Two cities, located on opposite coasts, have recently cried out for cable competition in their communities. A few weeks ago, SunBreak ran a story under "Why Comcast Needs Competition...Badly." The post describes a significant outage in Seattle and Comcast's slow response to fix the problem.

You may think to yourself, Hey, come on, it's 90 minutes out of your day. But what I think about is how much time cumulatively was wasted in Seattle this morning, much of it simply because people would not have been sure where the problem was. An early, all-hands-on-deck announcement from Comcast would have been a big help. It seems slightly insane that a company that provides internet service isn't very good at using the internet.

The folks at Sunbreak apparently were not aware that the City is still slowly considering building a network to ensure everyone in the community has affordable high speed broadband access (which would likely be far more reliable than Comcast's network). After I noted this in the comments, they reprinted one of my posts about Seattle's deliberations. Meanwhile, the folks in Scranton, Pennsylvania, (immortalized in the television show The Office) have been asking when they get the faster broadband now available in Philly, Pittsburgh, and parts of the Lehigh Valley. The answer came bluntly from Stop the Cap: Sorry Scranton, You’re Stuck With Comcast Cable… Indefinitely An article from the Times Tribune explains why the private sector fails to provide competition:

"Offering out television service is expensive, too expensive for most smaller telephone companies," said telecom industry analyst Jeff Kagan. "So many are reselling satellite service to keep customers who want one bundle and one bill." Because of that, satellite television providers, who were never a formidable challenge to conventional cable companies, gained market share, Mr.

I was doing some research on the cost of business broadband services in the Twin Cities when I encountered one of the stark differences between local networks accountable to the public and the massive telcos (in this case, Qwest). I was compiling some numbers on broadband costs and had just gotten through a very quick and efficient chat with Xmission - a service provider on the UTOPIA network. For some reason, I thought getting similar information from Qwest would also be easy, particularly as we are in the middle of Qwest territory up here in Minnesota. But Qwest's website couldn't tell me what services are available in our area because it was convinced our address and phone number was outside their 14-state operating territory. Our office is in Minneapolis, which is certainly within the Qwest territory. So I picked up the phone to call Qwest and find out what was available. After 4.5 minutes (which is a long time when one is already annoyed) listening to Qwest advertising in between being assured that my business was VERY important to them, I was connected to a rather friendly woman who tried to help. For another four minutes, she tried to locate my building to tell us what services are available. She noted several times, as they all do, that the system was slow today and she was waiting for it to update. As a side note, this is the direct consequence of consolidation and the supposed economy of scale that results from bigness: we wait on hold to eventually talk to people across the country (or globe) while they wait for the computer to give us some probably inaccurate information because no one has any actual idea where services are available. Alas, she found our address and was sorry to report that they only had slow services available for us because they have not yet lit the additional fiber necessary to offer services faster than 5Mbps down and .896Mbps upstream. Perhaps by the end of the year. Our office is located at the edge of the University of Minnesota in a dense area -- hardly the kind of place you would expect Qwest to struggle to offer decent connections. I'm glad the customer service person was so pleasant because we spoke for almost ten minutes while waiting for their computers to find the information she needed to tell me.

As Salisbury prepares to officially launch its publicly owned FTTH network offering triple-play services, it offers lessons for other communities that want to follow in its footsteps. As we wrote a month ago, Fibrant has candidly admitted it cannot win a price war with incumbents. Companies like Time Warner Cable have a tremendous scale advantage, which allows them to price below cost in Salisbury because the large profits from all the non-competitive markets nearby can subsidize temporary losses. On October 10, the Salisbury Post ran a story "Fibrant can't match cable company specials." Alternative possible titles for the article could have been "Cable Co cuts prices to drive competition from market," or "Time Warner Cable admits customers pay different prices for same services." Interestingly, when Fibrant unveiled its pricing originally, the headline read "Fibrant reveals pricing" rather than "Fibrants offers speeds far faster than incumbents." A lesson for community networks: do not expect the media to cover you fairly. The big companies have public affairs people with relationships with the press and they often buy a lot of local advertising. This is not to say all local media is bought off -- far from it -- but local media will have to be educated about the advantages of community networks. Quick question: When you hear this quote, who do you first think of?

"We always work with customers to meet their needs and budget."

The cable company, right? Well, that is Time Warner Cable's claim in the above Salisbury Post article. Later in the article, a local business owner expressed a different sentiment: "Time Warner has the worst customer service I have ever dealt with." The business owner goes on:

“Fibrant may have these same kind of issues, however I can actually go to the source to deal personally with someone who is vested in the community, not spend two hours on the phone and never solve the problem as I do with TWC,” he said. “Even if pricing is higher, I would make the change.

A couple of short interesting stories this week:

• The Chattanoogan.com published a "Declaration of Independence from Comcast", written by a "fi-oneer" or person who is testing the new publicly owned FTTH services.

  Unsurprisingly, there are some glitches this early in the process, but the fi-oneer seems pretty happy with it overall:

  The television is fantastic; we have a multitude of channels, both high def and non high def; local, 'cable,' sports, movies, etc. Contracts are still being completed with a couple of providers, so we are missing my favorite, HGTV. I have been told that it will be coming in less that two weeks.

  Although as with any new product there are occasional glitches, but we have only had a few, minor not major ones, at that. The picture might freeze for a few seconds, or pixilate for a few seconds. There are some things you need to learn about the remote control.

  Interestingly, early problems can actually help community networks. In Burlington, Vermont, early problems allowed the publicly owned network to demonstrate how good its customer service was compared to the incumbents and gained a better reputation.

• More news out of Seattle - following up on our recent story noting Reclaim the Media's push for public broadband in Seattle, Seattle radio station KUOW's program "The Conversation" had some guests discussing the existing network in Tacoma and a potential network for Seattle. Follow that link to listen in, the relevant portion runs from 14 minutes to 21 minutes (a total of 7 minutes).

• Karl Bode at DSL Reports slams a recent report by incumbent-flack group Discovery Institute that concludes government regulation of broadband is unnecessary. Bode's response is worth reading, here is an excerpt: