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CenturyLink: Comcast Is Trying To Prevent Competition In Its Territories
mpicpp sends word that CenturyLink has accused Comcast of restricting competition in the development of internet infrastructure. CenturyLink asked the FCC to block the acquisition of Time Warner Cable to prevent Comcast from further abusing its size and power. For example, Comcast is urging local authorities to deny CenturyLink permission to build out new infrastructure if they can't reach all of a city's residents during the initial buildout. Of course, a full buildout into a brand new market is much more expensive than installing connections a bit at a time. Comcast argues that CenturyLink shouldn't be able to cherry-pick the wealthy neighborhoods and avoid the poor ones. CenturyLink points out that no other ISP complains about this, and says allowing the merger would let Comcast extend these tactics to regions currently operated by Time Warner Cable.
Because it creates competition and drives down the profit margin?
The reasoning is this - if Comcast builds out to the entire city, they're building out to highly profitable areas and to less profitable (or even unprofitable) areas. They do the build into the market with the understanding that they will make money on average, looking at the whole city, even if they lose money in some neighborhoods. Now Centurylink comes in and builds only in the expensive neighborhoods - well, guess what? They can offer cheaper rates in those neighborhoods, because they don't have to offset their losses in the poor neighborhoods. If they snipe away enough Comcast customers, eventually Comcast has to pull out entirely because they're losing money. At that point, who serves the poor neighborhoods? I am not a Comcast fan, but they absolutely have a point here. Competition isn't fair if one provider is being required to serve the whole city, but the other is not.
The solution, of course, is municipal broadband.
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To clarify, you mean municipalities building their own, community-owned networks, correct? I think the solution to this is for the towns to take a step back; the people of the community should create a co-op to build and maintain the infrastructure, and the towns should back the bonds.
The other solution is to allow partial buildouts, but ensure each phase is balanced between "rich" and "poor" areas. That lowers the cost of entry while ensuring fair competition.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If it took 10 years for Comcast to provide internet service to the *entire* city, then CenturyLink should have 10 years to do the same. Seems fair to me.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.