Nicole Nguyen
speaker
376 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2021
last heard Feb 2024
Nicole Nguyen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
these companies bank on customers setting and forgetting payment for their bills and never really thinking to scrutinize them until there's a sudden price hike and you may be paying, you know, double or triple what you initially signed up for.
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Absolutely.
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Internet is essential.
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The pandemic proved that learning and working from home requires having a high speed and stable internet connection.
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And the effect that monopoly or oligopoly, even if it's regional, has on consumers is that price becomes a barrier to entry.
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And a Wall Street Journal analysis actually found that low-income and rural areas get worse deals than their high-income and urban counterparts, if only because they're not incentivized to invest in infrastructure in those areas, and there's lack of competition there.
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A lot of the researchers in this space point to effectively a lack of competition and the continued consolidation of a lot of telecom companies, most recently T-Mobile and Sprint, but that's also happening in the broadband space.
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And although there are a handful of major nationwide internet providers and also regional providers, they've essentially carved up the country in ways that give them, if not a monopoly, an oligopoly.
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An oligopoly is a state of limited competition.
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in which a market is shared by a small number of providers, which is what most Americans face today.
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They usually have a choice between one or two cable providers.
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A lot of folks that I've spoken to for this column were blindsided by sudden price hikes.
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Some signed up for internet, didn't realize that they were signing up for an introductory price, a promotional rate that expired suddenly after two years.
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That two-year expiration date was somewhere in the fine print, but not explicitly in their bill.
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And so when it came time to a price hike, there was no warning.
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And they experience increasing rates every year.
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And it's unclear what the rate they're paying is, whether or not it's promotional, and when that date expires.
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Okay, so what do the internet companies say about these issues?
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Showing 321–340 of 376 · page 17 of 19
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