It’s time to wrap up Evil Week, and what better way than by pitting two of the most evil industries against each other. Today, we’re flipping our usual script upside down to find out who’s worse: cell carriers or cable companies.


This post is part of our Evil Week series at Lifehacker, where we look at the dark side of getting things done. Sometimes evil is justified, and other times, knowing evil means knowing how to beat it. Want more? Check out our evil week tag page .


The Contenders

By any reasonable metric, most people are not happy with their cell carrier or cable company. The latter frequently tops the charts for least trustworthy companies, and cell carriers...well, just check the comments on any of our articles about them. Of course, the corporate world of internet providers is complex and many companies have their hands in both industries, so here’s how we’re breaking it down.

Cell Carriers: In the U.S., there are four major carriers: Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Collectively, they account for over 405 million wireless subscribers in the U.S. dozens of virtual networks called MVNOs

In the U.S., there are four major carriers: Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Collectively, they account for over Cable Companies: For our purposes, “cable companies” is shorthand for companies that provide home broadband internet, as well as companies that provide cable television packages. In many areas of the country, these are one and the same. Comcast (which owns Xfinity), AT&T, Charter (which owns Time Warner Cable), and Verizon all fall into this category. As of 2014, Nearly a third of U.S. households have no choice in home internet provider


We’re not even going to pretend to cover every single area that these companies aggravate their customers because it would take weeks to cover it all, but we’ll sure try.

Data Caps and Throttling Make Both Groups a Pain to Use


Carriers and cable companies are both guilty of one of the most annoying billing practices: data caps. These caps charge higher prices to customers who use more data. Ostensibly, caps manage network congestion, but it’s unclear (at best) if they actually help. Data caps affect a customer’s average usage over a month, but they don’t—and can’t—target high-traffic periods or locations. In fact, Comcast’s own internal customer service script even says that data caps aren’t about congestion management, but rather about “fairness” in pricing. Of course, Comcast also says they’re not caps, but “data usage plans.” So, even though there’s no real practical reason to limit your home internet usage, cable companies will find a way to charge you more because it’s “fair.”

Data caps are such a huge problem that the FCC has received tens of thousands of complaints about them since mid-2015. Most of them, however, target home internet companies. Carriers have stricter data limits, but this makes slightly more sense given that wireless spectrum is a finite resource. If you run out of data on your phone, you can hop on a Wi-Fi network somewhere. However, if you run out of data on your home internet, you’re a little screwed. Comcast and AT&T have raised their data caps to 1TB per month, after which you’ll be charged extra for going over. 1TB is a more reasonable limit than they’ve had in the past (some were as low as 250GB), but even that can get tight if you have a family sharing one connection, streaming movies or downloading games. In most cases, the limit also doesn’t change if you have a faster internet speed. Whether you have 1Mbps or 150Mbps, you get the same amount of data. This makes no sense. If you’d rather not worry about counting your gigabytes, AT&T will sell you an unlimited data upcharge for $30, while Comcast charges $50.


On the carrier side, things are a lot more confusing. You can get some unlimited plans, but they come with a lot of fine print. T-Mobile’s One plan offers unlimited data, but if you try to tether you’ll be throttled to 2G speeds, unless you pay $15 per 5GB of data per month. Sprint’s similar plan comes with 5GB of free LTE tethering data before you have to pay extra. AT&T will only give you unlimited data if you have DIRECTV or U-Verse for some reason, and they’ll still throttle you after 22GB. Verizon doesn’t give a crap about unlimited plans.


Contracts, Hidden Fees, and Sponsored Deals Make It Hard to Shop Around

While carriers have gotten better about their multi-year contracts—they’re now mostly tied to paying off your phone instead of arbitrarily binding you to them for two years—they’re still a terrible way to buy phones, and they hide the true cost of your phone. Meanwhile, sponsored data plans fudge the edges of net neutrality under our noses, and new phone lease programs keep you paying just as much for phones you never actually get to keep. The sheer volume of confusing carrier plans is enough to make my head spin and this is my job. For the average consumer, getting a fair deal can be difficult, if not impossible.


Cable companies meanwhile utilize a lot of the shady tactics that we’ve all just grown to accept. Local competition is limited or extremely rare depending on where you live and it’s basically impossible to start a new internet company (as Google recently found out the hard way), so you’re stuck with whatever you already have in your area. Television and internet bundles nudge you into getting packages you might not need just to save a buck. On the upside, television service is seeing a bit of a competition renaissance. Services like Sling TV pushed AT&T to launch its own streaming plan offering 100 channels for $35/month without bundling it to a TV or internet package. While this is way better than the old model, Comcast and other cable companies still sell a lot of confusing bundles that often lead to buying way more than you need just to get the basic service you want.

Getting internet service on your phone or in your home is frustrating no matter what. You can expect to spend hours reading fine print, comparison shopping, and doing your own math to make sure you’re getting the best deal possible. Just don’t forget to make a phone call every six months to a year to save yourself some money.


