1. Adjust their rates down to be more competitive. Not just the gimmicky temporary discount, that no savvy consumer buys these days. Its an old trick that is played out.

2. Cable (Comcast, in particular) continues to lose the information war. Much of this is due to bad information architecture on their site, poor marketing campaigns, and so forth.

3. Create a system of choosing the channels that you want without being stuck with a bundle of 75 music channels I never use, dozens of sports channels I don’t watch, religious channels I could give a rip about, and home shopping channels that I never even look at. /*I want to choose the channels I pay for*/, and get rid of the rest. One of these days a company is going to figure out that if you give consumers what they want, they will pay you for it. With all of the MBAs floating around looking for billion dollar ideas, surely someone is smart enough to create a business model that accomplishes this single, huge consumer priority…

I recently switched to Comcast from Qwest for a variety of reasons (primarily work-related, despite my hatred of cable price gouging), and I have to say, my connection is MUCH more stable and much faster than it is with Qwest. And this despite my long-standing impression (based on the blather of marketing done by DSL and satellite companies) that cable modem suffers from more users sharing a single cable. That is true to a degree, but these days, it never falls to the comparably-priced low levels of common DSL. But, Qwest and companies like them are winning the information war, as stated above.

In fact, the pricing of my Comcast package is the same as my Qwest package, and Qwest does not include television. This was NOT my impression, until I actually spoke with Comcast on the phone.

And let me reiterate – I HATE cable companies for their deregulated gouging.

To survive/thrive, cable needs to get it together – get the price down, and get the message out about their offerings and technology superiority. According to the sales person, they are offering 150-200MB down speeds in some areas, today. Compare that to the max 7MB download speed of top-dollar DSL, and even with shared cable technology, cable will likely always be faster.