The cable TV industry practically invented the idea of bundling home telecommunications packages together for more convenience and greater savings and despite the efforts of the satellite TV industry, cable TV still remains on top for this method of delivering high quality service to its customers.

The bundling of home telecommunications services is actually a pretty straightforward concept. Basically, the subscriber signs up for two or more home telecommunications services, gets a single monthly bill that itemizes all of the services, and gets a discount as compared to what the services would cost separately. In return for the convenience and savings, the service provider gets greater customer loyalty (the subscriber does have more invested in a company that provides it two or three services than it would in a company that provides just one) and more business from that subscriber.

While satellite TV companies may try to deliver bundled service packages, the result is a pale comparison to what the cable TV industry delivers. This comes from how those services are delivered. Cable TV companies are capable of delivering digital TV service, high speed Internet access, and a digital phone line; all without the help of any other companies. Satellite TV companies on the other hand, have to enter into agreements with phone companies and satellite Internet companies in order to deliver the home phone service and high speed Internet access.

This hodge podge of companies ends up being an annoyance rather than a benefit in many different ways. For one thing, even though you’re getting your phone service and Internet service through your satellite TV company (or your satellite TV through your phone company as the case may be), you’re likely to have to deal with the customer service departments of more than one company if you have any problems. In addition, you may even get the run around when you try to have any issues taken care of. In effect, the phone company might blame the satellite TV company for whatever is going wrong, and you’d really better watch out if you get your high speed Internet service from a satellite Internet company!

In addition to the logistical problems with having the services of different companies bundled together, there’s also the problem of the technical inferiority of satellite TV, satellite Internet, DSL, and conventional telephone technologies. All of these services are technologically inferior to cable TV. Satellite TV doesn’t do as good of a job of providing video on demand programming as digital cable TV does. In addition, digital cable TV services are implementing new technology that removes bandwidth restrictions so that they can offer more channels- including HDTV channels- than satellite TV is capable of offering. When it comes to Internet service, digital cable technology is capable of offering four times the speed of DSL or satellite Internet at roughly the same cost as DSL and half the cost of satellite Internet. When you look at the fact that satellite Internet has a high latency that makes it impractical for a number of different basic Internet applications, this technology seems even worse.

All of this is why cable companies offer superior bundled services.