Did you feel that? The Internet just got a hell of a lot slower. After more than a decade of battling each other for the honors of worst Internet experience, Comcast and Time Warner are joining forces to suck harder together than any single Internet service provider ever has in the history of the World Wide Web. Until now, most areas of the US have only had to suffer either Comcast or Time Warner. Now everyone will get to suffer both. Meanwhile, South Koreans will soon be able to download an entire movie in ONE SECOND.
Under the terms of the deal, Time Warner Cable shareholders will receive 2.875 shares of newly issued Comcast common stock for each of their shares, people briefed on the matter said on Wednesday evening. Based on Comcast’s closing price of $55.24 on Wednesday, that values each Time Warner Cable share at about $158.82 each.
For Comcast, the deal, extending its leadership in the cable industry, is another transformative step in the evolution of what is now America’s most influential media company. It comes less than a year after Comcast completed the acquisition of NBC Universal And it will further extend Comcast’s lead as the nation’s largest cable operator.
I realize this deal is bigger than Internet service, but the web in America has been taking some big hits lately and this is just another left hook to the body. Rumor has it that Verizon and Comcast are already choking out bandwidth to NetFlix after a recent ruling against net neutrality. Now there's this.
Here's an idea I had all the way back in 1997. You guys tell me if you think it's worth pursuing.
Back then the Internet was miserably slow. Dial-up was still pretty much the norm, and "broadband" wasn't really all that broad. To add insult to injury, the idiots were flocking to the Internet in droves, and further slowing things down with pictures of their stupid kids, endless forwards of chain letters and prayer requests, and all sorts of other low IQ spam.
So my idea was this: a premium Internet service provider that charged around $75 a month but guaranteed bandwidth and speed, and here's the catch - you had to have a minimum IQ of 120 to even sign up for the service. The base package would be 10x faster than anything else on the market, but your Internet speed increased even more if you had a higher IQ. Each day you would have to log on and correctly answer random questions determined to be 120-IQ questions just to get access, but you could keep answering harder and harder questions to increase the day's speed until you reached a question you couldn't answer.
At the time I had a buddy who actually sold all the backbone equipment necessary to start an ISP, and he's the one who convinced me not to do it because the cost of all the equipment was prohibitive.
What do you guys think? Would you pay, say, $100 a month and subject yourself to a daily IQ test to have access to the 5G speed they're rolling out in South Korea? I know I would. It would certainly beat Comcast.
I'm pretty sure your idea would destroy the entire internet porn industry.
Personally though, I don't like the idea mainly because I have no use (right now) for download speeds that fast. I'm not building a digital replica of the National Library, I just want to stream TV shows without the damn thing buffering. It might be useful if they start making shows available to stream in 1080p quality, still I'd rather pay $50/month and not have to take a test every day to get adequate bandwidth, rather than twice that AND take a test every day for bandwidth I wouldn't put full use to.
That, or I'll just move to the next town Google installs Google Fiber at.
Never dealt with Comcast. However, having just moved, had to wait 3+ days for TWC to show up from when they said they would.
On the second day, trying to arrange a time, I called the service center out of frustration. The guy could barely speak English, and when he said he was transferring me to the closest technician, he actually just sent me back to the menu, that sneaky fuck (which takes about 20 minutes to navigate back to a person).
Comcast is god fucking awful.
This really mad me laugh for some reason... "that sneaky fuck"
The problem here isn't that these companies are capping the speed of their throughput but its that their antiquated equipment literally cant handle speeds any faster. Honestly all of this merging will ultimately be better for speeds, because now the Comcast can't sit back and cry about how all of the other cable companies are bogging down their network because of the common line rules. If they have no competition they wont be able to use that as an excuse any more. However it fucks everyone on price because they can now essentially set the price for bandwidth anywhere in the country.
This.
@"Edmundo Braverman" as much as I like shitting on terrible companies, I don't think Korea vs America is a fair comparison RE internet speeds. Wiring Korea for 5G is equivalent to a walk in the park compared to trying to keep up internet speeds in a land as vast as America; same reason why they're on 240v vs 120v for us.
Also just so you know, Comcast offers "free subscriber wide area wifi" this is nothing more than them hacking your home routers to allow anyone to get on your network and bypass your passwords and logins So next time you see that commercial for that company claiming that tomorrow can't wait and that they are deploying a nationwide wifi service know they are fucking us all.
I used both of them as a customer. I actually used DirectTV, and Verizon Fios as well. Main reason is because I move so much.
That said, from my experience Time Warner is better for TV and Comcast better for internet of all them four. Granted I haven't used Fios since 2011, so things might have improved. The bad thing with cable is that you don't much choices, you have to take what's in the area.
How did this even pass the regulators? Is America TRYING to make itself stupider? Cue anti gov't mensing bitchfest from libertarian fanbois, all fine and well, but I'm asking a serious question....anyone know how this skated through in the first place?
Hasn't quite yet; still has to pass approval of shareholders and regulators.
Oh good call. I saw this before coffee and didn't scan the article. +1
Service providers paraded their lawyers and spokes people in front of congress and said that people have choice. How do they do that you ask? Its simple really, they take a city like LA and say that it has X number of providers in the area. The Congress people think wow "LA really has a lot of choice, it wont hurt if they loose two to make one better service" What they fail to understand is that if you look on a more micro level there is little to no choice in most neighborhoods. However with the advent of satellite tv and internet you always have a different choice because these services cover anywhere. Doesn't always mean you will be able to use them because of trees, buildings, mountains ect.
