Why Comcast’s Phone Success Means You Should Wait

Comcast just announced that it passed Qwest to move into third place as a residential phone service provider. That sounds like great news on the surface. But let’s look deeper. How did it come about? The straight answer is aggressive marketing of triple play tv/internet/voice services to Comcast customers. Comcast has done a great job and deserves its current success in some ways. But in the long run this spells bad news unless Comcast can figure out how to improve its TV service.

You see the current numbers one and two in residential phone service, AT&T and Verizon, both still have triple the phone customers of Comcast. And they are both aggressively rolling out optical ultra high speed services across the US. Verizon has admittedly hit early problems with some highly public snafus, but is now mostly past that. And AT&T has been queitly rolling out its own service. Since these services make Comcast’s look last generation (which it is), Comcast is going to lose all those new phone customers and more as soon as those customers switch to Version or AT&T for THEIR triple play packages.

Here at Dialbuzz we have AT&T Uverse rolling into the neighbourhood in the next two months. While we may not sign up for home phone service with them, we might if the combo deal is good enough. We will certainly be going with them over Comcast for internet – we are tired of Comcast’s nasty pay higher rates if you won’t get TV tricks.