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Bundling telecommunications services together into a single package is a marketing tool that benefits both consumers and the companies that supply the services. At least that’s the case under ideal conditions. Under less than ideal conditions, the companies involved see most of the benefits while the benefits that the consumers enjoy can easily be offset by a new set of frustrations.

The idea behind bundled telecommunications services is that instead of getting your TV service from a TV service provider, your Internet access from an Internet service provider, and your phone service from the local phone company; you can instead enjoy all three of these products (or any two of them actually) through the same company. Not only do you have to deal with only one bill per month- rather than three separate ones- but the company will also discount the cost of its services. The company benefits by making itself more attractive to consumers who want to simplify aspects of their lives and by getting the revenues of more than one service.

Of course all of these things happen under the ideal conditions that you might expect to find if your get a bundled package through a company like Comcast. Comcast does a number of things that define good bundled services. For example, it keeps all of the services that it provides in house rather than farming them out to other providers. This gives Comcast more control over the services that it provides and therefore the level of customer service associated with them. This also allows Comcast to offer the benefit of using superior technologies.

The practice of outsourcing services to other companies is extremely common, and actually made necessary by the fact that many companies simply don’t have the technology to offer some of the services that they’d like to include in the bundle. For example, a satellite TV provider will have trouble providing phone service, and phone companies have yet to figure out a good way to provide TV service over a phone line. While bundling services from several different companies together does often provide the convenience and savings that makes bundled service packages so attractive in general, the fact that different services are administered by different companies makes it more difficult for customers to get decent service when something goes wrong. It’s simply too easy for the different companies involved to pass the buck on customer service issues and therefore not bother to solve any problems that may crop up.

Another thing that can make bundled services from separate companies a bad deal is because they often take advantage of less than ideal technologies. For example, DSL is often passed off as high speed Internet in these bundled packages while Comcast’s broad band cable high speed Internet service is about six times faster (and often much faster than that because of the slow speed of many DSL connections) and only costs a couple of extra dollars a month. Satellite Internet is a much more advanced technology than DSL, but it’s no faster and may actually perform worse because of the time lag created by the time that it takes the data to travel the thousands of miles to and from the satellites. Any phone service that involves a traditional phone company is sure to cost too much and provide too little when compared to Comcast’s home phone service.

While bundling of telecommunications services is definitely an idea that has a lot of benefits, there are a number of pitfalls to look out for.

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