Why do people hate cable companies? If you ask 100 different people you’ll get 100 different answers, but there will undoubtedly be a few common threads that run through the vast majority of them. Poor customer service will likely be somewhere near the top of the list. While just about every major cable company in the country has acknowledged customer care issues to some degree, progress in this area is painfully slow and cable companies are regularly at the bottom of surveys that deal with customer service.
High prices are another pain point, and quality of service often comes up when people complain about their cable providers. When people pay $80, $120, even $200 or more per month, they want their Internet speeds to be as fast as advertised, and every outage stings more than the last.
People constantly take to the Internet to discuss why they hate their cable company and we’ve heard practically every story there is to hear, but there’s one unique perspective that hasn’t been explored: Why does Brian Roberts, CEO of what may be the most disliked cable company in the country, think people hate cable companies so much?
During the Ignition conference this past weekend, Henry Blodget interviewed Comcast CEO Brian Roberts during one of the sessions. A number of topics were covered — and a number of softballs were lobbed — but the pair did touch on some hot button items.
Roberts fielded a question about Comcast’s data caps, which have certainly been a sore subject among subscribers in the recent past. Leaked Comcast documents confirmed what we all already knew, that these caps are all about increasing profits and have nothing to do with congestion, and we discussed several reasons why Comcast’s caps are so awful.
Of course, Roberts gave the standard answers when addressing the data caps: 95% of customers are unaffected, pricing is fair, and so on.
The most interesting portion of the interview is perhaps when Roberts fielded a follow-up question to the data cap discussion. Blodget broadened the conversation and asked Roberts to address the general public’s impressions of cable companies, and Roberts’s responds included a few interesting notes.
