Here’s a problem most North Americans wish they had: confusing rate cuts that are coming as a result of fierce competition for your telecom dollar.

In Ireland, the problem is real and some consumers are finding themselves perplexed watching the cost of broadband, telephone, and television service dropping by as much as $159 a year from the four different providers competing across much of the country. Telco Eircom has a 35% market share (39% in 2013), UPC/Virgin Media Cable – 28% (25% in 2013), Vodafone – 21% (17% in 2013), and Sky – 12% (1% in 2013).

“Neighbors are talking to one another and comparing bills only to find some are paying less than others even though they have the same types of services,” says Richard Donahue, a Dublin resident turned compulsive comparison shopper. “Because competition is getting stronger, local providers are pushing to get customers into bundles of services to keep them from switching.”

The result is lower pricing to help convince consumers to take all of their business to one provider. The ongoing drop in the price of telephone, television and broadband service has now been measured by Comreg, Ireland’s telecoms regulator. It released a report this month stating prices have “fallen significantly for the average Irish household.”

Consumers willing to make providers fight for their business are saving over $100 a year on bundled service packages. Comreg reported that even without asking, the average consumer subscribing to a package of television and broadband service has seen prices fall by nearly $75 a year across the board. Those also subscribing to telephone service are paying around $50 less a year. Only the cost of standalone broadband has remained the same, but that price has stayed close to what the Irish consider an acceptable range for Internet access — between $15 and $40 a month.

Irish cable competitor UPC (now Virgin Media) sells a package of 240Mbps broadband with an unlimited calling landline for around $50 a month.

“Standalone broadband pricing may not be falling, but it isn’t rising either,” reports Donahue. “Service has improved with faster speeds and better reliability so you receive better value for money.”

Even mobile service prices are down by almost $90 a year, but there are some caveats.

“Ireland has one significant mobile problem yet to be sorted — the penalty for breaching allowances, which can be substantial,” Donahue said. “Comreg found almost a third of Ireland has received a warning text from a provider about nearing a limit provided by our allowances for voice minutes, texts, or data.”

Donahue adds the Irish are reticent about changing mobile providers, even if it would save them money.

“We love to complain about poor providers in this country that drop calls and leave us without coverage but 73 percent of us have not changed our provider in at least three years,” he reports. “Most don’t believe there are any savings doing so.”

Ireland appears to be a few years behind North American trends dealing with telecom services. The Comreg report found:

• Only 9 percent of Irish households subscribe to Netflix
• 76% of Irish mobile users still text back and forth but are gradually shifting towards app-based messaging services like Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp
• 43% of those watching online video report watching less traditional live/linear TV
• Only about 58% of mobile users browse the web with their phones
• 60% of broadband users couldn’t tell you what broadband speeds they receive/are supposed to receive
• 88% of those 65+ still have landline phone service, while 46% of those 18-24 still use landlines to make and receive calls.

Time to cut the cable TV bill down to size.

Cord-cutting, the often denied and downplayed practice of canceling cable television service, is becoming trendy in the United States, with up to two million customers likely to turn their backs on pay TV in 2015.

The Financial Times reports about 566,000 customers have canceled cable television between April and June on this year. The subscriber losses are occurring at most cable operators except for Verizon, which picked up a few new customers during the last quarter.

That translates into 6,200 customers a day dropping service, despite aggressive efforts by providers to rescue their business. For at least 10 years, cable television prices have risen at nearly twice the rate of inflation, helping give the industry a public black eye. But with few alternatives until recently, consumers bared their teeth but paid the bill. With the advent of online video services and digital over the air television, that is finally changing.

Today, customers in or near large cities can watch an average of 12-24 over the air stations and digital “sub-channels” for free. Add a Netflix and Hulu subscription and customers can watch “on-demand” shows as well.

Some cable companies have resisted dramatic rate increases realizing they will continue to bleed customers with every rate hike notice. But many others have resorted to tricks like adding surcharges at the bottom of the bill. Many cable companies today include sports programming and broadband TV surcharges of $1-4 each, hoping customers will blame someone else for their higher bill. Most surcharges are not covered by customer retention or new customer discounts, either, and those fees are rising.

