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Businesses The Internet Media Television The Almighty Buck

Time Warner, Comcast in Deal to Buy Adelphia 143

Posted by CowboyNeal from the changing-of-hands dept.
BlakeCaldwell writes "CNet reports that Time Warner and cable TV operator Comcast are set to pay $18 billion for bankrupt cable operator Adelphia Communications. The tentative deal, in cash and stock warrants, appears to beat off a potential rival bid by cable firm Cablevision Systems, which a separate source has said was preparing a $16.5 billion cash bid for Adelphia."
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Time Warner, Comcast in Deal to Buy Adelphia More

Time Warner, Comcast in Deal to Buy Adelphia

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  • One big cable company? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tinrobot ( 314936 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @09:32AM (#12186994)
    The way we're headed in this country, there soon be only one company running all telecommunications.

    Then it will merge with the one company that runs everything else.

    Whatever happened to the Sherman anti-trust act?
    • What are you talking about? Less competition in business is good for the economy!!!11

    • I'll tell ya' (Score:5, Funny)

      by ImaLamer ( 260199 ) <john.lamar@nOSpam.gmail.com> on Saturday April 09, 2005 @09:38AM (#12187024) Homepage Journal
      Whatever happened to the Sherman anti-trust act?

      It was bought by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to become Media0wns1
    • Yeah, don't these things have to be approved, much like the proposed DirecTV and DishNetwork merger. While they were building up for the grand merger finale... it was eventually trumped and a flat no too.

      Being a bankruptcy buy out... is there an exception?

      Some much appreciated insight would be helpful.

    • Whatever happened to the Sherman anti-trust act?

      Ronald Reagan and the conservative libertarians. No, that's not a flame-thrower attack. The Reagan presidency is when the Depression era protections began being stripped.

      • Wasn't the Reagan presidency also when AT&T was broken up into the Baby Bells?

        And wasn't it the Clinton presidency when the telecomm merger frenzy began?

        • Re:One big cable company? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by yintercept ( 517362 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @11:08AM (#12187481) Homepage Journal
          There is a very strong argument that the climate for the megamerger trend was set in the Reagan era. Likewise the momentum of the AT&T break started well before Reagan. The nasty truth about economics is that we rarely see the full effects of a policy during the administration that passed the policy.

          I agree that Libertarians routinely shoot themselves in the foot on the monopoly issue. They fail to see that the break up of the companies that dominated the economic climate was a necessary step for their economic revolution.

          Socialists are a bit more clever in this regards. Socialists support the consolidation of industry in a small number of hands while trying at every turn to fan envy and resentment toward the owners. Once the monopolies have a lock on the market, they can use the political capital of wealth envy to step in and take over.

          Libertariens should be the first (and sometimes are) the first to support anti trust actions.
      • And don't forget Clinton continued the trend with the TCA 1996 and I believe some more bank deregulations.
    • In Post 9/11 America, the cable companies must be one or terror will win.
    • "Whatever happened to the Sherman anti-trust act?"

      I guess we'll find out in the next few years, won't we? Of course, the sale hasn't been approved, yet, so it might only be the next few months.

      And, the anti-trust act stops abuse of monopoly, not existence of monopoly, and I don't see any huge signs of that from the cable companies. Of course, someone here might have an example. Feel free to contribute one.
    • Whatever happened to the Sherman anti-trust act?
      Here in the states, we walk a fine line of capitalistic hypocracy. Most service companies try to destroy their competition, but if they succeed, they find themselves facing the anti-trust act.
      If they decide not to drive each other out of business, and even agree to divide up the business or fix prices, they risk being branded a cartel (also illegal).
      The safest way to do business in the US is to just be mediocre.

  • They can have 'em... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The local Adelphia franchise has sucked ever since they were Century Cable, and before that, Teleprompter. Typically a year or more wait for new channels to be added.

    When I asked the senior citizen bill-taking drones at the front desk if their digital cable would work with TiVo, they both asked "What's TiVo?". When I asked for a manager, he *also* asked "What's TiVo?". This was in *2004*.

    I told then-Century to piss off in 1998 and switched to DirecTV and haven't looked back.

  • How do you go bankrupt (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @09:39AM (#12187030)
    When you are valued at 16 - 18 billion, or was this just an executive 'lets force a sale so we get nice big payoffs' deal?

