Comcast Provides Alternative To Phone Company Monopoly

The telephone is a type of technology that virtually everyone relies on in their own homes. It's the way we get help when we have trouble, and it's the primary form of communication many people still use to keep in touch with each other and to get information. The telephone's usefulness spans business, pleasure, and even education.

In the past decade or so an interesting thing has been happening to telephone communication in America. There have been an increasing number of alternatives to having a land line phone from the conventional telephone company in the American home, and yet telephone companies are behaving more like monopolies. This behavior on the part of the phone companies is expressed primarily in charging increasingly high rates for the same kind of service that they've always provided. In fact, even the most basic calling plan that you can get through most phone companies cost roughly eighty percent more than it did just a decade ago!

This is some pretty surprising behavior given the alternatives that consumers now have to land line phones from the phone company. For example, mobile phones are more affordable than ever before and often come with sophisticated extra features and long distance included. VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, applications are another alternative for anyone who has a high speed Internet connection. VoIP makes talking on the phone a lot cheaper since there aren't any long distance fees over the Internet. While these two alternatives are both alternative to traditional phone service, they don't completely replace it. Mobile phones are still more expensive than landlines, a land line is required for some types of Internet access like DSL and dial up, and neither is necessarily fully compatible with 911.

While mobile phones and VoIP aren't necessarily good competition for traditional phone service, there is still another alternative. In the form of phone service from some cable TV companies. Comcast is an excellent example of a cable TV company that provides digital phone service. Comcast calls its phone service Digital Voice and it provides twelve advanced calling features like voice mail, call waiting, caller ID, and more for a price that's very comparable to what the phone company would charge. For more information click Best Comcast Cable Deals.

The real difference in price between the phone service that cable TV companies such as Comcast provide and what the phone company offers comes from their long distance plans. While traditional phone companies charge their customers by the minute for long distance calls, Comcast includes all domestic long distance calls in its flat rate. This means that calls to numbers listed in the United States can Canada cost nothing extra to place.

In addition to digital phone service, Comcast Promotions provide the best cable TV deals for digital TV and high speed Internet access as well. Both are very functional with the digital TV service delivering hundreds of channels, and the high speed Internet delivering up to 12 mbps. Like many other cable TV companies, Comcast also provides a discount when two or more of these services are bundled together on a single bill.

This kind of competition really makes it odd that traditional phone companies behave like monopolies.