“The federal government has offered billions of dollars to CenturyLink and AT&T, resulting in little infrastructure improvement. Despite funding, speeds still do not meet the FCC definition of broadband,” the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) notes in a fact sheet.
Chattanooga, Tennessee, is a good example of the municipal model. The Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga offers gigabit Internet service for $70 a month and was the highest-rated ISP in a recent Consumer Reports survey. EPB built its network and turned a profit despite having to defeat a lawsuit filed in 2008 by Comcast, which tried to stop the network from being built.
You get that comcast wasn’t baited into this fee, right? That they came up with this pricing on their own?
Do you not believe there is a story here that this family can’t get internet access beyond 3mbit/sec without paying tens of thousands of dollars? Because that’s the story here. The only one focused on Comcast appears to be you.
I have a friend who would happily pay that much. He is in a rural area outside Seattle. Every few years it seems someone cannot read the files and offers to connect his house. He says “Sure give me a quote” they come out and say “umm, no we can’t “. One time the rep on the phone said they could give him a quote without have to come out. I think it was low five figures and he said “Sure, come out and do it” they showed up to do the work and said “No we can’t “
$27,000 for directional boring, engineering, permitting, labor and materials for almost 300 feet of cabling and conduit is not out of line for this type of project. Sucks that this couple doesn’t have anyone else to share the expense but they should have checked into it before buying the property. Caveat emptor.
The article literally has this subhead in it:
Not our first Comcast horror story
This story is simply another in a series of Comcast bashing articles. The author even admits it.
“Couple forced to endure unsubsidized provisioning costs from protected monopoly vendor who, despite receiving government subsidies, is not obligated to provide them service” is exactly the correct interpretation.
In other words, Comcast are being legally-permitted unethical assholes, who will, of course, finally cave and provide service once this story goes viral, as Ars has documented in the past.
I appreciate you position here, and thank you for your perspective.
Wow big deal…Charter/Spectrum quoted me $75,000 to run a service line just over 3000ft (1/2 mile) and this was 5 years ago before everything got so expensive. Said it cost them $20 per foot to run a service line. You can buy a spool of cable for about $1 per ft. I checked into it back then.
Yeah at one time I had AT&T DSL. AT&T has over a dozen of those little green road side connection boxs on my street. One is even beside my drive way. Now AT&T has told me for over 7 years now that they dont service my street or my house and I cant even get a land line home phone. The agreement they made with the FCC so they could buy the satellite company (I forget the name now) was that they had to provide service to so many new homes and update the infrastructure to support more connections…they lied to the FCC and submitted false reports so the FCC would approve the Satellite company deal.
would that it were true. the market competition for shared infrastructure has driven prices up, not down. it’d be one thing if they were actually competing for services - but running redundant wires is redundant, and expensive
Americans pay the most in the world for broadband access. And it’s not exactly blazing fast.
For an Internet connection of 25 megabits per second, New Yorkers pay about $55 — nearly double that of what residents in London, Seoul, and Bucharest, Romania, pay. And residents in cities such as Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo and Paris get connections nearly eight times faster
It took a ridiculously long time for my neighborhood to get high-speed internet when I was living in San Francisco. I don’t know what we would have done if we hadn’t been able to upgrade before the big Covid lockdown.
One the things people fail to understand, permitting fees are expensive, specially going under an arterial (which this street is). Coordinating with power, gas and since it’s Seattle, hiring SPD to control traffic, is not cheap.
Unlike phone, it’s not considered a life line, so Comcast would have to foot the bill. They look at return on investment over time. Who’s to say they pay for it and then the customer changes services in two years?
If there was a pole they could attach to, it wouldn’t be a big issue. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than going underground.
And people keep saying it’s cause they have a monopoly. Which is false. There are multiple other choices here in Seattle. CneturyLink, Astound (formerly Wave), Ziply, multiple microwave providers, StarLink, t-mobile, etc.
But I always hear “they don’t provide the same speeds XFINITY does, so they have a monopoly”
Another thing some people don’t seem to understand is that big ISPs have been given hundreds of millions of dollars by local, state, and federal governments and pocketed rather a lot of it instead of using it for the infrastructure development it was earmarked for.
If Comcast had used every dollar that was given to it for internet infrastructure development in the Seattle area, and this residence just didn’t make the cut, that would be one thing. But that’s not what happened. So when they took the public cash and want to charge these folks $27k to put in a cable line, that’s where it becomes unethical. These folks already contributed to putting in that cable line through their taxes.
The icing on the cake is when they fail to develop the infrastructure and then block local ISPs from covering the gap.
The obvious solution is StarLink. Easy to install, reliable, and fast. Folks I know had a similar issue with Comcast estimating $20K to install a short line and $100/month. StarLink works great in King County WA.