    • Re:How do you go bankrupt (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Do a Google search for the "Riggas Family" and you'll see exactly how. Of course, they are in prison now.
    • Bankrupt just means a company's current assets (cash) aren't sufficient to pay its current bills. Bankruptcy (under supervision of a judge) actually allows a company to get off paying some of its debts, thus increasing its worth.

      K-Mart, for example, came out of bankruptcy in good enough shape to buy Sears.

    • Re:How do you go bankrupt (Score:5, Informative)

      by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Saturday April 09, 2005 @11:04AM (#12187465)
      How do you go bankrupt when you are valued at 16-18 billion

      Good question! Now I don't claim to be a business expert, but I do spend considerable time researching public companies as a hobby (why? lucrative). There are some measures thrown around for value of a company. Market or share capital is the amount of money the company has raised through sales of its shares on the stock market. Hence, large cap, small cap. The second measure is assets on balance sheet, which lets you say, omfg, citigroup [shitigroup.com] has $1.5 trillion in assets!

      Now what you never hear about from the media are other key ingredients, cash and debt. You don't hear them because they generally are not impressive and conducive to investing. Generally, you go bankrupt when you have too little cash and too much debt. It might have surprised some to hear that General Motors is at risk of bankruptcy. How can such a "huge" company have that problem? Well they had incredibly large debt, and overvalued assets. In comparison, many financial companies these days, while they have HUGE market capital and assets, also have tremendous debt, very little cash... and (icing on the cake) assets that are artifically too high and liabilities that are hidden off the balance sheet.
      • An individual would be required to sell his assets (sans his house in some states) to get enough cash to pay his debtors. How does a corporation get away with not doing so?

        If Adelphia has $17.5B worth of assets surely they could sell off cable plants in some areas to competitors to get enough cash to pay the guy who sold them some photocopiers.

        Ah, now I get the consolidation - if there are no competitors it becomes impossible to sell assets so you can just dip in and out of bankruptcy as a business model
    • Do a search: Adelphia Rigas [google.com].

  • Adelphia (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fade_to_Blah ( 555601 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @09:39AM (#12187033)
    We have Adelphia here in Mass and I must say it has been pretty much rock solid since they announced their bankrupt. In fact, things actually improved after that. The cable internet has been nothing but great and the TV has been fine (though I am not too picky about TV as I dont watch it too often).

    I have to say that Im not looking forward to this buyout....
    • I have Adelphia in Virginia and pay about $100/month for basic TV and Internet. I like the Internet side of the deal, but the TV channel selection is terrible. I have absolutely no reason to watch the Inspirational Network or the Golf Channel, for example. To get TechTV or any of the National Geographic channels, I would have to pay insane amounts for digital cable and get a box that screws up VCR recording and my DVD player (I've tried it), as well as get a bunch of movie channels I am never going to wa
    • Adelphia in Florida sucks.I loose access at least once or twice a week. It is slow and franky their service has been the pits.
    • Same here in NH, though I have to reset my cable modem at least once a month.

      Come to think of it, maybe that they're running 4 T1's to my house for $60/mo has something to do with their current financial standing...

  • As a current adelphia subscriber... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Donjo ( 797935 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @09:40AM (#12187041) Homepage Journal
    ... I see this as a good thing. I have never had comcast, but they always seem to get their new technology out the fastest when compared to the other cable companies, which I see as a good thing. What exactly don't people like about comcast?
    • Their prices. The fact that their cable modem service NEVER worked here. Their tech support sucked. They always told us it was a 'line issue' and that they'd have it fixed. After 2 years of their BS, we finally got DSL.

      And we pay half price per month now for DSL.
      • I have to agree. I used to have comcast and it was horrible. Every time it rained more than a drizzle the calbe would go out. It took 3 phone calls to get a technician to come out and then the soonest they could arrange was 6 days away. Then when I moved they tried to charge me for the rented modem. It took 8 months before they admitted I had returned it when I cancled my service.

        Now I'm not saying Adelphia is great either. When I bought my house the rep on the phone told me nobody had ever had service the
      • I used to have comcast and it was horrible. Every time it rained more than a drizzle the calbe would go out.

        I find this rather amusing, in light of all of Comcast's TV ads saying how much better cable TV is than a dish, because cable doesn't have these problems while dish does.

    • Same ol' slashbot mentality, "small company good, ugghhh, monolithic corporation bad, ugghhh". Then the slashbots go off and pick the lice from one another. Troll? You betcha, but the truth hurts sometimes. That and I think some heeks are still pissed off about the g4/techtv fiasco. Get over it.