Odds are, there is not way that this gets through the regulators without serious divestitures but I'm not even sure what they could sell off to let this happen. This strikes me as a similar situation to when AT&T tried to buy T-mobile. I can't imagine they let this through.
Either that or leasing arrangements to sub providers?
The AT&T T-Mobile deal was a piece of BS mastery rigged up by bankers and lawyers to collect a bunch of fees with out doing any major work because any idiot could have told you there were enough congress people who had a beef with people who were parts of that deal to block it.
You don't know how the process works do you? They don't have approval yet dumbass.
Besides, it can get blocked based on the assumption it creates too much scale and control. However, they have very little overlap. But in the future, if they try to get monopolistic, they open themselves up to being regulated.... So it's always a risk they run.
If I had any regular interaction with you, I'd guess you were busting my balls for speaking without thinking while in a semi comatose state. But I don't. So...fuck off.
This is the worst news to come in a long time, the service is going to get worse everyday.
I'm hoping google moves forward aggressively with their fiber plans, that will be next ISP.
I'm actually happy they are doing this deal. It is going to create the most god awful, monolithic, anti-customer service behemoth known to man, that even the most ignorant and pacifistic moms and pops will realize they are getting fucked and want something better.
Pretty much all TWC and CMCSA are accomplishing is lubing up the market for Google Fiber to penetrate so hard and so deep and so completely that before we know it this will be the United States of Google and I'm not entirely opposed to that.
tl;dr - Go long GOOG and enjoy your piles of money
Pretty much THIS. +1
What a vivid and perfect analogy. Anyone know the chances this gets past antitrust laws? The facts they are stating is that they don't have any overlap markets and that together they will only control 30% of the market, but I think every consumer out there knows that the whole industry is total shit and that the consumer gets screwed either way.
Also, the damage this merger could cause would be even shittier if Net Neutrality fades away, which im sure CMCSA and TWC are lobbying hard to end.
Dr. Cox?
Monopoly?
Fios customer here, happy as a pig in shit. This is the end result of a rent-seeking monopoly. Can't say I'm surprised. JPM's TMT group is going to be rolling in cash though.
What is even more surprising....the deal has no break up fee
That makes me think even more that they know full well the odds of this getting through the regulators aren't very good.
The real irony of this whole deal is that the whole telecom industry is just a pig rolling around in shit, i.e. same shit different company name. These companies buy each other out every so many years just to change names so that the customers have someone else to hate for a given amount of time before a new shell company is set up to buy all of the smaller groups that were spun off to allow the name changing merger to go through. Then once public ire gets too high the shell company that buys one of the big boys and we are back to where we started. But the shell has to sell off all of the little guys in order to not rock the boat and tada we form a new shell company to start it all over again. Bell aka AT&T has done this dog and pony show several times.
Interesting seeing what TWC and CMCSA shares have done since last night.
I'm considering shorting some TWC actually. I could be totally wrong, but I just can't see this happening.
Yeah, it's a hard call though. I mean, if it is planned at 2.875 shares (with CMCSA trading at $52.96 as of posting this and TWC at ~$144), seems like merger news hasn't really been "priced in" (or whatever nomenclature it should be) since at 52.96 * (2.875) = $152.26.
Perhaps the market isn't really buying into it that much either. Idfk
Actually a few months ago I had to get Time Warner again in my latest apartment, and surprisingly it's been working reasonably well. Maybe it's just a fluke or maybe they have made some improvement somehow (at least from a product perspective)...their service is still unchanged and awful with their service centers giving DMVs everywhere a run for their money in terms of worst place to be.
Essentially a bigger Adelphia? I was too young to know the details of its demise.
Comcast is essentially fishing for a larger area for Netflix throttling. Comcast recently launched a competing streaming service.
CMCSA pissed off the FCC after winning the net neutrality ruling. This is the perfect time for the FCC to fuck over CMCSA on this deal.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/13/comcast-twc-merger-net-neutrality/
I've had both Comcast and TWC, and both are equally awful if my memory serves me correctly. Funnily enough, I've had real issues with Netflix over the past 3 weeks, where it'll buffer every 30 seconds. Sometimes a modem reset works, but the majority of the time it doesn't. Maybe I'm a victim of throttling?
As a side note, I think there's still a chance Charter remains in the mix. Prior to this announcement, it was Charter who was trying to acquire TWC, and last month it was announced that Charter would immediately spin-off certain markets/assets to Comcast in order to get past regulatory approvals. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out. Either way, the industry needs to consolidate, its been hemorrhaging subscribers over recent years and needs to consolidate to stay afloat.
In better news, Google keeps trying to push the envelope:
Google is working on technology that would deliver data at speeds of 10 gigabits per second, ten times the bandwidth of current Google Fiber connections, according to a new report in USA Today. "That's where the world is going. It's going to happen," Google CFO Patrick Pichette said on a call with Goldman Sachs. "That's what we're working on. There's no need to wait."
That's the right attitude.
If Hitler and Stalin had a baby...
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