You probably knew your choices for pay TV and broadband here in the Bay Area weren t good. But you may not realize how bad they actually are relatively to what people elsewhere can get.
That point became crystal clear for me when I read a recent column by my former colleague Chris O Brien. Chris moved to France a few months ago and like me recently went shopping for telecommunications services. The result: Chris will be spending about a third less than I will be paying even under my promotional deal and getting a whole lot more for his money.
As Chris details in a piece for VentureBeat, he will be paying a basic rate of about $63 a month. For that, he will get:
- Pay TV with 250 cable channels
- Home phone service with unlimited international calling
- Internet service with 100 megabit per second (Mbps) download speeds
- Mobile phone service with unlimited calling and 3 gigabytes (GB) of monthly bandwidth.
By contrast, as I detailed in my column today, I just put together a bundle that will cost me around $100 a month for the first year and then about $150 a month in my second year, not including one-time costs or taxes. For that, I ll be getting the following. I ve highlighted in red where my deal comes up short:
- Pay TV with about channels
- Home phone services with unlimited calling
- Internet service with download speeds
You ll notice that unlike Chris, my bundle also doesn t include mobile phone service. The Merc actually pays for my phone service, but my wife and I pay out of pocket for her phone service. That comes to about $82 a month. So all told, for a comparable bundle of services, we will be paying about $182 a month — or about three times more than what Chris s paying — for objectively inferior service. And when our prices go up next year, we ll be paying $230 a month, or nearly four times as much as Chris is paying.
That huge difference isn t unusual, unfortunately. Groups such as the New America Foundation haveconsistentlyfound that we Americans pay more but get less for our telecommunications services compared with consumers in other developed countries.
As Chris notes in his column, the key problem we face is a lack of competition. While he could choose from some five different telecommunications packages, most of us are lucky if we have two options, and, when it comes to high-speed broadband, most of us don t even have that.
So read Chris column and weep. Or, better yet, call the FCC and your Congressional representatives and demand more choices. Because we sure could use some.
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