    • Outage galore, bad customer service, etc. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      When it was ATT/TCI, I saw an outage maybe once a year. Now, It happens monthly (sometimes worse). These outages can last for anywhere from 10 minutes (these are fine), to several days. If you consider a crippled system as being out, then I have seen it last 5 days.

      Their customer service sux. Rude. They do not know anything beyond their scripts ("Sir, you have to get your network neighbhorhood to work before we can help you"; Mam, As I said, I am running Linux. May I please talk to Tier 3). With that sai
      • "Now, It happens monthly (sometimes worse)."

        That may be the case, but you are hardly a representative sample. Here in my town, I personally know at least 20 people who have Comcast HSI, and the only outage *any* of us have had since the transition from @home was the DNS quasi-outage a few days ago.

        "As I said, I am running Linux. May I please talk to Tier 3"

        You don't get it, do you?

        According to a friend who works at the call center of a local ISP (FRII), there are three types of callers:

        A: Pepole who do
    • I've had a number of outages where the cable modem just "goes offline" for 10-15 minutes or so. Calling tech support results in a recorded message of problems in the area, or a warm body saying "they're working on it." More than once I've had to drop and restart my ethernet connection to renew the DHCP lease... sometimes after a week of uptime, sometimes after a day.

      This week Comcast's DNS servers were unavailable. I wouldn't even be online if not for AlterNIC DNS servers.

      TV service (expanded cable with n
    • I've never had any major problems w/ Comcast and there cable internet is rock solid. (Granted it has gone down before) Beats the hell of Millennium which is pretty much the only other player in this area...
    • Comcast comes off as a bunch of dicks. Their service is ok, but very expensive.

      I was paying 115 for cable internet + 1 tv with digital classic.

      With adelphia we have cable internet, 5 digital boxs and ALL the premium channels (hbo, starz, etc) and pay only 150.
      • You very well could've gotten the same deal with comcast. That's how cable providers work. The more crap you add the cheaper it becomes to add more.

        Want digital cable? $50
        Want internet? $49
        Want both together? $70

        Want 1 premium? $10
        2? $17
        3? $24
        all 5? $30

        Get it?

  • How long can this consolidation trend go on for (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    until there are only 2 companies in the world ? then what do we do ?

  • Local fallout (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JSC ( 9187 ) <{john} {at} {coxen.com}> on Saturday April 09, 2005 @09:41AM (#12187045)
    The thing that worrys me about all this is what's going to happen to the local economy. I live about 20 miles from Adelphia's original home, Coudersport, PA. The buyout of Adelphia is probably going to result in the closing of all the local offices.

    Until recently, Adelphia has been the big dog around here as employers go so the effect on the local job market is probably going to be pretty severe. 'course, we've been expecting it but now we get to see just how bad it's going to get.

  • Porn is wrong.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SenatorOrrinHatch ( 741838 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @09:42AM (#12187047)
    ... but it sure seems to have helped Adelphia's market value!

    For those that don't know, they stopped showing soft porn a while back for "moral" reasons. Recently they started peddling pay-per-view hardcore, and it seems to be a winning strategy.

    I'd like to add that, in the 9 years since I've graduated high school, the first one of my classmates to become a self-made millionaire did it by making it easier for people to find porn online. Any comments?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I heard this on a radio news station in L.A. a few weeks ago. Here's an online source [broadcastingcable.com] (3/14/2005) to support that:

      "... Indeed, last month, news reports about Adelphia Communications' intention to offer the most graphic form of hardcore porn (XXX, in the adult-entertainment business's calibration of the sex acts depicted) on its cable system in Southern California prompted so much criticism that the company quickly abandoned the plans."

  • yay (Score:2, Insightful)

    by $lashdot ( 472358 )
    Now we can be overcharged and underserviced by fewer corporations.
    • Yeah. I think Comcast's upgrade to 4Mbps from 3Mbps was just a way for them to justify future rate hikes. I mean, $58/month just for an internet connection? I think it's a bit pricey for one individual.

      Do I have other choices? Hmm... DSL, but I'd have to pay around $50/month for a phone line and the DSL connection and then it would be a fraction of the speed.

      Wireless? Nope. I don't believe there is anything like that where I live.

      Satelite? Too much latency.

