- Low customer satisfaction levels and high churn
- Rising prices and poor value
- Little choice among providers
- Market segmented into haves and have nots
All of these conditions describe the sickly individual
health insurance market as it existed prior to the enactment of the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act reforms that took effect at the start of the
year. They also accurately define the market for premise Internet
telecommunications service in 2014.
For the pre-Affordable Care Act individual health insurance
market, a tipping point was reached in early 2010 when a California health plan
issuer raised premium rates by nearly 40 percent for some plans. At the same
time, millions of Americans not covered by employer or government health plans
couldn’t purchase coverage at any price due to pre-existing medical conditions.
Today, millions of Americans face the same predicament when
it comes to landline premises Internet service because none is available for
sale to them -- two decades after most people accessed the Internet by slow,
dialup modems still being used today. Mirroring poor customer satisfaction with
health insurers, consumers give
low
ratings to telephone and cable companies.
Like the individual health insurance market, dissatisfaction
with premise Internet telecommunications service will soon reach a tipping
point that forces positive change. Tipping points are hard to predict precisely.
They occur when the right combination of events and public sentiment converge at
exactly the right time and place.
For landline Internet premise market dysfunction, it’s
inevitable that point will soon be reached. It’s only a question of how and
when we’ll get there.
One thing’s for certain. When a market for a product or
service of vital importance to the nation’s economic well-being can’t remedy its
own dysfunction, massive government intervention becomes more likely.
