An open letter to Wide Open West, or any CableCo with vision

Hello!

I currently have 50 Mbps internet service through Time Warner for $45 per month.  The reason that TWC services me and not WOW is because I can only pay more for an identical product from Wide Open West.  There is nothing compelling about your product lineup to cause me to switch.

If I really wanted to, I could purchase TWO cable modems, use a splitter, and buy TWO fifty megabit connections from you for double the price.  And they'd both be capable of simultaneously maxing out their IP bandwidth.

So why not cut the bullcrap and just let me pay MORE MONEY FOR MORE SPEED ON A SINGLE LINE?!?!

I'm really sick of making this request of every ISP I've EVER had, especially in light of the fact that they'll ALL let me purchase multiple lines to place an identical load on the network.

Bandwidth isn't free, but in this context, it is most certainly fungible.  Sure there are limits at the node and at your network borders, but those costs scale logarithmically.  If they didn't, your business model wouldn't even work.  So why refuse to sell me the product I'd be happy to pay for that literally drops right in to your existing business model, revenue projections, and technical infrastructure?

I'm making a plea for you to sell me something with a revenue equivalent of a larger customer base, but with a total expense footprint that is LOWER than actual customers!  After all, I can't call the support department twice and you don't need to pay a tech to come out to my house twice.  And since those things DO cost money, consider charging me for them in a FAIR way---like what T-Mobile is doing with the cost of "subsidized" cell phones.

The customer pays for everything.  If we didn't, then you'd go out of business.  So please, consider letting me pay for my share, and in return for being a loyal customer, don't make me pay for other customers that require more expense by hiding the costs of an unnecessary technician visit or support call from that person in MY bill!  Let the group of customers that necessitates the expense share that cost entirely, and charge them per-month or per-incident.  If I can lower your costs, what's a better incentive to actually do so than lowering my own at the same time?

Paperless billing?  Give me the same utility I have with a paper bill, like being able to access them FOREVER (which you can offload to Google in the form of e-mailed PDFs by the way), and then give me a part of the financial incentive that drives the effort for you instead of pretending that it has anything to do with "Going Green."  Figure out how much money that saves you and pass 60-80% of that along to me!  You'll be able to shut down the entire paper-bill infrastructure inside of 12 months if you do that, because while some people like their paper bills, I guarantee that they like their greenbacks a whole lot more.

Economy of scale suggests that symbiotically lowering my costs by a fraction what directly lowers your own will free up more of your revenue to in turn provide me with an even better product without having to pay for the things I don't want and won't use.  And by distilling down the product you sell me to be just the one that enables all of the rest---IP connectivity and bandwidth---you can decouple the expense of your legacy offerings from it, too!

Please let me explain, because this is the last and final point.

Not just the Internet proper, but IP, or Internet Protocol itself is the REAL game changer.  IP sits inside of a set of network layers that abstract connectivity so efficiently that the same products and services you deliver over your coaxial cable can also be delivered over LTE and Ethernet and Fiber because the REAL platform they require TODAY is IP connectivity.

EVERY OTHER PRODUCT that you sell on a non-IP platform is being artificially propped up by technology it doesn't need in order to meet a business ideal that is quite literally forcing you to throw good money after bad as your customers slowly start to learn that they don't need to pay YOU for the privilege of "Ultra TV" or telephony when IP can capably transit both of them in ways so much more flexible than QAM over coax.  If the "cord-cutting" phenomenon is proving anything, it's that the business model of charging EVERYONE for the things only SOME customers want to buy isn't tolerable to the tune thousands of dollars per year.  And the spectrum on your lines that those signals consume is detrimental to improving the FAR superior internet connectivity product that can literally break the glass ceiling imposed by your network footprint.

Maybe you can already see it.

As I've said, audio, video, and telephony are all applications that neatly fit into the ultimate flexibility and usefulness of IP connectivity and bandwidth.  And there are people out there that have those two things but don't live inside of your coax footprint.  In fact, that's the majority of people on the planet.  But the Internet can bring those products to customers that you wouldn't otherwise be capable of reaching.  I could buy bandwidth from Time Warner, but purchase television service from YOU and watch it over your competitor's lines.  And selling your legacy products in a way that makes them more compelling than what is offered by absolutely everyone else is a recipe for customer satisfaction and loyalty the likes of which the cable industry as a whole hasn't seen since before I was even born.

YOU need to bring your cash cow into the 21st century because it's definitely a product that people want to purchase, but the way that you limit the product to the bounds of your physical footprint is an antiquated artefact of a time long past.  Internet connectivity can be kept profitable by treating and selling it like the commodity product it is.  Television isn't like that yet because industry giants refuse to adapt their business models as a fractional expense even though things like the Slingbox have proven that it is within the power and capability of the things you ALREADY SELL to turn it into an immensely scalable and ridiculously profitable enterprise in ways that already fit inside of the laws and regulations by which you are bound and the contracts you already have with your partners.

Heck, if I had a month and access to your technical teams, I could lay out a roadmap and a proof of concept for exactly such a thing, and I'm not even in your industry.  And if I can put together such a product in a scalable way with nothing more than my background in IT and my enthusiast experience with networked TV tuners, imagine what anyone with your resources can do while you sit back and watch the head start you could leverage right now pass you by.

I want nothing more than to see this coming evolution happen, because it's good for consumers and will be even better for the company that sets the bar.  But if you don't set that bar, if you don't take the money that people are willing to offer, then Netflix or Google or Apple or Microsoft will come up from behind you and be happy to do so instead.  Because there's money to be made in that PREMIUM product, but the commodity of "an internet connection" will forever be a race to the bottom.  And once it's the only asset you've got left after TV service inexorably transcends today's monopolistic business model and billing structure, the company that decided to take the chance and drag your cash cow into the future without you---the company that was willing to fight off the lawyers of the existing entrenched interests that fear this inevitable future---will come by to vertically integrate the last mile with fiber by leveraging the mountain of cash that people like me were all to happy to throw at them.

Thank you for your time.