When it comes to the marketing campaigns that companies use to sell their products and services, some are little more than hyperbole and pointless noise. Most adds for car dealerships on the radio are examples of this. At the other end of the spectrum though, you can find marketing campaigns that actually provide deals that are not only attractive, but also beneficial as well. The bundles of telecommunications services that a lot of companies are offering to residential customers these days constitute a good example of the latter.

While bundled home telecommunications services may offer real value to customers, some of them tend to be better than others. Cable TV companies in general- and Comcast in particular- tend to offer bundled packages that are a good value, while other types of companies bear some scrutiny when looking into the deals that they offer. Generally, any company that has to ally itself with another company in order to offer more than one service deserves some wariness.

An example of a company that might offer bundled services but can only do so with the help of another company would be a phone company. After all, while a phone company should be fairly competent when it comes to offering phone services, there Internet service is likely to be very limited and their TV service is probably nonexistent. After all, phone lines are pretty dinky when it comes to transmitting anything other than conversation. This translates into slow Internet connections either through DSL or dial up. Some phone companies have experimented with providing TV programming over DSL connections (actual channels rather than streaming Internet video), but given that the bandwidth of DSL is severely limited when it comes to Internet data, video like that has proven to be too much for that technology to handle.

Because of all of this, a phone company has to contract with a satellite TV company and possibly even a satellite Internet company to cover all of the bases. Plus, if you see a deal where a stellite TV company is offering high speed Internet service or phone service, you can be sure that it’s farming those services out to other companies as well. All of this makes a leader in the cable TV industry- like Comcast- a much better choice for multiple services.

The real trouble with dividing up services among different companies and then offering them on one bill is that customer service can be sub par. That’s because this scenario opens up the distinct possibility of one company passing the blame for some kind of an aberration in service to another company. In other words, you can have two or even three companies all blaming each other for some problem with your phone service, TV service, or high speed Internet connection rather than ever getting around to fixing the problem.

By contrast, with a company like Comcast, there’s no where to pass the buck. Moreover, since the same company is in charge of everything, you probably won’t have the same kinds of problems with conflicting services to begin with. The point is to be careful when choosing bundled services and use Comcast’s method of providing those services as a model.