      So really, there are very, very few corporation
  • For those of outside the US is this the best thing or worst thing that can happen to them?

    rus
    • I moved across town and entered Adelphia's coverage. Adelphia was charging me $30 less for extended basic and cable internet than time warner. Adelphia also had a better lineup (SpeedTV is like heroin to me) and less downtime on the internet.

      Time Warner has great service, but with Adelphia I never had to have the cable repairman come out in the first place.
      • I already pay $140 a month for my cable service (admittedly maxed out with all channels and a DVR plus cablemodem). If TW charges more... :/

        Well, I did see an add for 3Mbps Verizon DSL, and I don't really need all of those channels. I've heard mixed reviews about TW service, too.

  • Uhh. (Score:3, Funny)

    by \\ ( 118555 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @10:02AM (#12187128) Homepage
    I wish a potential rival would beat me off.

  • So... (Score:3, Funny)

    by FlyByPC ( 841016 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @10:09AM (#12187174) Homepage
    I subscribe to Adelphia's cable-Internet service;

    It looks like Time-Warner will buy Adelphia;

    ...Does this mean I'm gonna become an AOLer?!?
    NOOOOOOO!!!!
  • In other related news. Cablevision, who own Voom [voom.com], said yesterday [nypost.com] that Voom would be shutdown at the end of this month. Good timing.

  • Good Riddance Adelphia! (Score:5, Informative)

    by bardothodal ( 864753 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @10:12AM (#12187191) Homepage Journal
    They are horrible where I live. Oversold broadband to the point where I actually uncapped my modem. The upload changed to whatever I wanted but the download speed never changed! 100 ms ping to the first second hop. Run ethereal and watch the garbage packets fly about! 5%-12% packetloss for over a year. They actually made Verizon look good. The cable tv is just crap too. the lower channels have so much attentuation the are in the constant state of static. My sisters digital cable goes out constantly. They told me at the local office the wait for HDTV programming was 3 years away! I have to d/l programming from Usenet to get an HDTV quality tv show that I can already watch in substandard definition . So sad. They suck. But don't take my world for it , go browse DSL Reports for 6 years of horror stories.
    • Where I live they are great! 4mbs download rates, great signal too.
    • I would have to agree...Adelphia sux0rz.

      I live in the East San Fernando Valley. Adelphia has been our cable company since they bought the TCI franchise. We have always felt like the Red Headed Stepchildren of cable here because the West Valley has always had a better managed and more modern cable franchise. I'm not sure who had 'em first but Time Warner has been the franchise owner there for at least 25 years.

      Adelphia also bought out the holdings of what started out as Theta Cable in Los Angeles proper, a
      • Comcast probably will leave the LA area almost entirely. Los Angeles itself will become 98% Time Warner, according an article in the LA Times today. It looks from that article like they're getting all of the Adelphia customers in LA and Orange Counties -- including Comcast's existing subscriber base -- in exchange for segments in other parts of the country. Los Angeles city regulators seem to be almost drooling at being able to pound on only one cable company to get them to provide better rates and servi
    • Oversold broadband to the point where I actually uncapped my modem.

      Be careful about that... It wasn't Adelphia, but another company made some guy's life hellish because he uncapped his modem [broadbandreports.com].

      (more on topic) My in-laws have Adelphia in Cleveland. Seems fine to me. I periodically connect in to their network from Maine to work on stuff and I've never noticed any particularly poor performance.
    • Sounds like you got other problems... lower channels attenuate a LOT less than upper channels. 1.5dBmv per 100ft at chan 3 opposed to 5.6dBmv per 100ft at 750mhz (~chan 100). Call the damn company and complain.

  • Great idea. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Renraku ( 518261 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @10:19AM (#12187222) Homepage
    Where I am in east TN, it used to be just Comcast offering cable and cable internet services. As a result, their internet service was like $70/mo, and their cable TV was way overpriced.

    Since several more cable providers have moved into the area, they all have roughly the same price, which is around $30-40 for internet service.

    Now what could POSSIBLY warrant a $30/month drop in price for Comcast? Competition, maybe?

    What do you think would happen if gas had a competitor? What if electric cars rivaled gas-powered cars for efficiency/ease-of-use? You're damn right gas prices wouldn't be so high. As of now, gas companies can make any excuse they want to jack prices. "Well, this week I have to pay for my new yacht, so I'm going to jack the prices $.04 a gallon. And everyone else will too, because they'll feel that they aren't getting as good a profit. There'll be the ones that only jack theirs $.03 a gallon, but we have enough loyal customers to ensure that I can buy 3 more yachts by tommorow."
    • even if comcast buys adelphia - i have a feeling you will be seeing a package price later towards the end of the Q3/beginning of Q4 that will bring a package price below 100 for all of their services...

      they know its something they need to do.

      they've heard the customers and will be responding.
    • Not so sure about the yacht thing... Gasoline is a commodity. There's simply no room in any commodity market to charge above market value.

