After beating cable lobby, Colorado city moves ahead with muni broadband

Re:After beating cable lobby, Colorado city moves ahead with... by jchw on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @02:38PM (#16064302)

I'm reading this as a side-effect of just how absolutely hated broadband companies like Comcast and Verizon are. They've spent decades ignoring consumers, doing exactly what they don't want, providing shoddy service, providing shoddy support, doing absolutely fuck all other than continuously raking in money.

Now they want us to help them by stomping out government competition? Fat chance. They'll just have to do what they did with net neutrality: spend years and years planting people in agencies and political positions to push their self-interests. I hope they do and I hope it backfires.

I doubt they can blow a million on lobbying in every city that starts talking about municipal broadband, so I'm guessing if this trend continues they're going to switch focus to attempting to outlaw it entirely. Certainly possible, but it seems like a harder target than dismantling net neutrality.

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Re:After beating cable lobby, Colorado city moves ahead with... by aidenn0 on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:02PM (#16067075)

Comcast in particular seems to evoke near-universal feelings of rage, and has done so for decads. I remember a while back, my dad looked into bonded ISDN as an option when we couldn't get DSL just to avoid Comcast (ISDN turned out to be way too expensive, but the moment FIOS was available he switched, after using Comcast for over a decade)

See also Comcast's customer satisfaction scores rise, but are still below the IRS's: http://bgr.com/2017/04/25/comcast-customer-service-scores-20...

Americans in general don't trust the government to provide good services and yet municipal broadband gets strong support from voters almost everywhere. It's really hard to understate how much people don't like Comcast

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Re:After beating cable lobby, Colorado city moves ahead with... by Simon_says on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @03:12PM (#16064598)

I feel like Comcast/Verizon/CenturyLink were too short-sighted. If they were only 50% as shitty to their customers as they have been, they could have ridden that gravy train for a long time. But instead they treat it as a contest to see who can twist the knife more, and there's such a backlash that they're going to start completely losing big markets.

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Re:After beating cable lobby, Colorado city moves ahead with... by bsder on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @04:59PM (#16065656)

Hey, I can't get my 25% executive bonus if I don't somehow squeeze another 2% out of my department's expenses.

This yacht won't pay for itself, you know.

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Re:After beating cable lobby, Colorado city moves ahead with... by Simon_says on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @05:30PM (#16065942)

Exactly. That's what I'm getting at. Being public companies means they have to report results quarterly, which gives incentives to juice the numbers with short term gains so long as the costs, like public goodwill and brand reputation, can't be quantified and can't be put on the balance sheet.

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Re:After beating cable lobby, Colorado city moves ahead with... by tehlike on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @05:43PM (#16066085)

Unless you have jeff bezos skills to convince ling term this is better.

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