Comcast’s behavior is a textbook example of “monopoly liberation”. For customers who rely on Comcast because there is no real alternative, the silence says it all. The absence of any real competition renders a certain advantage and privilege to the company that allows it to treat connectivity as a privilege, not a right, and accountability as optional.
Privilege of Concentrated Power
U.S cable network providers work on divided territories to avoid any collision and conflict of interest. In many U.S markets, Comcast is effectively the only broadband internet provider. Regions such as Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Houston, Denver, Atlanta, and many more listed by Comcast itself, either have Comcast as the only option or slower and less reliable DSL offered by companies like AT&T or Verizon.
According to this, if we take the population into account, Comcast is the only choice for more than 47 million people in the U.S. without any meaningful competition. In this arrangement, when Comcast is well aware of the fact that their customer base doesn’t really have any other rival to switch to, their nonchalant behavior in response to a national-level outage is a no-brainer.
They’re playing on a subtle but effective PR move: diffuse blame, minimize outrage, and wait for the frustration to fade. In a market where one company dominates, silence is not incompetence; it’s a strategy.
Peak Hour Exploitation
The outage hit right at 7:30 pm, during the NFL game and peak streaming time. The timing couldn’t have been worse for the customers, but couldn’t have been better for Comcast. Knocking out the internet during leisure time frustrates the domestic customer base, but does not impact the enterprise clients (as most of the businesses operate in the daytime).
This window of outage exposes how service providers’ priorities are centered around pragmatism and not across-the-board quality of service. Residential users bear the brunt of failures because their loss doesn’t translate into financial penalties.
On the other hand, Enterprise clients, whose uptime directly affects large contracts, enjoy stronger safeguards. To add insult to injury, the only advice on their support page is the classic “Re-start” your modem. This advice tells that instead of fixing the issue for home-based consumers, they’re making them believe that it might be their own fault.
When a minor glitch has the potential to disrupt “Coast-To-Coast” service, it signals underinvestment in network resilience and overreliance on monopoly privilege. True competition would demand redundancy, transparency, and fair compensation. Instead, millions of Americans have become captive to the providers who treat the internet as a utility they own, and not a service they owe.
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