  • Please, no! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by defile39 ( 592628 )
    I had Adelphia once. I have Comcast currently, and have had experiences with it in the past. I can honestly say that, if given the opportunity, I would conjure up dark forces, sell whatever remains of my soul at this point (as I've made some transactions in the past for things like Pearl Jam tickets), and bargain for Adelphia back. The quality difference between the two companies is hardly minimal. With Adelphia, I felt like more than just my 90 dollar a month payment. With Comcast, I pay more, get les
  • It makes me nervous to see more than a few broadband suppliers with subscribers in the millions. With those numbers comes not just cheaper general overhead but heavy marketing budgets. And with only the bigstackers running television ads, people have no idea what the little guys are offering.

    The market is naturally inefficient and stacked against the consumer. For example, Joe Freeloader in Connecticut is frustrated that he can't seem to access Kazaa via Cablevision broadband, but to his knowledge that's


  • Adelphia's service has been great here, but they're expensive. I pay $100 a month for basic digital cable and cable modem, that's too much for me.

    Hope Comcast doesn't screw with the service and/or raise the rates more.

    • Likewise. I've had very few problems, and with their recent speed upgrade [adelphiapowerpage.com], it'll be a little better. I still don't like that their TOS/AUP specifically states that you cannot host "servers of any kind." All of my problems with my most recent web host would have not happened if I could just run the server myself. I don't get enough traffic to need 100 Mbps connections (although it's nice for that occasional large file).

      If this deal does go through, I hope that what's left of Adelphia will lighten up a

  • As an Adelphia Employee (Score:5, Informative)

    by d3ac0n ( 715594 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @10:51AM (#12187386)
    All I know is that I'm not too excited about this. I work in upper level tech support for the High speed internet division here in Buffalo NY. Let me tell you, this last year since the bankruptcy was announced haven't been pretty. With all the uncertainty surrounding the bankruptcy we have been hemorraging people like crazy. Most of our best talent has bailed for other companies and/or other states. It's only within the last 3 months that things have really begun to improve as many long needed network upgrades have taken place, and we FINALLY got some more people here at level 2 support to help with the call load.

    If this deal is indeed final (no offical word from the courts yet), I suspect that the talent bleed will begin anew since we will probably only have about 6 more months of employment at that point. The worst part about it is that the economy is so poor in the Buffalo area (despite having more IT infrastructure in place than many IT 'capitols' like Austin Texas) That for many of us, getting work in IT will be next to impossible locally. This means that we will have to try and sell our houses in a sinking housing market and make a jump to another area of the country. Alternately, we could make a bid for Self-Employment in one of the most business unfriendly states in the union, or up and quit the IT field altogether and start a new carreer in a new field. Frankly, I'm not excited about any of those prospects. Working for myself is by far the most enticing, but trying to create a sucessful small business in this state is alot like trying to "chop down the greatest tree in the forest with a herring." In other words, darn near impossible. At any rate, it's gonna be ugly. Darn ugly. I suspect that I will probably ride it out to the end, as we will probably be receiving good severance packages. But I would imagine that many others will be leaving as soon as they are able to get other work. Wish us all luck. we're gonna need it.

    BTW, I will probably be commenting more about this in my blog http://www.wearyman.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] feel free to stop by. Just don't expect any real insider info. I won't be putting my severance package at risk just for a blog post!
    • despite having more IT infrastructure in place than many IT 'capitols' like Austin Texas

      I'm in Buffalo too. Can you tell me what you means by this? Other than the oft-repeated claim that all of Canada's Internet connectivity passes through the Main Place Tower building (something I have no reason to doubt/believe), what else is there in Buffalo?

