Comcast: Our 3% price increase is actually 40%

Comcast took over the ground cable business in Houston, Texas. The transition was relatively smooth, with a low percentage of outages and complaints - despite many people with proprietary email addresses being forced to change names. For many people, like myself, there was little difference except the name on the bill.

That of course lasted only a little while. This is a cable company, after all. Soon after they were firmly in place, they began changing their channel lineups and increasing prices. I could care less about TV, as I only have them for my Internet, but my wife likes to watch television sometimes on the weekends so we have basic cable. For about 5 years, we've had the same package - broadband Internet and basic cable which included all local and regular cable channels (CNN, SciFi, History, etc).

Comcast came in and claimed that they were just shifting things around and adding more channels, as an excuse for the slight 1-6% increase in price, but very little else would change. Was this true? Well, this is a cable company after all. Here's what they really did.

They increased the prices of all their services by 1% to 6%. They then began adding High-Definition channels - channels that they already had in standard definition, but apparently that counts as "adding" a channel. Then they cut out several channels completely. Then they did something very clever, they completely gutted the basic service channel lineup, reducing it essentially to local (and HD local) channels. What did this do? It eliminated the basic cable service entirely, because you get very little from it that you don't get from regular terrestrial broadcasts.

This service is now $17 (up from $15)...paying for cable that gets you nothing. Their next up service package, which includes all of the cable channels we already had before the switch, is around $40/mo. That's a 38% increase in the cost of same-service cable, not the 3% increase they notified us of for our basic service in our last bill.

Very clever indeed. This does a few good things for Comcast. For customers like me, they collect slightly more money while providing vastly reduced services, thus encouraging an upgrade to give them nearly 40% more each month for exactly what I had already been getting. For customers without Internet, it encourages them to either upgrade or ditch cable entirely, since it probably isn't cost effective to provide technical and service support to a customer paying only $17/mo. It also encourages people to look more closely at their bundled packages, which would effectively ensnare consumers into having cable/Internet/phone with a single company - not, in my opinion, a smart move.

So my wife and I are considering hooking up the big antenna in our attic and just getting broadcast TV for nothing, cancel Comcast entirely and switch to AT&T (who we already have a landline phone with). This would cut our current bill in half (their best DSL speed - 6.0mbps download is only $35/mo compared to the $70/mo we now pay for Internet/cable).

We'd already discussed this before, but my wife didn't want to cancel the cable. Now that Comcast has effectively canceled it for her already, she is starting to lean towards getting rid of them and accepting local channels. Maybe it's not so bad that Comcast is so bad.