Fed-up with your cable company? Consumer Reports survey confirms you are not alone

Matthew Diebel | USA TODAY

It lands with a thud in your mailbox every month. Your cable bill, that is.

And it can be a lot of money, which would not be so bad if the service were superb.

But, say consumers, it usually isn’t.

Most pay-TV providers continue to do a poor job of leaving their customers feeling like their service is worth the money, according to the latest ratings from Consumer Reports, the not-for-profit ratings organization. This includes some of the country’s largest operators, such as Comcast, Spectrum (formerly Charter/Time Warner Cable) and Cox Communications Cable, all of which earned low scores in multiple categories, including value and customer service.

Want good service? Move to Chattanooga, Tenn., where EPB Fiber, a municipal broadband service run as a public utility, earns standout ratings from the magazine. Or in one of the handful of markets supplied by Google Fiber, a service offered by the huge Internet search company. Both earned high scores from the Consumer Reports survey for overall satisfaction, reliability and equipment, and were the only two of the more than 30 providers in the ratings to get better than the lowest score for value.

And two smaller cable companies, Armstrong and Consolidated Communications, did better than most. Armstrong operates in several states, including Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Consolidated runs both fiber and traditional cable services in 11 states, including parts of California, Pennsylvania and Texas, as well as in several Midwestern states.



RELATED STORIES



Meanwhile, according to the magazine, Charter's and Comcast's fiber offerings earned middle-of-the-pack scores, ahead of their lower-scoring traditional cable plans. Frontier Fiber and perennial low-scorer Mediacom Cable trailed all other companies, joined by Atlantic Broadband Cable, Cable One Cable and Spectrum.

“Though consumer dissatisfaction with their cable companies has been simmering for quite some time, it’s now starting to boil over in terms of actual cord-cutting from traditional pay TV providers,” said Jim Willcox, senior electronics editor at Consumer Reports, in a statement. “The good news is that there are now more alternatives, so it’s possible for consumers to get the shows and movies they want, often at a lower price than a traditional pay TV plan.”

Willcox was referring to online streaming services that in many ways replicate a traditional pay-TV package. These include Direct TV Now, Hulu With Live TV, Sling TV, Sony PlayStation Vue and YouTube TV. Hulu With Live TV, for example, offers about 50 channels, including major networks in some areas and sports channels such as CBS Sports, ESPN, and Fox Sports, for a starting price of about $40 per month.

As Consumer Reports points out, though, cord-cutters still need internet access. In this regard, fiber-based companies generally did better, with Google Fiber being the top-rated in the survey and the only company with “Excellent” marks for both reliability and value.

The ratings, the magazine said, reflect the experiences of subscribers who completed the telecom section of its Fall 2016 Annual Questionnaire. They are based on 114,107 respondents for TV service providers, 90,838 for Internet service providers and 26,642 for providers of bundled services.