Both Groups Have Their Share of Legal Problems with Consumers

When a company pisses off its customers enough, eventually you can expect that the government will have to get involved. Let’s take a look at some of the various lawsuits, investigations, and rulings that all these companies have dealt with just over the last two years.


Carriers:


Cable companies:


The effect of lawsuits and federal investigations has had a clear impact on how these companies operate, but it’s a slow process with a lot to clean up. There are a lot of gray areas where carriers and cable companies can fudge their services to eek out more charges from their customers. This list is by no means comprehensive, either. Keeping legal tabs on these companies is a full time job.

Both Groups Want to Control What You See and Read, But Cable Companies Are Better At It

Every time you see this logo now, Comcast gets paid. Soon, the same may be true of AT&T and Warner Brothers.


Wireless carriers and cable companies have a curious relationship with the media that you watch, stream, and read. The more they grow, the more they want to own the content that their networks bring to you, controlling the process from start to finish. Perhaps the biggest example of this is Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011. After the buyout (which finalized in 2013), Comcast owns the studio that produced Jason Bourne, one of the TV stations that advertised it, and the TV and internet provider that you can use to watch it at home. For Comcast, this is a pretty sweet deal. For most consumers, it sounds scary as hell.

Having one company with so much control over so many forms of media can get scary, even if you ignore monopoly-related policies like Comcast giving its own content preferential treatment. For example, Comcast famously ghostwrote letters for politicians to send to the FCC on its behalf urging the organization to approve its acquisition of Time Warner (a venture that eventually failed.) Back in 2007, NBC also wanted ISPs to become copyright cops. Now, the financial interests of Comcast and NBC are aligned, so it was no surprise that Comcast helped create a heavily-criticized six-strikes copyright flagging system. While the acquisition hasn’t led to the internet wasteland that some feared, it has consolidated power.


If Comcast having too much power scares you, don’t worry. AT&T wants to acquire Time Warner, so there will be at least two mega corporations to compete with each other. In some ways, this is legitimately comforting. AT&T recently announced that it wants to sell an internet-based cable package for $35 a month based its DIRECTV service. If it buys Time Warner and includes more channels in this package, it may push Comcast to do something similar. It could not only reduce the cost of cable packages, but finally break them out of the internet and TV bundles we’ve grown so used to. Imagine how great it would be to pick a TV package from any provider you want, paying a low monthly fee, and watching it on whatever device you want.

On the other hand, this would mean that AT&T owns CNN, HBO, Warner Brothers, and a host of other media companies. This consolidates a lot of power in one place, just like Comcast. Of the the Big Three news networks (MSNBC, CNN, and Fox), two would be owned by American internet service providers. The third would be Fox, which is owned by 21st Century Fox. The more that big companies buy media creators, the harder it is to find independent organizations producing TV shows, creating movies, or covering the news. It also means it’s harder to put pressure on those companies. Don’t like your Comcast internet service and want to “vote with your wallet?” Well, you better stop watching Universal or Dreamworks movies, NBC shows, and definitely don’t go to Universal Studios. Also, you probably still have to buy Comcast internet service anyway if you don’t have a better choice in your area.


Where are carriers in all this? Well, with the exception of AT&T (which is in both camps), cell carriers are thankfully laughably bad at conspiring to control the media. Sprint doesn’t really have the money to buy anyone and its Japan-based owner SoftBank doesn’t have a big media presence. T-Mobile’s majority shareholder Deutsche Telekom similarly doesn’t have much interest in becoming a mega media conglomerate.

The only other carrier interested in media is Verizon which has a curious history with it at best. In 2014, Verizon tried to launch its own tech news site, SugarString. This site had the flagrantly biased mandate to avoid topics such as spying and net neutrality. It closed less than two months later. In 2015, Verizon tried again to get into the media game by...buying AOL. Not exactly a multimedia leader. This gave Verizon control of sites like the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, but that’s about it. Then it bought Yahoo in 2016, which gave it Tumblr and all of Yahoo’s media portals. Those properties are important, but it’s a far cry from owning whole news networks and movie studios. Given its history, it would be worrying if Verizon ever got its hands on a bigger media company, but so far it doesn’t seem to have near the level of power that Comcast or AT&T have.


The Verdict: They All Suck, But Cable Companies Are Big Enough to Do More Harm

Carriers and cable companies both suck in their own ways. Carriers use confusing billing practices and dense contract tomes to lock you into service plans that probably cost way more than you really need. Fortunately, most people can just hop on a prepaid plan and get the best of all worlds without all the crap.


Cable companies are on another level, though. AT&T and Comcast are angling to become multimedia titans that are increasingly hard to challenge. This can sometimes lead to really cool innovations, but it also raises a lot of questions about the consolidation of power. These worries are compounded when these companies control powerful lobbying arms. Your cable bill is a headache, but the influence these companies can exert over Congress can be a lot worse. If we’re looking for most evil, this probably takes the cake.