Comcast Case Study

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Technology no doubt will exist if Comcast and AT&T start to merge. As I searched from the Internet, more than a third of AT&T’s subscribers are still served by old-fashioned coaxial cable instead of fiber optic lines, limiting the number of stations they receive and making it impossible to provide the high-speed Internet connections, while about 97 percent of Comcast’s customers had fiber optic connections, which help ot generate about $300 a subscriber,roughly twice what AT&T receives. It seems obviously the merged company will follow what Comcast does, but it’s definitely a headache if the customers of AT&T requested to use fiber optic lines. The transition will cause many problems such as pricing and overloaded work.

According to Telecom Act of 1996，it set up three major battlefront within the industry. First it opened the $108.3 billion market for local service to its first serious competition:AT&T, the nation’s largest telecommunications company, was now permitted to get back into the local phone business, which it had been forced to leave 12 years earlier.

Secondly, the Act allowed the incumbent local exchange carriers(ILECs) to enter the long-distance business,both within and outside of their service region: they could offer in-region long-distance only after demonstrating that they had opened their local markets to competition, but they were free immediately to offer out-of-region long distance, without any precondition.

Finally, the act shifted cable companies into a new strategic position: like ILECs, cable companies have wires into customers homes---the coveted “last mile.” Thoughthe idea of cable telephony had been around for years, cable operators had been prohibited from offering phone service: the Telecommunications Act gave new life to the prospect of cable-based telecommunications.

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