I completely agree with you that their service is awful and primarily geared towards sales. I also agree that they engage in price obfuscation in order to nickel and dime you to death: it's really obnoxious and makes for an awful customer experience.
I'll even agree with you that they are expensive (because they are). But they are expensive with good reason: a nationwide communications network is really expensive to run, and there's no fair way to allocate costs.
When considering throughput / capacity on infrastructure, peak usage is all that really matters. In that sense, someone who goes on Netflix and watches 2 hours of video every night at 8-10PM costs you roughly the same as someone with torrents running 24/7. Some ISPs have resorted to data caps because they at least introduce the possibility that you might go over, which causes people to at least think about their bandwidth usage.
When all is said and done, telecom companies in the US are profitable, but not insanely profitable. This is the entire reason that Comcast is the sole broadband provider in many of its markets: the payouts (margins) aren't big enough for another company to justify the upfront costs, except in a few profitable suburbs. If you look at cellular, where the big players DID overbuild in comparison to landlines, net margins STILL settled out close to 10-15% (not coincidentally, those are about the same as cable/landline.) And cellular is still awful, even though it is much more competitive than wireline.
Having worked at a number of big telecom companies, the vast majority of people who work at them have no exposure to any of the crap you're talking about. I know it's fun to generalize on the internet, but most people working at these companies are so far removed from anything regulatory or customer service related that it doesn't bother them. Hell, most of them are consultants who don't even work for the company.
Marketing is a hypothesis-driven steamroller: you test several variants of marketing material and see which one works best. The one that works best is probably the least honest one! So you go with it because your goal is to produce the most effective marketing material, not the most transparent. You probably don't even know enough about the product that's being sold to know you're being dishonest.
Actually the cable infrastructure was built almost exclusively with private money. Most of the grants and taxpayer money were to support universal access (i.e. paying the cable companies to wire up the less profitable areas of town). They wouldn't have even needed them in the current deregulated telecom environment.
Regardless, the build-out happened almost 40 years ago, and the infrastructure that exists today is a lot more complex and would cost a lot more to deploy today. Almost all of that complexity has to do with data transmission, which is a product that was never envisioned when the cable buildout was happening.
I'll even agree with you that they are expensive (because they are). But they are expensive with good reason: a nationwide communications network is really expensive to run, and there's no fair way to allocate costs.
When considering throughput / capacity on infrastructure, peak usage is all that really matters. In that sense, someone who goes on Netflix and watches 2 hours of video every night at 8-10PM costs you roughly the same as someone with torrents running 24/7. Some ISPs have resorted to data caps because they at least introduce the possibility that you might go over, which causes people to at least think about their bandwidth usage.
When all is said and done, telecom companies in the US are profitable, but not insanely profitable. This is the entire reason that Comcast is the sole broadband provider in many of its markets: the payouts (margins) aren't big enough for another company to justify the upfront costs, except in a few profitable suburbs. If you look at cellular, where the big players DID overbuild in comparison to landlines, net margins STILL settled out close to 10-15% (not coincidentally, those are about the same as cable/landline.) And cellular is still awful, even though it is much more competitive than wireline.
Having worked at a number of big telecom companies, the vast majority of people who work at them have no exposure to any of the crap you're talking about. I know it's fun to generalize on the internet, but most people working at these companies are so far removed from anything regulatory or customer service related that it doesn't bother them. Hell, most of them are consultants who don't even work for the company.
Marketing is a hypothesis-driven steamroller: you test several variants of marketing material and see which one works best. The one that works best is probably the least honest one! So you go with it because your goal is to produce the most effective marketing material, not the most transparent. You probably don't even know enough about the product that's being sold to know you're being dishonest.