Time Warner Cable added a $2.75 sports surcharge on many customer bills in addition to the Broadcast TV surcharge. Most providers charge between $2-6. Within three years, customers can expect to see surcharges hiked to the $8 range.

As the cord cutting numbers add up, broadcast executives may still be in denial, but Wall Street isn’t. Traders did some cutting of their own, slashing $50 billion off the value of media stocks after major entertainment companies reported declining ad revenues and expected poorer financial results in the future.

If Windstream was hoping to make a splash with its new Kinetic IPTV service, Time Warner Cable certainly isn’t reaching for a towel.

Kinetic debuted in April in Lincoln, Neb., the first community to get Windstream’s fiber to the neighborhood TV service. Three months after being introduced, it’s available in about half of the city. But it is not proving much of a threat to incumbent Time Warner Cable because Windstream set rates roughly the same or higher than what the cable company charges.

In fact, a Stop the Cap! reader contemplating a trial run of Kinetic was quickly dissuaded when he learned Windstream charged $10 more than what he already paid Time Warner Cable.

“Windstream either does not understand Time Warner’s pricing or is artificially trying to limit demand for the moment,” our reader tells us. “I have to believe it is one or the other because the alternative is they don’t know what they are doing and are creating an experiment built to fail. When I told Time Warner I was toying with the idea of trying Kinetic, they cut my bill another $30 a month and Kinetic is now dead to me.”

Time Warner Cable’s customer retention department is well positioned to keep customers because it can sell faster Internet speeds at a lower price than Windstream has offered so far. The phone company obviously has no interest in starting a price war in Lincoln:

• Windstream Kinetic offers packages ranging from $39.99-$129.98/mo;
• Time Warner Cable offers packages ranging from $19.99-$129.99/mo.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports other customers have had similar experiences.

Ryan Pryor said he inquired about Kinetic, but the price quoted was slightly more than what he now pays for a similar bundle with Time Warner and would have offered a slower Internet speed. So he chose to stick with what he has.

Where Windstream has had some success is attracting current satellite customers. Jason Smith was tired of losing satellite service during storms and since he was already a Windstream DSL customer, upgrading to Kinetic made sense.

“The picture quality has been very impressive,” Smith told the newspaper. “The one thing I noticed was how much better the picture looked than on DirecTV with the same HDMI connection to my TV.”

Smith is also happy with a more capable whole house DVR and the fact Windstream offers wireless set-top boxes.

But Smith also admitted he wasn’t sure if we would stick with the service long-term. A significant disadvantage of Kinetic is its reliance on copper wiring part of the way between Smith’s home and Windstream’s central office. All fiber to the neighborhood projects have bandwidth limitations that would not exist with a straight fiber to the home upgrade. Kinetic’s limits become clear when trying to watch three HD signals at once while being on the Internet. He can’t. Kinetic limits customers to two HD video streams at a time, compared with DirecTV’s five. Broadband speeds slow if other members of the household are also accessing telephone and television services.

With competition like that, Time Warner Cable has done little to strengthen its position, with no immediate plans to upgrade service in the city. All that has changed recently is a channel realignment that groups like-channels together starting at channel 100. Time Warner began that nationwide channel realignment in Syracuse, N.Y., in the spring of 2013. More than two years later, that change is only now reaching Lincoln.

Bryan Brooks, the Windstream vice president of business development, did not offer the newspaper many specifics about how Kinetic was performing, except to say demand has met expectations.

With AT&T’s arrival in the Mexican wireless marketplace with its purchase of Iusacell and Nextel, América Móvil is responding with plans to build a new state-of-the-art $50 billion fiber-to-the-home network for Mexican consumers.

According to El Economista, América Móvil has a five-year plan to construct a 311,000 mile fiber network that will offer phone, broadband, and television service. The move comes in response to media reports AT&T is exploring delivering a video package over its acquired wireless networks within the next two years. The network will support broadband speeds that are faster than what most Americans along the border with Mexico can receive from AT&T and CenturyLink’s prevalent DSL services.

