Survey says: Comcast, Time Warner Cable customers are still the angriest
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts. — Comcast — Comcast and Time Warner Cable are the most hated companies in each of the three “triple play” markets where they operate, according to an American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) report being released Tuesday.
Context & Ripple Effects
The American Customer Satisfaction Index's new triple-play rankings land three months into the review of Comcast's planned $45.2 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable, and they give the merger's critics fresh ammunition: the two companies are the most-hated firms in every market where both operate. The finding extends a pattern already visible in the numbers — the pair lost 1.1 million video customers between them in 2013 even before any deal was on the table.
The satisfaction scores also echo a long history: Comcast has drawn public heat since at least its 2007-2008 P2P throttling controversy, when it faced an open letter from Mark Cuban and later had to answer shareholder complaints about customer service. What is different now is that dissatisfaction has become a live regulatory variable, with Senator Al Franken arguing in April that Comcast only stopped calling Time Warner Cable a competitor once it wanted to buy it.
First-order effects
- The ACSI ranking hands opponents of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger — already pressing via the confirmed plan to spin off 2.5 million subscribers and shift 1.4 million to Charter — a quantified consumer-harm argument to cite in the review process.
- For Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, whose executive team confirmed plans on May 14 to roll out usage-based billing around a 500GB cap to all customers within five years, the worst-in-market scores make any cap-based pricing change politically harder to defend.
Second-order effects
- Rivals competing for defecting cable subscribers can market directly against the ACSI findings, converting documented dissatisfaction into switching pressure in exactly the triple-play markets where the merged company would be largest.
- The Netflix interconnection dispute — with Comcast publicly accusing Netflix of degrading its own streams and shifting delivery costs — becomes harder to win rhetorically when the carrier making the accusation sits at the bottom of national satisfaction rankings.
Third-order effects
- If regulators weigh measured customer hostility against consolidation proposals, satisfaction data becomes a standing input into antitrust reviews of telecom mergers, raising the bar for scale-driven deals in markets where consumers cannot easily switch providers.
- Sustained bottom-of-the-index scores across a duopoly-like market structure point toward eventual policy intervention in broadband customer treatment — usage caps, service quality, and exit options — rather than reliance on competitive discipline that the data shows does not exist.
The trend: US pay-TV and broadband consolidation is advancing despite — and increasingly because regulators must confront — documented customer dissatisfaction at the very companies seeking to merge.