Combast

…is what we used to call Comcast when I lived in DC.  Bunch of bastards – they ate Cable TV Arlington, so I was stuck with them.  Substandard DVR option (if any), horrible cable guide functionality, stuff breaking at random, and clueless customer service that would show up to your house…maybe.  If Comcast said the technician would arrive between 12 and 5 on Tuesday, there would be no technician and there might not be a Tuesday.

But it was my only option for TV, because I lived in an apartment.  Sure, I could put up rabbit ears, but things like DirecTV or Dish or an entirely theoretical fiber offering were non-starters.

That’s the thing: Comcast is out there trying to sell its Time-Warner Cable merger as being entirely pro-consumer in a thriving competitive market because DirecTV! And Dish!  And Netflix! And Hulu! And Google Fiber!

Hold. UP.

Here’s the fact of the matter: the so-called “triple play” is a ruse.  Ultimately, what you’re getting is phone, TV and Internet access – but the phone service is delivered as data, and the TV is just a collection of streams. What Comcast really is – what any cable company is, to be honest – is a data pipe into the house with some services slapped over top of it.  Hulu and Netflix aren’t competitors at all, because they aren’t running a pipe.  DirecTV and Dish are competing television services, but they’re not a pipe.  Google Fiber is a pipe…if you live in Kansas City or Provo or maybe Austin.

But the thing is, right now, there are two pipes into the house: your cable company and your phone company.  And that’s it.  Anything more would require running new cables to your house, whether it’s Google Fiber or a municipally-owned fiber option (such as in Chattanooga), and that represents a non-trivial infrastructure cost plus the limitations on what local municipalities and HOAs and the like are willing to have done.  So at the end of the day, you face a duopoly: your local cable company, irrespective of the name, or your local Baby Bell, also irrespective of the name.

And that’s the problem.  Comcast can point to companies like Cox or Charter or the like, but cable TV is a local monopoly everywhere and always.  How many cable companies can you choose between?  For my part, I get to pick between Comcast and U-Verse.  That’s AT&T U-verse, the local Baby Bell.  I can’t choose a fiber option, because nobody’s running fiber to my house.  I could go back to DirecTV for my television, but I’d still have to pick a broadband provider.  And I could choose DSL from a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier…and be limited to whatever the copper can carry from the CO, assuming they can actually undercut the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (i.e. the Baby Bell). I went down that route, but Speakeasy could never get faster than 1.5Mbps, no matter how much they wanted to.

There are any number of possible alternatives which Comcast or Verizon or AT&T will flog to show you what a real competitive bidness they are in – and most of them, like WiMAX or municipal fiber or the like, barely exist and often as not are crap where they do.  Ultimately, if you want a legitimately competitive business environment, the only thing you can do is to have the local community take possession of the last mile – the line from the central office to the house – and then allow anyone to use it.  If the two lines into your house are suddenly open to half a dozen providers each, then all of a sudden you have real competition and real choice.

As it is, Comcast is happy for you to have a choice, and the choice is go with them or go without.

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