Charter Communications to acquire Cox Communications

[kphoger]

The owner and president of my company are back in the office today, so I went over and chatted with them today.  Here are some interesting insights they had about the merger:

1.  It's a good thing in general.

2.  The telecom world is a different world than it was back during the Comcast acquisition.  With streaming having skyrocketed since then, it's hard to make the case that a cable monopoly can even exist anymore.  At this point, an ISP is an ISP.  For that reason, nobody seems to think (as I can confirm from the article's I've read) that it's going to be difficult at all to clear the remaining legal hurdles.

3.  They don't expect us to see any changes trickle down to us IRL for a year.  These things take time to sort out, on multiple levels.

4.  This is a good time to be in the decal printing business.

5.  Our liaisons over at Cox are probably more worried about their jobs right now than we are.

One thing I mentioned that they hadn't thought of is that Charter takes pride in having US-based customer service operations.  We outsourced our dispatch operations (which in the cable world is a cross between order entry and troubleshooting) to an India-based company several years ago;  that was the best thing to happen to my work life (I used to be a dispatcher, and it was non-stop stress), but dealing with the language barrier has been a constant frustration for the field techs.  My company's Cox techs aren't even allowed by Cox to contact their in-house dispatch, but our Charter techs only go through Charter's in-house dispatch.  So, if you're a Cox customer and have been frustrated dealing with outsourced foreign customer service reps, then that might eventually change.

[kphoger]

Between yesterday and today, my login for Charter Communications changed from _____@charter.com to _____@spectrum.com

[hbelkins]

Stop being a rural person then. It's simple economics that it's more expensive to deliver pretty much any kind of service to a rural area (low population spread out over a large area) than an urban one (large population in a smaller area).

You have the freedom to choose a rural lifestyle, but complaining about the foreseeable consequences is just whining.

Go live in a city then. I did so in 2012, and I never looked back.

Yep and yep.

Actually, he lives in a very suburban area. About as close to living in the city as you can get without actually living in the city.

As opposed to me. Until cable television came to my area, we could receive two OTA stations. My grandmother, who lived about a mile away but at a higher elevation, could receive four OTA stations on a good day, three normally.

With the advent of digital TV, i can get a grand total of one station (the local religious radio station became a TV station several years ago and is the only digital TV signal I can receive). If not for it, I could receive zero TV signals.

[bandit957]

I also lost a bunch of our over-the-air stations because of the switchover to digital. I regained a couple of them when I got a better set, but then the "repacking" happened, and I lost one of them again.

[kphoger]

They keep pushing things back one month at a time.  At first, we were told things would switch from Cox to Charter/Spectrum in June.  Then it was July, then August, and now they're saying September.

[kphoger]

Whatever the California hurdle was, they finally got past it.  The word around here is that the merger is supposed to finally hit next week.  Those of us at work who don't already have Charter credentials are supposed to complete their onboarding steps by Wednesday.  It should be an interesting week coming up, because nobody knows what it's going to look like.  One funny thing is that, because we already work for both Charter and Cox, everyone else keeps asking us how the merger is going to affect this or that—as if we have any special insight that they don't.

[bandit957]

Whatever the California hurdle was, they finally got past it.  The word around here is that the merger is supposed to finally hit next week.  Those of us at work who don't already have Charter credentials are supposed to complete their onboarding steps by Wednesday.  It should be an interesting week coming up, because nobody knows what it's going to look like.  One funny thing is that, because we already work for both Charter and Cox, everyone else keeps asking us how the merger is going to affect this or that—as if we have any special insight that they don't.

So another merger rubber-stamped. Imagine that!

[kphoger]

So another merger rubber-stamped. Imagine that!

Huh?  No, whatever the hurdle was in California, it held up the merger for months.  Not just rubber-stamped.

[kalvado]

Whatever the California hurdle was, they finally got past it.  The word around here is that the merger is supposed to finally hit next week.  Those of us at work who don't already have Charter credentials are supposed to complete their onboarding steps by Wednesday.  It should be an interesting week coming up, because nobody knows what it's going to look like.  One funny thing is that, because we already work for both Charter and Cox, everyone else keeps asking us how the merger is going to affect this or that—as if we have any special insight that they don't.

And to celebrate the merger, our Spectrum (Charter) bill for internet only just increased a little bit, from $90 to $100 monthly.... Did someone expected lower prices?

[kphoger]

And to celebrate the merger, our Spectrum (Charter) bill for internet only just increased a little bit, from $90 to $100 monthly.... Did someone expected lower prices?

I've never done a side-by-side comparison of package pricing between the two, so I honestly don't know how likely a person is to see the bill go up or down.  I'm not even sure if the internet speeds offered would line up neatly to do a side-by-side like that.

[kphoger]

Package prices are funny like that, though.  We had been on an old grandfathered Cox internet package that isn't offered anymore, till one day Carrie and I figured out that it was actually slower than the slowest plan currently offered.  I guess, because it was a legacy package, its speed didn't increase every time all the other ones did, so eventually the bottom one passed ours up.  Therefore, in March, we switched to a package that gives us 50 Mb/s faster download speeds (and 10 Mb/s slower upload, but we don't really care about that) and costs $22.87 less per month.

[kphoger]

"Day 1" of Charter taking over Cox is supposed to be this Thursday, August 20.  I'm half-expecting my access to break, because I already have credentials for Charter but I'm supposed to get access to Cox through the same system but with a new ID.  Hopefully I can tie my current Symantec VIP Access credential ID to two different accounts...

Perhaps related, Charter restructured their geographical markets for accounting reasons, and our Lincoln NE office was moved into a region that doesn't yet exist in my billing portal.  So now the Charter accounting department has to manually pull my reports for me—and presumably all the other contractor companies in that new region.