From all appearances, it’s anything but Time Warner vs. Comcast. From a business point of view, Comcast owns 22% of Time Warner. They’re jointly buying Adelphia together and splitting it up.

And that’s where it get’s ugly.

In doing the joint venture to buy the US’s 5th largest cable company (Adelphia), and divest Comcast of it’s 22% share of Time Warner, what they don’t tell you is they’re going to swap some markets around. The Star Tribune has the story.

And one of those is here, the Twin Cities. Today, TW owns the South and West suburbs, as well as parts of Minneapolis. Comcast, through it’s purchase of AT&T, owns St. Paul and the northern suburbs.

And a year from now, they’re gonig to trade a market. And Comcast gets the Twin Cities.

Which just plain sucks.

Financially, Comcast is going to raise my rates over 25%. But what chaps me is the level of service. Since Comcast bought AT&T, who bought TCI, they’ve been upgrading those cable lines for years, and are almost done. Time Warner on the other hand, has had wonderful service for the last 5 years.

Comcast blocks ports, such as 80, so users can’t host different kinds of servers.

Time Warner not only doesn’t block them, but once every few months I get an email saying “Hey, we see you running an email server, so we scanned it, and it’s not a relay”. Even though it’s against the TOS for me to do so, they give me a heads up that they know, and continue to let me.

I’ll be honest – I’m not a big fan of Big Media companies, and Time Warner is one of the biggest. But their cable broadband service has been phenomenal. Few service outages, ok customer service, and the quality, including boosting from 3 to 5 megs down earlier this year, has kicked ass.

I am not looking forward to being a Comcast customer. They’re going to raise my price substantially, because I choose not to subscribe to TV service from them, they have antiquated cable systems, and are now going to try and merge someone else’s cable system in to theirs.

Great.