T-Mobile's Getting Into Cable TV, Where Its Opposition To Net Neutrality May Come Back To Bite It

from the goes-around-comes-around dept

After regulators blocked AT&T's attempted acquisition of T-Mobile, T-Mobile found a new lease on life and began delivering some much-needed competition to the wireless sector. That added competition brought numerous benefits to consumers, from forcing AT&T and Verizon to bring back unlimited data plans, to the elimination of long-term contracts. And while these companies still try to avoid competing too intently on price, T-Mobile's disruption has been hugely beneficial all the same.

That said, T-Mobile's consumer-friendly brand identity (driven by trash-talking CEO John Legere) often only goes so far. The company has consistently opposed net neutrality rules, at one point insisting this opposition would put the company on the "right side of history." When people questioned T-Mobile's positions (and a lot of the outright bullshit it used to justify its own zero rating and throttling), Legere doubled down by attacking the EFF.

So it's interesting to see the company's announcement this week that it would be jumping into the television business and challenging traditional cable operators. According to T-Mobile, they've also acquired a streaming video operator by the name of Layer3TV, whose technology will be used to fuel the new service scheduled to arrive sometime in 2018. While details and pricing are non-existent, Legere quite justly took the opportunity to make fun of the cable industry's high prices and horrible customer service reputation:

"People love their TV, but they hate their TV providers. And worse, they have no real choice but to simply take it – the crappy customer service, clunky technology and outrageous bills loaded with fees! That’s where we come in. We’re gonna fix the pain points and bring real choice to consumers across the country,” said John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile. “It only makes sense for the Un-carrier to do to TV what we’re doing to wireless: change it for good! Personally, I can’t wait to start fighting for consumers here!”

But T-Mobile's previous disdain for net neutrality rules could easily come back to bite it. T-Mobile did state the service will be offered over both wireless and the fixed-line broadband networks of industry giants like Comcast. And with net neutrality rules set to be destroyed this week, there will soon be nothing stopping Comcast from using any number of tricks to make T-Mobile's entry into the market more difficult.

Without net neutrality rules there's about a million ways Comcast could harm T-Mobile TV, based entirely on things broadband ISPs have already done. Comcast could let its interconnection points congest forcing T-Mobile to pay significantly more money just for packets to reach Comcast customers without delay. If that doesn't work, Comcast could use its arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps to penalize T-Mobile's new offering while letting Comcast's own services through untouched (aka zero rating). T-Mobile's service could also be throttled or deprioritized, while deeper-pocketed competitors pay to get preferential treatment.

And that's all just things Comcast is on record having already done. With no net neutrality rules in place, and the FCC and FTC poised to be little more than rubber stamps for entrenched telecom duopolies, there's really no limit to the "creative" approaches incumbent ISPs will take to protect their turf. Of course since T-Mobile helped enable this with its opposition to net neutrality, it surely won't mind as companies like Comcast do everything in their power to harm T-Mobile's TV efforts while driving up operating costs via a rotating array of unnecessary troll tolls, right?

Filed Under: cable tv, net neutrality, pay tv, tv
Companies: comcast, layer3tv, t-mobile