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Time Warner Cable Is Going Away

Published on: May 18, 2016 at 1:05 PM
By Nick Younker

Time Warner Cable has long been the second largest provider of cable and internet services to many people throughout the U.S. But now, that era is about to go away, and Time Warner Cable is making its last curtain call.

Now that rival competitor cable company Charter Communications has finalized a deal to purchase the second largest cable and internet provider in the country, Time Warner Cable will be a thing of the past, and customers will get a whole new company to deal with for their problems and complications, according to Bloomberg Technology .

Although many different Time Warner Cable customers in many metropolitan markets will have conflicting reports about how well Time Warner handled their business services, there have been many different times in the past where customers have felt extreme frustration with their services and have had to call the company, wait on hold, then spend half of their working day waiting for a technician to show up between allotted blocks of time.

It is unclear at this time if that will also be the case with Charter Communications, but many different cable companies across the U.S. have also been given the same frustrating critiques as Time Warner Cable.

Charter actually announced its plans to take over Time Warner Cable last year, and now that the company has finally closed in on a deal to buy the company, many have seen it as a hostile takeover of the company. Time Warner Cable was sold off to Charter for $55.1 billion today, and that will also include phasing out the Time Warner Cable name as well.

Charter really has its work cut out for them. Not only did Time Warner Cable leave a bad taste in its customers’ mouths for poor service, but it went down in the history books last year as the company with the worst customer service record ever, which includes all business markets and not just cable markets.

Charter has been really busy lately expanding its brand across the U.S. Not only did it just acquire Time Warner Cable, but it also acquired Bright House Networks last year for $10.4 billion. Charter is still operating those business markets with the same brand, but it has been reported that it will be phasing out the Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable names over the next several years to make way for a more energized and powerful Charter Communications in the cable and internet markets.

But here is the problem with that. Considering the rising costs of cable services and customer frustration with having to pay skyrocketing monthly bills for channels they don’t even watch, most consumers in the U.S. have been dropping cable, or “cutting the cord,” and optioning for streaming entertainment like Netflix, Amazon Prime , YouTube , and Hulu .

There has also been some real competition for Time Warner Cable, and many other cable companies lately with streaming cable products like Sling TV and the emerging platforms on YouTube and Hulu. There has also been news lately that Apple TV is getting closer to closing deals with major cable networks to offer their live cable programming through a streaming monthly package.

Although it is too early to tell what Charter Communications will be doing with Time Warner Cable once it starts to take over operations of the cable provider in all of its major markets, there is significant reason to believe that it may grow to be as large, if not larger, than Comcast Communications , which is currently the biggest cable and internet provider in the U.S.

There is little to no chance that Charter will be closing down the Time Warner Cable operations in its respective markets, which includes New York City. But there is a good chance that it will be phasing out certain services and replacing it with their own list of offerings to customers.

[Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images]

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