Altice Altice
Who the f*ck is Altice?
Altice to buy controlling stake in Suddenlink for NINE BEEELION dollars
Patrick Drahi's telecommunications firm Altice is set to make its first foray into the American telecommunications market after acquiring a controlling stake in Suddenlink for over $9bn. The Wall Street Journal first reported that Drahi was in "advanced talks" to capture Suddenlink Communications, one of the United States' ten …
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Wednesday 20th May 2015 23:55 GMT Wade Burchette
I am worried
Suddenlink is my ISP. Internet speeds start at 50 meg. Less than 40 miles away, a much larger and more populated market has Time Warner Cable and they must pay extra to get 30 meg internet. I get faster speeds for less money. It gets better. When I call tech support, my call is routed to a customer service center about 50 miles away.
If another business venture comes in, I worry that profits will be more important than customer service. On the other hand, this purchase may mean that Suddenlink is no longer fair game to swallowed by the evil Comcrap or evil Time Warner.
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Thursday 21st May 2015 05:31 GMT pixl97
Re: I am worried
Also a Suddenlink customer and was wondering the same thing. I worked for a cable company named TCA quite some number of years ago, and they were a pretty decent small time player. This was in the early days of cable, before DOCSIS 1 was finalized and had Terayon (or something close to that) modems. Not terribly long after I started working there we were bought by Cox, and wow, they, just like their name, are a bag of dicks. Full blown 'monetize' the customer scripts were given to us, about how we should treat the customer as a number of "RGU's" Revenue Generating Units, and how it was our job as techs to increase the number of RGUs each customer represented. We revolted in mass to the new scripts and told management that we were sticking with the old ones. They fixed peoples problems, and fast. The new shit they gave us was mostly marketing fluff and had very little training (which is very important for new employees) on actually fixing the problem that caused the customer to call in the first place.
They didn't fire us all, probably because they had some kind of contractual obligations that had to fulfill in the buyout, but I got out of there as quickly as possible. Not many years later Cox dumped their midwestern assets as they could not extract as much revenue as expected from their customers. The operation then turned in to Suddenlink which as been pretty decent.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
