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Given that cable companies are often monopolies in the region they operate and that they have a history of shady practices, I’m not sure why people are so hesitant to accept local governments from offering broadband instead. If they did then at least there would be public input on the implementation instead of just corporate interests deciding who is eligible and what they want to install (and when…)
Given that cable companies are often monopolies in the region they operate and that they have a history of shady practices, I’m not sure why people are so hesitant to accept local governments from offering broadband instead. If they did then at least there would be public input on the implementation instead of just corporate interests deciding who is eligible and what they want to install (and when…)
To be fair, your local government is a monopoly in the region they operate and if you look into it likely have a history of shady practices - at least all the places I have lived. I also doubt they value customer service any more than your ISP.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Municipal broadband doesn't bundle with TV and sports like Comcast does. Addicted people need their hits of dopamine, and Comcast (or insert evil ISP here) controls the supply even with a municipal player in town. I wouldn't be surprised if Comcast charged you more for your TV package alone than if you bundled your internet as well.
There are plenty of internet OTT services that provide live TV like Hulu Live, YouTube TV, Sling, etc. These days if you’re not into sports, there is really no need for live TV. You can mix and match streaming services.
Also, digital antennas can come in handy if the local channels provide the news and sports content that you could otherwise not get with Internet TV services.
I could see a major increase in these municipal providers if that could somehow be an additional revenue driver. But I also imagine the existing players already lobbied a law to prevent that.
How in the world can someone "prefer their current provider" without something to compare against? I think in any kind of survey like this, I would like to see the actual questions that were asked.
Maybe they've had bad experiences dealing with other municipal services from their city. Or maybe they just think the act of switching will be a pain in the butt. I can imagine many of the answers boil down to "yes, give me anything but X" or "it's good enough please don't break it"
I don't see any way this could be a meaningful survey, because the implication is that 60% of consumers would "not even consider" switching to a cheaper provider, which is ridiculous. Of course people would consider it. I'm not even personally convinced it's a great idea (I'm not currently impressed with municipal _anything_ living in Seattle), and I would _consider_ using it instead of Xfinity. I doubt there are 20%…
> I don't see any way this could be a meaningful survey, because the implication is that 60% of consumers would "not even consider" switching to a cheaper provider, which is ridiculous. Are you assuming municipal broadband would be cheaper? As discussed elsewhere on this thread, it's very difficult to have any sense of the meaning of the results without understanding the questions asked. If the question was literally…
Allegedly Chattanooga has 10Gb municipal broadband. Anyone use it? How's the service?
I haven’t had any outages in the year or so I’ve been here. Latency and packet loss are better than what I had with Comcast on average. There are no caps either.
I pay the same price here that I paid for 50mbps Comcast business class (business to avoid the data caps).
That’s fairly amazing to me considering the billions of dollars that corporate monopolies have invested in advertising and PR, compared to zero in towns that haven’t done any promotion of the idea of municipal broadband.