Moving shop (4)

Goodbye Casema

Another company we said goodbye to was the cable company Casema. We had to say goodbye to the company as we will leave their territory and move to the area of one of their colleagues. Cable companies are still territory bound. Only by the terrestrial digital television Digitenne cable companies have in some areas competition.

Casema is nice company with some interesting history. It was part of KPN, but had to separated from it as KPN would be to much of a market force; this was way before triple play in the 1990s. Recently the company was sold to Warburg Pincus and Cinven and will be consolidated with Multikabel, bought by Marcus Pincus. It will now be the third cable company in the Netherlands. As Essent Kabelcom division, the second largest cable company in the Netherlands, is still on auction, Casema might even merge with Essent Kabelcom. And this would be bad news for KPN and UPC.

Casema recently bought the wimax license from Versatel in order to extend its regional area to a national distribution network for internet.

The service of Casema was okay; nothing very good, nothing bad. I had only one run-in with them, when they offered fast internet over the cable. I talked with the call-center about a fast connection and the in-house cabling. I indicated that I wanted to have the cable come in on the first floor. The call centre, eager to sell, told me that this should not be a problem. But the engineer, who came to execute the assignment, was not willing to bring the cable to the first floor. So we refused to go ahead. That was the end of Casema internet for us.

Their offer of television channels was okay. In 1986 they started to bring the BBC with a royal marriage. Their international offer with CNN, Belgian, German, French and Spanish programs is more than you could swallow and have time for. Casema had also an offer for digital television. You had to get the set-top box yourself at a retailer and request a subscription. We did not go the digital telvision way as we didi not see the advantages of it for television itself and did not have any time to look video-on-demand. Digital television needs some more incentives.

So Casema has one client less for the time being. But they will not notice that.

Tags:casema, cable, broadband

Blog Posting Number: 452