lesmikesell
It never makes sense for an older company to lose money to get/keep customer numbers.
I’ll give you a practical example of what’s wrong with Comcast. Rural vacation town, Xfinity/Comcast the only game in town, paying $128 a month for data only with the Unlimited data add on, on old sub split. Call and get it reduced by $10 a month. 1000/41 speed, approximately. Previously this was a cable TV/Internet house and Comcast was getting $282 a month!
Brightspeed Fiber comes to town, overbuilds fiber, charges $69 a month for symmetrical 1gb/1gb. That’s the rack rate!
The truth of the matter is that Comcast/Xfinity feels entitled to collect premium money for an old coax network. They feel entitled to fleece current customers but chase new customers. This plan is bound to fail in the long term. I get it on some level, if they came up and said, we’re going to do right by our customers and right size our rates, wall street would not react well, but the truth of the matter is that the overbuilding isn’t going to stop, and Comcast will slowly become more and more irrelevant as their captive older audience that is terrified to switch all dies off.
To your point, if a company like Comcast can’t make money charging $69 a month for 1gb/1gb then their cost structure is out of whack or something else is wrong. Plenty of other fiber providers sit in the $60-$80 range rack rate and do just fine.
If I were in charge of Comcast, I’d cut the cruft, and run it like one of those fiber overbuilders, cut my losses on DOCSIS and start overbuilding fiber and charging a reasonable rate for it.
But yet, quarter after quarter, there’s a lot of head scratching and they can’t figure out why they keep losing subs.
