win*! Or just be the bottom two of four choices.
*unless you are not one of those 8 people who benefit from the sale of ComChartCo Wireless.
"Correct, which is why they are talking about their various regions, which they can conveniently NOT be each other's competition for a period of time..."
But unlike ISPs, in most parts of the USA there are already three or four mobile carriers available.
Personally I think this is going to fail majestically, but hopefully not before costing Comcast billions.
"P.S.--I think I'd rather be dragged through a vat full of razor blades and battery acid than buy cell service from these guys." - There are advantages to keeping services separate even if it costs a little more monthly. I am not real thrilled about having Comcrapstic for my cell service when they are the only game in town as an ISP. Don't like getting a double bend over job.
Comcastic (Kom-Kast-ic) American, early 21st century
1. To succeed despite mind-numbing mediocrity. Usage: "Spam is a favorite breakfast food, despite its comcastic appearance, use of preservatives and taste"
2. Prone to painful and disasterous mistakes. Usage: "The jury felt that amputating the incorrect foot of the diabetes patient was a pretty comcastic thing to do, resulting in a punitive decision in the plaintiff's favor"
I don't necessarily see more competition in the wireless space to be a bad thing.
Unfortunately, this isn't that. They're going to be an MVNO. Yawn. I like my current MVNO quite well, thanks. I like Ting's pricing and their customer service is top notch. NFW I'm going from excellent customer service to the worst in the industry -- sorry, the worst in ANY industry -- even if my experience using phone service that depends on VOIP hadn't been crappy to begin with.
This explains Comcast Insistance on us all switching to their wireless router. In order to make this Comcast/Charter Wireless phone service deal through Verizon, happen. Problem is, it's caused Service Outages this week. No one at Comcast is providing any info. The Media needs to know about this.
Wonder if this is why Comcast Xfinity has been having Service Outages, since Early May. Service Outages that while reported on Twitter, don't seem to be getting any reports in the media, including this site? Might want to check on that, as Service outages all over the country are happening on exactly the same days, over the past two months. I'd think that's a big enough story to get the attention of this site.
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