Do cable companies always suck?

Does anybody ever like their cable company? You can tell how many people around hear love our cable company by the number of dishes that popped up once local channels became available. I was one of those that dropped cable as soon at I could get my local channels on DirecTV. I just got sick of them dropping channels and raising prices, plus there were a handful of channels I wanted that our cable company didn’t have.

I still had to keep them for my internet though. I think the $55 for 5Mb down and 500Kb up is a pretty ridiculous price. In other parts of the country those speeds would probably be a $30 package.

Our cable company is now advertising a 50Mb plan, which would be sweet, but it has too many restrictions. It’s pretty much unusable for me. In fact I don’t know who it’s aimed for. It has a ridiculously low 50GB cap. Any power user would blow through that cap, and any non-power user would probably be fine with their slower 5Mb plan. Here is what my router says my bandwidth usage has been the past few months:

So I would reach the cap in about six days. That reminds me of the olden days back when I was on AOL and had a 20 hour a month limit that I went over easily in the first week and then paid an arm and a leg for internet the rest of the month.

But that’s not the only thing. Not only would I have to cut back on my podcast downloads, and Netflix watching, I would also have to get, or at least pay for cable TV, or phone service in order to get the faster speed internet. And of course they hide what the actual price even is. All they show is the introductory price, which looks good, but would still cost me $75 because I would have to pay for a service I wouldn’t use.

So it looks like I will be stuck with slowish internet for some time. It’s not like it’s terribly slow, it’s more of the slow upload speeds that are killing me. I would be happy to pay $75 for uncapped, or maybe even capped if it was reasonable, 50Mb speeds if they would ever offer such a thing. Maybe I’m just dreaming though.