<story><title>Don’t Blame Big Cable. It’s Local Governments That Choke Broadband Competition</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-just-cable-companies-and-blame-local-government-for-dismal-broadband-competition/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zdw</author><text>The fundamental problem here is that in most places we&amp;#x27;ve arbitrarily decided that certain things like:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    - Roads
    - Water&amp;#x2F;Trash&amp;#x2F;Sewer
    - Police&amp;#x2F;Fire service
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Are a part of municipal government, whereas:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    - Electrical
    - Telephone
    - Cable TV
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Are frequently not, but are regulated.  Frequently, one of these last 3 will own the poles (usually the Electrical company, but sometimes the municipality) and the Phone&amp;#x2F;Cable companies lease the poles to put up their lines.&lt;p&gt;So, what do you do?  Make the Electric company put up New Companies A-Z&amp;#x27;s lines for free?  That doesn&amp;#x27;t work and would quickly lead to companies covering the lucrative part of town (read: &amp;quot;rich&amp;quot;) and widening the digital divide.&lt;p&gt;It comes back to the bad decision that didn&amp;#x27;t force Cable to be a common carrier.  Had that happened, we&amp;#x27;d end up with a situation like DSL where there are multiple vendors, except the lines would have the same speed capabilities as Cable.&lt;p&gt;So, in short, it comes back to a bad FCC decision.  Requiring a bunch of new physical infrastructure isn&amp;#x27;t needed when the existing could just be broken up and leased out as dumb pipes.</text></comment>
<story><title>Don’t Blame Big Cable. It’s Local Governments That Choke Broadband Competition</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-just-cable-companies-and-blame-local-government-for-dismal-broadband-competition/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>imgabe</author><text>So the cable companies aren&amp;#x27;t aggressively lobbying municipal governments to keep out competition? Where do you think these costs came from?&lt;p&gt;And god forbid the municipality try to build out its own network. That will just inspire the incumbent cable company to take them to court until the project gets scrapped.&lt;p&gt;No, I think we can pretty easily blame Big Cable for this one.</text></comment>