As I’ve said before, all of the “competition” that still exists in most duopoly markets is with the new customer promotional packages. They’ll fight with one another for sign-up deals, but once those expire, the every day prices are nothing to write home about.

I’ve also noticed operators using databases to qualify customers for promotional deals. They’ve noticed some consumers bouncing back and forth between promos year after year and, in this economy, they are “cutting the waste” and starting to clamp down on repeat promotion dippers. Some are now only allowing a “new customer” promo every 4-5 years, some are now “one promotion per customer” and never allowing the customer to get it again. Some of the software tracking this ties it to your Social Security number, which most providers demand.

As far as capping U-verse, when there is money to be made, they usually find a way to do something. Since AT&T is currently only testing caps in Beaumont and Reno, which are not U-verse cities as far as I know, we just don’t know what will be forthcoming on this front. I’d honestly like to see more activism on the part of Reno and Beaumont residents against the current overcharging experiments in both cities, but there is not the kind of organized outrage that we had when Time Warner Cable tried their scheme.

For one, Comcast’s Digital Premier package only comes with 150+ channels and is $100.29/mo. A comparable plan by AT&T comes with 220 channels and is $64/mo. The Comcast package can be had for $84.99/mo for 12months, though, if you sign a 1 year contract while the AT&T package is no contract. The $109/mo is for 360 freaking channels for crying out loud. Comcast doesn’t even offer that many channels.

Now when it comes to the internet, Comcast does offer a better deal. However, AT&T offers a higher speed tier than Comcast although for $12 more a month than Comcast’s top tier.

AT&T offers a better phone plan that is $10 cheaper than Comcast’s.

So who has the better deal? You tell me.

Also, AT&T offers a 30/30/30 deal. That is $90/month for all 3 services: phone, internet, TV. All you have to do is ask for it. Also, if you order online, you get $100 back so there is your 1st month totally free and no contract.

I had Time Warner service in the past. It was more expensive for TV, by far, and less reliable. For some reason around 2pm in the afternoon, the cable would go out, the internet would go out, and my phone would go out. I had to keep calling TW constantly to inform them of the outage and get a refund for the time it was out. This would happen several times a week. Got AT&T UVerse. Had it for months and have yet to see the service drop at all. I get a channel hiccup every now again but it lasts like 1 second or so.

Also, I don’t think that AT&T could cap Uverse. Your TV is going over the net. They switch the channel at a main office for you on the fly, like Atlanta. The line is always active at 25Mb/sec if you have the copper/fiber connection or 50Mb/sec for fiber. 6Mb is dedicated to HD streams. I think 2Mb is dedicated to SD streams and 1Mb for the phone. So it would seem to me that it would be hard to implement caps on an IPTV account to begin with.