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.