In comparison, U.S. phone companies like Verizon have stopped expanding its FiOS fiber to the home network and AT&T largely relies on a less-capable hybrid fiber/copper network for its U-verse service.

Competition in Mexico has forced providers to upgrade their networks to compete for customers while those in the United States tend to match each other’s prices or advocate for industry consolidation to maximize revenue and keep their costs as low as possible.

América Móvil’s broadband service Infinitum Telmex has already attracted 22.3 million broadband customers — a number likely to rise once it can enhance its online video streaming service Clarovideo.

A typical promotional offer from Comcast for a bundle of broadband, TV and phone service.

Cable and phone companies will continue to raise the price of broadband-only service while also increasing the value proposition of bundled packages of broadband, television, and phone service to keep customers from cutting the cable television cord.

For at least four years, cable companies have refocused rate increases and fees on Internet access, especially for broadband-only customers. At the same time, cable-TV rate hikes are easing, especially for customers subscribed to two or more services. Today, customers face prices as high as $67 a month for standalone Internet service. But that price can drop in half if customers bundle broadband with television and phone service. Most triple play promotions in markets where AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS compete can be as low as $90 a month. In less competitive markets, a similar promotion often costs $99-119 a month.

Recent research by Sanford Bernstein reveals these pricing strategies are not happening by accident.

Media analyst Todd Juenger recently held his second cord-cutting focus group in Comcast-dominant San Francisco and found some of those most likely to cancel cable television decided to keep their Comcast bundle after they discovered the cable company charges $66.95 a month for Internet-only service, excluding the modem rental fee. For $10 more per month during the first year, customers can get that same 25Mbps broadband service bundled with 140 TV channels. Assuming the customer doesn’t protest the subsequent rate increase beginning a year later, that rate will eventually reset to $136.90 a month. But price-sensitive customers who complain often avoid any rate increase at all.

Juenger’s focus group surveyed 18 men and women in the age group most likely to drop cable television – 21-38 year-olds. Despite their love for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and other online video services, the participants broadly recognized the cable/telco bundle now delivers a better value proposition and as long as cable and phone companies continue to price up standalone Internet service, many will choose to stay with the company they hate and not try to cobble together a comparable package of broadband and television service from other providers.

“Hence, we remain cautiously optimistic that cord-cutting, in large numbers, isn’t likely to happen,” Juenger wrote his clients. “It’s one of those ideas that sounds great in the abstract but crumbles when faced with the reality.”

As cable television pricing continues to exceed many household budgets, providers are seeking new customers that can afford cable TV but choose not to subscribe. One of their primary targets: broadband-only customers and cord-nevers who might be persuaded to add cable television at a starting price of $10-20 above what they pay for broadband service. That price is less than what Sling TV or PlayStation Vue charges for far fewer channels.

The challenge competing online video providers face is finding a compelling limited channel lineup that will appeal to all-comers. Although the average cable subscriber generally watches fewer than a dozen cable channels regularly, not having access to one or more of those favored channels is a deal-breaker for many.

Juenger’s focus group was most open to a hypothetical a-la-carte package of any 10 customer-chosen channels for $20 a month. But Juenger reminded his investor clients no such package currently exists and probably never will.

“Simply put, for existing pay-tv subs, the content [available to Sling or View customers] is too limited (relative to the cost savings); and for cord-nevers, the price is too high (relative to the appeal of the content),” Juenger wrote.

But Juenger did warn that customers are enthusiastic about sticking it to their current provider, if they can get the programming they want. That could make some programmers, especially broadcast stations and networks, more vulnerable to revenue loss. If a company can reliably offer a variety of theme-based slimmed down cable packages coupled with an effective and seamless over-the-air antenna, no retransmission fees would be paid to over-the-air stations and networks.

If the bundled package pricing argument doesn’t work with cord-cutters, the broadband usage cap probably will. Customers will quickly learn they can eat through their monthly Internet usage allowance watching live television online, or avoid that prospect by subscribing to cable TV, which offers unlimited viewing.