      • Draw a line from HSBC to UB south. Fiber, losts of fiber. Another line to canada. Also CitiCorp had a pretty big NAP there as well as UB north. There is lots of fiber and it in run on a few major routes allowing easy connection as compared to a lot of places where the fibre is run willy-nilly.
        • You know, there's more to "IT infrastructure" than a strand of glass (or plastic). Where are the data centers? The 25,000 square-feet-with-Halon colo facilities? The software houses? The backoffice operations of some major houses, running 100s of servers in massive server farms?
    • I grew up in buffalo and worked there untill I was 25. I have worked in both Tech support and internal IT and I really hope that you use the remaining 6 months pay, save up, and move out! I started out with client logic, moved to adelphia and ended up running an entire hell desk for localnet before I left. Always struggling, no extra money, always getting greif from mgmt. and stuck in an old novell town. Anyways to make a long story short, I left LecalNet moved to seattle and am now doing the stuff I lo
  • I've been averaging 4.8mbps down, and 2mbps up.

    2 months ago it was about 3mbps down and 256kbps up.

    Nice upgrade.

  • Of course!!!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by goon america ( 536413 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @11:11AM (#12187495) Homepage Journal
    I've said it before, I'll say it again -- modern corporations are just too damn small!
  • Look for Time Warner to spin-off its cable division after the deal is final. Some are specualting they will adopt the Adelphia name. This also has the potential to lower the cost of delivering services to the costumer as the 2 companies will have increased muscle against the cable networks. However, I expect the result to be an increase in profits rather than a lower cable bill.
  • Yeah, I'm a long-time sufferer of Adelphia's broadband service.

    The thing that bugs the hell out of me is why their broadband rates keep going up. In this day and age, with a broadband glut and equipment prices following an inverse Moore's law of pricing, why am I paying more for broadband today than I was 5 years ago?

    Adelphia's installation scheme is totally hopeless. Let's see: you buy a cablemodem at BestBuy or something; you hook it up; call in a MAC address, and you should be done, right?

    No. They'

  • Please, realize, Adelphia sucks.

    I don't mean it sucks a little, I mean it sucks a lot. In my area: no digital cable, no high speed internet, $40 for 40 channels.

    Yeah, can you say DSL+satellite?

    Meanwhile, 30 minutes away, Time Warner customers get tele+tv+internet for $150, including unlimited long distance.

    No use in having competition if the competition sucks THIS BAD.

  • Slashdot Rants (Score:2, Interesting)

    by headhot ( 137860 )
    I'm always amazed at people declaring "Comcast sucks" or "Time Warner sucks" or "Adelphia Sucks"

    What people don't realize that these are very very large decentralized companies. The HQ of these companies have financial and technical expectations for small systems (usually a franchise in a city or county) The way these franchises operate vary greatly from one to another.

    The degree of variance is great. Speaking about Comcast, its Arlington/Alexandria system is managed superbly and provides very good servic
  • How can two companies (Time Warner and Comcast) buy Adelphia? That doesn't make sense to me. Who would own it?
    • Time Warner and Comcast are both extremely large cable (and media) companies, but they do not compete with each other because they are based in different geographic locations. There most likely are non-competition agreements for areas where they are close by (for example NYC is TW while pretty much all of NJ is Comcast).

      What will happen is that Adelphia areas that are near Comcast areas will become part of Comcast and Adelphia areas that are near Time Warner areas will become Time Warner. I'm pretty sure
  • After the restructuring during the bankruptcy, Adelphia as a whole suffered from the same corporate culture that most big businesses suffer from -- everything comes down to the almighty dollar. It was not always like this when the former CEO, Mr. Rigas, ran the company. Yes, many of you will think "Hey, wasn't he the guy responsible for the stolen money and the bankruptcy?"

    Sadly, he was legally responsible, however most of the locals wish it were otherwise. Mr. Rigas was getting older, and I am told he
  • Is there even a contest... how can you people want comcast to get your business? They suck, period. They jack prices constantly for no apparent reason (other than the fact they have no competition). Their service was always sub-par... went down without notice... generally crap. Then we have cablevision (optimum online anyone?) How could anyone ever prefer never-ending price jacks with substandard service to optimum online? "no, I'd rather pay 100$/mo for 4mbit down instead of 40$/mo for 10mbit down 5m
  • Time Warner has been known to not be the biggest supporter and funder of public access TV stations. In my hometown, where we have a very active public access station with 3 channels, a huge volunteer base, and 5 full-time staffers, people are shitting bricks about what will happen once Time Warner comes in.
    • Cable companies generally run as franchises at the pleasure of the local government. Talk to local officials and ask them to make sure that the public access stays in place. The implicit threat is that the CATV company loses their franchise if they don't co-operate.
  • sucks. [adelphiasucks.com]

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