One of the biggest marketing trends to hit the telecommunications industry lately is bundled services. With bundled services, consumers can typically get up to three different home telecommunications services itemized together on a single bill. The rationale behind this phenomenon is that consumers will have the convenience of having to deal with only one monthly bill for their communications services, rather than two or three.



Consumers also experience savings because most companies will provide a discount on bundled services in exchange for the increased revenue of providing a household with more than one service.

While a lot of different telecommunications companies provide bundled services, some do a better job of it than others. For example, one common shortcoming of some bundled telecommunications services takes place when a company farms out some of the services to other companies rather than taking responsibility for those additional services themselves. For example, it's not unusual for a satellite TV company to offer DSL Internet access and land line phone service through a phone company in addition to its own satellite TV service. While customers will receive a discount and have the convenience of only paying a single monthly bill for all three services, the customers don't have the convenience of dealing with only one company.

Comcast is one example of a company that does a good job of offering bundled services because, not only does Comcast provide superior technology than other companies, but it also takes full responsibility for all of the services it offers. For example, Comcast can provide its customer with digital cable TV service, high speed Internet access, and a land based home phone line without farming out any of those services to other companies.

As far as the technology goes, Comcast's digital cable TV service has a number of features that easily make it as good or better than the majority of other TV service providers. These features include a total of over two hundred and seventy five available channels- some of them HDTV channels- dozens of digital music channels, video on demand technology, and dozens of premium movie channels. All of Comcast's programming is delivered in one hundred percent digital TV format and comes with an electronic program guide and parental control software. Digital receivers with built in digital video recorders are also available.

Comcast's high speed Internet service is far superior to other forms of supposedly high speed Internet. For example, it attain download speeds over six times faster than what DSL is capable of, and four times faster than what satellite Internet. Plus, the fact that Comcast's high speed Internet service uses the same digital cable that delivers cable TV service means that you can do without a phone line entirely if you choose to go with a VoIP option. This simply isn't possible with DSL because DSL requires a phone line, and VoIP applications won't work with satellite Internet service because of the time lag created by the fact that the satellites are thousands of miles above the surface of the Earth.

Even if you want a more conventional phone service than VoIP, Comcast can provide that as well with it's digital voice service. Again, Comcast takes full responsibility for the phone service rather than acting as the middleman between you and the phone company. This allows it to offer features and value that traditional phone services don't.

While there are a lot of companies offering packages of bundled services, Comcast serves as an example of some of the better ways to implement this idea.