Now consider the cable company. You want to add service? No problem--you can do that by yourself online. Want to cancel something or downgrade it? You *have* to call. Then you find that that part of the system is understaffed and it takes over an hour to do. Oh, and the cancellation is only open from 9-5, so I have to call during work. I kept a service at an old home for months (still owned it) after because I didn't have time to call to deal with it; only $20 a month for really cheap internet that was meant to tide over during a transition, but it shows how much hassle canceling can be.
Comcast was particularly evil about cancelling-- my mom was in competitive territory where she could have Comcast or WOW, and had signed up for a Comcast deal where she had no end of equipment trouble, and they would send her random stuff that she hadn't ordered. She died before the contract ran out and when I was managing her estate, they demanded that I come in to their office with the death certificate and letters of authority and wouldn't accept it by mail or give me a mailing address when I talked to them on the phone. I live 2000 miles away and was able to do the entire probate by mail and phone with the use of notaries and few medallion signature guarantees. *Every* other business and government entity was perfectly fine with mail (sometimes fax) and notaries or guarantees from my bank. Surprisingly, though, twitter shaming ended up working with comcast-- one tweet about it with details (because they can't hide it) and they gave me an email address to send details to and I got it worked out. Dealing with them was frustrating enough that I actually wrote to the FCC and my congress people to oppose the Comcast/TW merger.
Charter, on the other hand, has actually been pretty decent. I got them after PacBell was unable to make DSL work at my new house, and I've had very few problems. For a long time if I called them up for anything (add a service or ask a question) they'd actually offer to *lower* my rate and then backdate it 3 months. That happened several times. When I got my own cable modem it was no hassle to switch, and the few times I've had to go in for hardware swaps (e.g. to trade analog equipment for digital) there's been no more than one or two people in line. Last time I talked to them they said they'd stopped charging for the cable modems and I could switch back to one of theirs if I felt like it, or not. Recently I had problems due to rain (animals chewing on the cable insulation) and they sent someone out in the rain to fix it-- it took two trips because the pole access requires putting a ladder on a neighbors roof, but they were very easy to schedule with them and the neighbor. If they can buy TWC and make TWC be like the Charter I deal with (SoCal) it would actually be a good thing.