bicker

That's the great thing about a competitive marketplace like this: You can consider the options you have (including moving to another part of town, so you have more choices), you can eliminate whichever choices you want, you can favor individual choices based on whatever criteria you prefer, and you can even choose to do without.

Great choice. It's cost efficient, for sure. Each of the choices have their strengths and weaknesses.

Please excuse the clarification: You chose to leave them, actually.

Again, I hate to insist on preciseness, but what you found frustrating is that you didn't like any of the alternatives.

Comcast is the single largest provider. It would be pretty shocking if they were not also the single largest source of complaints.

Do keep complaints in perspective though: People complain because of frustrations similar to the one you relayed. They choose to think of it as just Comcast, but the reality is that they made choices similar to those you made: To not move to part of town where you have more choices; to not accept the offers from any of the other competitors either, because you didn't like them, etc. People would prefer to have everything perfect and practically free. However, what matters is what people actually value, and you can tell what people value not by listening to them talk -- talk is cheap and people use talking for venting frustration -- you can tell what people value by watching what they choose to spend their money on.

I'm not sure what your point was, with regard to the people you tell. It sounds to me that they simply made a different value judgment from the one you made. Reasonable people disagree about things, quite often. Right?

Or one of the others. Again, you made personal choices that eliminated the other options. That doesn't mean that those choices didn't exist. You just decided against them, or made other personal choices that preclude them.

Uh, in a word: No. That's incorrect. The vast majority of mass-market suppliers, both of products and services, operate the same way. That is the nature of the mass-market. You just choose to focus on the impact of it in sectors of the marketplace where the ramifications of it frustrate you.

We have five suppliers offering subscription television service to folks here in Burlington. Two of them are satellite services; the other three are terrestrial.