Cable and Mobile - Teammates or Adversaries. Part 1

There will always be people who are controlling what others are using. In the 90's the cable companies became giants selling television to the consumer that they could not get anywhere else. Today data is the commodity and the cable companies are still in the game. While they managed to remain a player the mobile companies have made their way into the market and are quickly gaining more and more real estate. With this comes the ever present battles for the money that is attached to all of the various products that they have for the consumer. One such product is not something that you can touch, feel, or even see. Rather it is something that we all use but has very rapidly become one of the most important things in all of our lives today, the data that we all need so much.

DATA Wars

Back when the connections were slow data was not an issue. Nobody needed to worry about their data usage because nobody was able to download anything large enough to matter. Streaming was not a thing back then and companies like Netflix did not exist. Even so, it did not take long for entities such as Netflix to start getting into the game with ideas and business models that did not exist before and with it came a need for a slice of the pie.

Of course the cable companies were not used to people trying to move in on their business because it did not happen all that often. And when it did they were not too worried because they would either win out in court on some trumped up patent lawsuit or they would just crush the competition in other ways. Regardless they remained their own god and really answered to no one. Such was the case when they started putting caps on their bandwidth and using "bandwidth throttling" to control what their customers could use.

When the mobile companies came into the fold it was an entirely different game. The cable companies did not see that they needed to fight with them too much. On the contrary there was an opportunity for an alliance. They could pool their resources and both industries could eat up the consumer. Of course this worked well until the data that consumers used became the biggest need they had and both the cable companies and the mobile companies had the means to sell it to them. This was the start of the DATA Wars.

The ultimate loser in this scenario is the customer. It does not matter how you arrange the players or what they are fighting over. None of it matters because no matter what is going on or how it is working out the consumer losses every time. See, you would think that in our capitalistic society that the customer would be the winner. You would think that the competition between the two entities would spur lower prices and better products. After all, isn't that the model that our markets were founded on? All of these "assumptions" would be correct. That is, if your assuming that things should be this way. The problem is that none of it has happened this way. Both industries have found ways to screw the consumer while fighting the competition. Why? Because the consumer does not have any choices in the matter, because the consumer has shown a dire need for the products, and because the government that is supposed to be the oversight here is not doing anything but allowing the companies to do what they want. So again.. the customer losses every time.