Cable broadband needs more competition, not less

The cable television industry doesn't need less competition. It needs more.

That is my complaint against the Comcast merger with Time Warner Cable. Cable TV prices are rising, and the monthly bills I nearly gagged over when I heard about them (as a relatively happy broadcast TV viewer 25 years ago) are now merely routine or even on the cheap side. A lot of factors are driving the rise in cable bills, but lack of competition is clearly one.

My other complaint is that both of these cable behemoths have fought tooth-and-nail against competitors, such as municipal cable systems. When the city of Wilson took the bold move of establishing a fiber-optic cable system with fiber to every residence, the big cable companies screamed. They threw the full weight of their lobbying and political power behind legislation in the North Carolina General Assembly that would have either banned municipal ventures into cable and Internet or would have placed severe restrictions on cities' abilities to launch or complete a cable system. Wilson and other municipalities fought back, but the clout of the cable giants was too great. After a three-year fight, legislators passed legislation limiting municipal systems to those cities that already had a system under way. So Wilson is one of the handful of cities offering high-speed broadband and cable TV services, along with the other utilities most cities provide. (Full disclosure: I am a Wilson Greenlight customer.)

This strangling of potential competitors and a monopolistic merger should not be allowed, but Washington seems incapable of stepping in. The cable companies have plenty of lobbyists in Washington, too.

As other new competitors arise, such as Google's plans for fiber networks in various cities, the lobbyists will have to work overtime to protect the TV-Comcast monopoly. And taking on Google and other software moguls will be more difficult than steamrolling a few upstart municipalities.

Another threat to the cable companies is the shift of TV watching to the Internet as more and more consumers give up cable because they can get what they want to watch over the Internet, right to their big, flat-screen "smart" TV. This threat will affect the municipal cable providers and the Google fiber networks, too, but it is the cable companies that have the most to lose.

While others preen, Wilson supplies service

Today's News & Observer leads with a story about area cities "preening" for attention from Google, which has announced a pilot program to wire one community for high-speed, fiber-optic Internet connections. It will be a demonstration project to show what high-speed connections can mean for a community.

Notice the sidebar to the story: "Wired Wilson." Wilson, unlike its neighbor Rocky Mount and thousands of other cities across the country, is not vying for Google's favor. Wilson already has the high-speed connection that Google is offering to one lucky community, to be named later. Wilson City Council took a $28 million gamble on a plan to connect the entire city with fiber-optic cables, offering Internet speeds of up to one gigabit per second. That's the speed Google is proposing. According to today's story, 20 percent of city residents have already signed up, well on the way toward the city's goal of 30 percent connectivity by the end of next year.

Wilson has received some statewide notice for its foresighted venture into fiber, and it has received a lot of grief from the existing Internet providers who don't want competition from a municipal government. Legislative efforts promoted by these legacy cable suppliers to prohibit cities from offering this service have thus far failed. I signed up for Wilson's Greenlight service and have been pleased with it. My major motivation was saving money. By bundling Greenlight's Internet, cable and phone services, we are saving about $40 a month compared to our previous expenses with separate phone and cable/Internet service. The download speeds with Greenlight's basic service are noticeably faster than before, even with our computers, which would be considered antiquated by technophiles' standards.

But the big advantage to Wilson in Greenlight is not found among typical residential customers like me. Rather, the advantage is to business applications and technical uses. BB&T, for example, can use this ultra-high-speed service to upload/downloads tons of data from its financial transaction processing operations. A computer software or graphics business would find this service appealing, even essential. City officials, parrying criticism from the corporate competitors, contend that information transfer is a public utility, like water, sewer, electricity and natural gas, which many cities have provided for decades.

So while other cities hopefully cross their fingers for Google's selection, Wilson already has what the others desire.