City of McAllen Surveying Time Warner Cable Company Customer Satisfaction
The City of McAllen, Texas is currently doing a customer satisfaction survey regarding Time Warner which has the exclusive contract to provide cable services in McAllen. Broadband cable services for the internet are rapidly becoming the lifeblood our economy and lifestyle. The granting of exclusive services to a single company creates a monopoly that exerts tremendous influence over a community. A recent Garnet study estimated that by 2012 77% of all households nationwide will be broadband dependent.
Currently there is an ongoing war in cable television advertising which can be provided through a cable provider giants with nationwide contracts versus the smaller regional stations through which cable is carried. Aggressive cable operators can usually underbid local stations on cost over time giving them the edge. The danger of this is that it gets harder and harder for local stations to economically survive because they are in effect competing with the company that actually carries their signal. This is why regulators need to insure that local small television stations are not being pushed out by their cable operator.
The use of broadband services over a cable line has become the standard for internet use. Dial up internet is too slow and specialized phone service requires special line placement which is usually just present in busy business areas. However cable is not a perfect system. Because many users are actually sharing one cable line the actual speed of the internet on this line varies according to how many users are online. In addition where a particular user is on the line can have an effect. For example, users at the end point of the service area can have little or no bandwidth available to them because the bandwidth sharing has taken up almost all the available bandwidth before it has reached them. This is why it is often hard to use the internet during peak hours. One way internet companies have sought to control this problem is by charging extra for customers who download extraordinary large amounts of data. Any growing community will suffer this type of growing pains. There are sophisticated and expensive ways to deal with these problems and cable providers have to make judgments about cost vs. benefit because the most sophisticated technology may not be affordable for the community served. This is an area where there are no set standards. Users need to quit thinking about cable internet systems in terms of speed alone and instead think of the capacity of the system to tolerate downloads per so many users.
The cable service itself is not the only blame for problems with internet slowness. Many people do not have their computers, modems, or routers optimized. The current popularity of wireless connections not only puts users at risk of security breaches unless it is encrypted but is slower than than hardwired connections. Trying to play online games or use complex high resolution graphics with slower older computer systems may appear to the user that the online connection is slow. In addition using outdated browsers or editions of the operating system can make internet usage slow. Finally, a very frequent cause of the internet slowness is that a virus or key-mapping software has invaded the user’s computer. Really good cable internet providers should provide telephone support that can rapidly identify whether a problem is cable based or due to a problem with the consumers hardware or software.
Cable companies who are granted permission to serve an area need to be monitored for customer service goals, technical competence and standards, and adherence to rules preventing illegal monopolies under the FCC regulations. We encourage McAllen residents to fill out the City of McAllen Time Warner Survey at the link below.