Rates have been made low to let the Standard into markets, or they have been made high to keep its competitors out of markets. Trifling differences in distances are made an excuse for large differences in rates favorable to the Standard Oil Co., while large differences in distances are ignored where they are against the Standard. Sometimes connecting roads prorate on oil—that is, make through rates which are lower than the combination of local rates; sometimes they refuse to prorate; but in either case the result of their policy is to favor the Standard Oil Co. Different methods are used in different places and under different conditions, but the net result is that from Maine to California the general arrangement of open rates on petroleum oil is such as to give the Standard an unreasonable advantage over its competitors" [1]

Cable companies regularly adjust prices based on the entrance of competitors (Google Fiber), or when a cable company enters a new market, prices are initially low to prevent competition and then slowly raised to a much higher level. The excuses for vast differences in rates in metropolitan cities are usually paper thin, but accepted by the media and government at face value. Cable companies also operate secondary businesses with a conflicting interest to their cable operations (Cable TV packages now directly competes with Broadband Internet, also see: NBC/Comcast), not unlike Standard Oil's purchase of many railways and control of shipping lanes. This arrangement vastly stacks the deck in favor of cable companies, and further cable company "cooperation" with state and national officials have created new restrictions on municipal competition.

Cable companies are our 21st century Standard Oil.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Monopoly_charges_...

The US acts as if one unregulated carrier is enough in cable.

I'd wager that the short term (~10 years) consequences would be vastly superior service for every day citizens. In the long term, not certain but I suspect it would be much of the same as long as the municipal provider had ever-increasing speeds as one of their primary purposes/guiding principals.

I'm not a communist but I think evidence shows that municipal broadband outperforms both telecom and cable operators in all terms of performance from costs to speeds to reliability.

This suggests the interesting possibility, that it may be worthwhile for the neighbors in a street to build their own cable and just give it to a competitor of the cable provider.

Similar things happen with turf wars. If I install services in one community then the incumbent can simply lower prices to match mine very easily. At the end of the day I've spent a bunch of money and may not gain any of my competitors customers. Even if my competitor is still paying off infrastructure in that region and may now be running at a lose the companies are so large one community isn't going to make a difference.

Even if you offer faster services the majority of people don't care, they just want to be able to watch Netflix as cheap as possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ilMx7k7mso

- bringing back all help desk type jobs that were offshored. All of our call center jobs were in the US until recently and some idiot started outsourcing some of them. We are bringing them back immediately. - EPON fiber build outs everywhere (we realize fiber is better than cable but there is existing cable infrastructure and the protocol can support 1gig/s with the current DOCSIS 3.1 standard so for now we are both upgrading the cable system and building fiber EPON) - no data caps in any form - getting rid of DVRs and having both live video and on demand/saved video stream from servers over IP

I would place us as much more techie friendly than ATT but less so compared to Google. Most of the problems with peoples cable service come from poor install jobs, if you have a problem with lost packets or dropping video please be persistent in getting a tech that is knowledgeable on how to troubleshoot line issues.

p.s. use namebench to find the best DNS servers for your area and use those instead of ours.

So, FCC wants them to enter a territory to increase competition, and Charter says "we want to reduce competition down the road buying the competitor". FCC should simply make it a requirement, that Charter should be forbidden from buying competitors in that market. That's all, problem solved.

And Charter must be really stupid to claim they want to reduce competition when talking about monopoly restricting conditions for the merger.

I'd love to have a third player in the game to add more pressure to keep the prices low.

  A coaxial cable is displayed for a photograph in front of a Time Warner Cable helmet in Manhattan Beach, California, U.S., on Monday, August 12, 2013.

I'll buy that. For a dollar.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network

As an off-topic aide: was "I'm not a communist" tongue in cheek? Or would such an infrastructure project be actually seen as "communist" &/or undesirable just for it's oversight?

Edit: terminology, link

In other words, the same number of subscribers now have to pay for 4x the infrastructure costs.

Except... that is all they have. All they have ever had. And as the population has risen, they have no budget to deploy more servers to meet demand, so every night the speeds crash and you have intermittent outages. Especially on weekends. They are running 20 year old switches that have to handle Netflix loads on a nightly basis.

So you go to town council meetings to find out whats up and it turns out that over 15 years later they still owe some ~3 million on the original bill of 22 million, and the whole town is 10 million in the red (with a population of 3 thousand) so it cannot spend money on practically anything.

So main street is like driving on a cobble trail with potholes that go unfilled for years, and school taxes are the highest in five surrounding boroughs and its still not enough for them.

Sure, you can be certain they got ripped off with whomever they bought the original deployment from back then, given its just coax and not even fiber, and the municipal ISP is only a small piece of general budget mismanagement, but it is a reflection on how bad in general politicians are at budgeting, and nobody should ever be surprised when someone cannot make a reasonable budget when they are doing it with other peoples money and they have no consequences to themselves besides possible reelection issues.

IMO, it is just a more fundamental reflection that politics and political office as it is arranged in the states is both systemically intentional and attracts people who are not technical, not actuarial, and often lawyers and other "people" persons who can talk big to get elected and then go into an echo-chamber of self-reinforcing superiority with all the other elected officials such that they never attract the kind of critical thinking or knowledge to approach anything close to municipal... anything, really, with any degree of competence. They just defer to their friends friend at a teleco wiring company or a water treatment operator or a civil engineering corps and get turned into a money faucet for terrible results. I'm not saying every government has to behave that way, but at least from my observations all the ones I have been under have, at best, been incompetent, and have often been of malicious intent towards its own citizens at their expense for corporate donors and insiders to their social circle. But it is certainly systemically intentional.

Municipal broadband just replaces one monopoly with another -- one that doesn't even have profit as a requirement, since it is also a taxing authority.

I think that you'd see the same phenomenon as in any country which socialised an industry: at first things are — as you guess — much the same, because the same people keep coming to work in the same buildings, operating the same machines according to the same processes &c. But the rate of innovation lowers, and eventually you get the equivalent of a Soviet grocery store (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOBFMMbUFI8): something much better than what you had before, but nowhere near as good as you could have had.

So after a decade or two of municipal broadband, you can expect that you'll have better broadband than when you started, but far, far, far worse broadband than where there is competition.

Now, if the debate is between a public and a private monopoly, I honestly don't know which is worse. Possibly the public monopoly, because its employees are unfireable, but — I don't know.