why is "investment" the primary benchmark? if the costs of deploying services dropped (hardware costs dropped a lot, reliability improvements meant fewer replacements, etc), and someone's spending just remained the same for a year, is that 'reduced investment'? And is that bad? It's far too simplistic a measure. Are they serving more customers, and is customer satisfaction improving? Those seem like much better metrics to track than 'investment'.
I'm still a firm believer that when these companies can't rely on artificial limitations to service speed, their only choice is to improve their actual service compared to their (sorry for using this dirty word...) competitors.
The article links to the 3rd Quarter Financial Results report from Comcast. It is far more informative than the actual article is.<p>Comcast appears to be spending more because they had a good quarter.<p><pre><code> Revenue for Cable Communications increased 6.3% to $11.7 billion in the third quarter of 2015 compared to $11.0 billion in the third quarter of 2014, driven by increases of 10.2% in high-speed Internet, 19.5% in business services and 3.3% in video.
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6.3% is pretty great.<p><pre><code> The increase in Cable revenue reflects increased customer relationships (see below), customers receiving higher levels of service and customers taking additional services, as well as rate adjustments.
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"Higher levels of service" refers to customers opting for faster connection speeds. Consumers appeared to be willing to purchase better plans from Comcast despite whatever regulations have been put into place recently.<p>"Increased customer relationships" refers to the number of people they've been successful at roping back into their cable TV ecosystem. How? By putting streaming video onto college campuses.<p>The report later states:<p><pre><code> Video net losses improved 40.6% year-over-year to 48,000 and were the best result for a third quarter in nine years
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Why?<p><pre><code> The improvement in video customer net losses in the third quarter of 2015 includes an 11,000 increase in net additions, compared to the third quarter of 2014, related to schools participating in our Xfinity On Campus service.
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OK -- so Comcast has had a huge spike in high speed internet sales thanks to customers wanting upgrades, and they have had a huge decrease in losses in their cable television market thanks to customers leveraging their new streaming TV service. Given that some of their services have seen 20% revenue increases year-over-year, an 11% increase in expenses is not exactly what I'd call absurd.<p>And I don't really want to pour through this document any further, but we shouldn't forget that debt payments and all sorts of corporate nonsense can cause spikes in operating costs, investments, expenses, etc., which may tell part of the story.<p>Overall, I for one am a bit disappointed that Ars Technica would stoop so low towards the territory of populist journalism. They have misrepresented and editorialized cold-hard facts in an offensively blatant fashion. Let me point out that I fucking hate Comcast as a service, a company, and a concept. So I am not shilling for them. But come on, Ars Technica is really losing face by posting this kind of nonsense.