Letters to the Editor: Cable service outages unacceptable

The cable service for students living on campus has become unacceptable. We are paying rates comparable with a standard cable provider, but we are receiving a lesser product. In the public, recent events with the Duke Cable Television (DTV) service would prompt many to change cable providers. However, we do not have that option as students living on campus. There is only one cable provider and they know that no matter what service they offer, we have to subscribe to them if we want cable television.

This past weekend, HBO was out of service, with The Travel Channel showing in its place. Students like me who enjoy watching the Sunday night HBO lineup were unable to do so. Then, on Tuesday, the cable went out completely around 12:30 p.m., then came back for a short while, then went out again for the remainder of the night. If the problem began at 12:30 p.m., shouldn't it have been worked on all afternoon and have been fixed by the evening? In my experiences with cable television, if there were outages, they would be fixed within a few hours. However, this did not occur with DTV and that is unacceptable.

In the middle of the fall semester, the channel lineup that DTV offered was changed without much warning or notice given to it's customers. Popular channels such as MTV2, ESPNews, and The Game Show Network were replaced with Turner Movie Classics, ESPN Classic, and The Disney Channel. Maybe it's just me, but it would seem that many more college students would watch MTV2 than Turner Movie Classics or The Disney Channel. Also, students were made aware of the changes only five days prior to their activation. Clearly, the decision to make these changes didn't occur five days before the changes were made. If DTV was considering changes, I would like to have been asked for customer input, or at least be made aware of the situation earlier. For those students like myself who prepaid cable for the whole semester, there was no way to even cancel the service.

Perhaps there is nothing we can do as students other than boycotting the cable service, which just has a negative impact on us. Perhaps it is up to the University to take action and find a new cable service or improve the one that is offered. I know that there are many other more important problems in the world and that cable television is a luxury, but if it is a luxury that we are paying for, then we should be satisfied with the product and it should be known that this is not the case.