Broadband Industry Tells FCC Their Customer Service Is Great, Nothing To See Here

For decades, U.S. cable and broadband providers have statistically had some of the worst customer support and satisfaction ratings of any industry or government agency in America (see: the American Customer Satisfaction Index). That’s quite a feat in a country where banks, airlines, insurance companies, and medical giants intensely compete to deliver vast untold frustration upon the U.S. consumer.

The reason is no mystery: the heavily consolidated, monopolized, and government pampered telecom industry sees very little real competition in broadband, resulting in high prices, spotty access, slow speeds, and terrible customer service.

Every so often the FCC puts on a little show pretending that it cares about this. Like last month when the Biden FCC announced it was conducting a review of broadband customer service problems. Part of that review involved asking the telecom lobby what it thought about the industry’s customer service, and you’ll be unsurprised to learn that they think it’s absolutely fabulous.

The primary reason that U.S. broadband customer service is fabulous, the industry declares, is because frustrated users can simply switch to another ISP:

“If a provider fails to efficiently resolve an issue, they risk losing not only that customer—and not just for the one service, but potentially for all of the bundled services offered to that customer—but also any prospective customers that come across a negative review online. Because of this, broadband providers know that their success is dependent upon providing and maintaining excellent customer service.”

For most Americans that is, of course, a lie. Most communities are lucky if they have access to one fixed-line ISP capable of offering broadband at the standard acceptable service level (broadly now considered 100 Mbps downstream, 20 Mbps upstream). Most are under the thumb of, at best, a shitty cable provider and a phone company that’s struggled to consistently upgrade DSL to fiber (despite billions in subsidies).

The FCC is, of course, getting a much different story from smaller regulators and local customers and businesses, which routinely pummel the agency with stories of prolonged outages, high prices, all manner of dodgy fees, and substandard customer service.

Of course because Trump won the election, this entire inquiry is now moot. Given his choice of FCC boss (Brendan Carr) is unwaveringly loyal to giant providers like AT&T and Comcast, and is absolutely guaranteed to take a hatchet not only to this inquiry, but all FCC broadband consumer protection efforts, whether into consumer privacy, sneaky fees, or customer service.

You know, for “populism” (??).

Curiously one segment of the U.S. broadband industry that tends to have stellar customer service is community owned broadband networks. In large part because these cooperatives, municipalities, and utilities are owned and staffed by community members with an actual vested interest in maintaining quality of service. It’s hard to dodge the ire of your customers when you shop at the same Walmart.

Such community broadband efforts have broad, bipartisan U.S. support. Big telecoms have also tried to crush this movement by passing shitty, state level bans. They’ve also lobbied Republicans to unsuccessfully (so far) impose a federal ban on your town or city building its own fiber network. Still, more than 700 municipalities and counting have embraced some level of local broadband network.

I’d suspect the Trump FCC will be more than happy to help the industry undermine such efforts. Usually the pretense is they’re just terribly concerned about the potential impact on taxpayers; concerns that magically disappear when it comes time to throw billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks at Elon Musk, AT&T, or Comcast in exchange for expensive broadband access mysteriously always half delivered.

As the federal government under Trump once again abdicates its responsibility to protect markets and consumers from monopoly power, I suspect these local, organic, grass root reactions to market failure will only get increasingly popular. With the federal government soon to become utterly unreliable, most fights — especially in sectors like broadband — are going to be state by state, block by block affairs.