Re: Comcast merger FAQs

[Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>]

<<On Wed, 20 Nov 2002 12:06:54 -0500, Dave Faneuf <tklaundry@juno.com> said:

> it, there's a negotiating strategy  for you...competition promotes better
> service and prices,  if a municipality has no other cable provider to
> turn to when contract renewal time comes around, that my friend is a
> monopoly.

It's a monopoly either way, if the city is giving exclusive rights to
one cable company.  One of the big selling points (at least among the
D.C. think-tank crowd) to the Telecom Act was that it broke down the
barriers preventing multiple cable companies from serving the same
community.  It is as a result of the Telecom Act that I have a choice
of two cable companies and three local telephone companies at my home
in Framingham.

In many communities, the monopoly status of cable TV is a result of
economics -- most suburban communities are insufficiently dense to
justify the build-out costs of a second cable network.  The first
cable network only made economic sense because it was built under a
guaranteed monopoly from the franchising authority.

-GAWollman