A failure to compete

Some would say that competition is that which makes America great. When competition is missing, prices rise, innovation and improvement cease, companies get rich and consumers are left holding the bag. At these times, the government generally steps in and uses it’s anti-trust powers to plant the seeds of competition if collusion or market position has left a monopoly.

But what happens when there is the guise of competition? What if you have a duopoly?

Where I live I have two “choices” for internet service, Time-Warner (nee Adelphia) cable and Windstream (nee Alltel) DSL. One might think that two companies providing the same service would be in direct competition with one another, and thus would drive lower prices, better products and service. Right?

I’ve used cable internet since I bought my house almost 5 years ago. The performance has been ok, with occasional speed upgrades and price increases. Service has never been what I paid for speed wise but it was worlds faster than the 1.5Mbps DSL I could have gotten instead.

Recently the latencies have  gone through the roof, especially in the evening peak hours. They make watching streaming videos on the 360 difficult, viewing my friends list painful and playing games impossible without frequent periods of lag or disconnections. This combined with Time-Warner’s recent promise to screw their customers gave me both the technical and commercial justification to revisit DSL.

Much to my surprise and pleasure, Windstream said they could provide 6Mbps service unbundled for a reasonable price. Thus I went ahead and placed an order for new service. The tech that came to do the install was nice and competent but informed me that the signal from the central office to my house was only strong enough to provide 3Mbps service. I was willing to accept this as 3Mbps down was still comparable to the 4-6Mbps I’ve come to expect from Time-Warner during peak hours.

So I spent the better part of the day trying to get the modem activated, only to find that the signal to noise ratio was too low, so I had a second tech come out and trouble shoot the line and was informed that the signal was right on the cusp of handling 3Mbps so the best they could really deliver was 1.5Mbit.

Needless to say I’m back to Time-Warner, stuck until Windstream upgrades their equipment. I feel trapped, Windstream isn’t even token competition for Time-Warner. Thus I feel like I have no recourse against Time-Warner raising my prices, providing lousy product or bad customer service. It’s like it’s 1980 again and AT&T is the phone god.

Man I miss playing Left 4 Dead in the evening…