Even the cable industry's biggest fan can't deny reality.

"Customer service right now is completely unacceptable," Michael Powell, the industry's top lobbyist, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Powell was the Federal Communications Commission chairman from 2001 to 2005 and is now CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA).

"I think the industry needs to really—not double, triple—make a 10-year commitment to the recovery of that relationship," he also said. "I don't think it's because they're bad people. I think it's a consequence of their growth."

No cable company's customer service has faced greater scrutiny than Comcast's. Employees practically forbidding customers from canceling service and changing customers' account names to "Asshole," "whore," "dummy," and "super bitch" are among the most egregious examples, but far from the only ones. A Comcast executive vice president admitted that company executives are "deeply disappointed" by their own performance in a Senate hearing on the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger. Last September, the company promoted an executive into a new role designed to fix the company's customer service problems—the "Asshole" incident happened four months later.

Powell has been making the rounds on the interview circuit to denounce current FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's net neutrality plan. He said it is "highly likely" that the NCTA would join a lawsuit against the FCC's proposal.