Many of the larger cable providing companies offer bundled service deals where a customer can purchase say, cable television, internet, and phone service all in one subscription – for instance, triple play services are exactly that. Everything is offered at a fairly discounted price, making it more enticing to customers to buy their complete service package as opposed to a single service like television or internet. This can help to keep things more convenient as well, because the customer does not have to deal with multiple companies and bills, as everything is covered in the single subscription. Recently several large United States cable operators have started offering their subscribers wireless services at no additional cost. Truly it is becoming a harder offer to resist – being able to have high-speed internet, quality phone service and television for a relatively reasonable price.
Due to the nature of cable services and the hardware that is used, it is very easy for companies to bundle their various services in this way. Coaxial cables allow large amounts of data to be transferred all at once. Even with the cable television signals in use, plenty of bandwidth space is left for other digital services such as internet and telephone, both in the unlicensed and licensed spectrums. All of this certainly makes things increasingly competitive for cable providing companies, because now consumers are able to get roughly all of their cable requirements met by a single company. Certainly cable technology has come very far – these kinds of service bundles were of course impossible with older technologies such as broadcasted television which used radio waves to transmit signals to the consumer’s television antenna, which was quite limited in it’s capabilities and reliability; The related markets seemed to remain quite separated from each other, but technology has changed things.


