And how the Greensboro City Council is responsible.
A few years ago the Greensboro City Council voted to lobby the North Carolina State Legislature to pass laws that would make it illegal for municipalities to own their own cable and internet systems. Then Councilman Danny Thompson spoke loudly against it. In Fox News we read:
"Recent legislative moves on the state level. Legislators in Utah and Kansas have put forward bills that would make it difficult for cities to run their own broadband networks. These prohibitions are much favored by big cable operators, like Comcast and Time Warner cable; there are already more than a dozen states that have such restrictions.
What unites these two stories is this fact: The real problem with the quality of our Internet services is that too many cities have already given Internet providers monopoly access -- and make it extremely difficult for competitors to come in and lay cable to compete. Satellite is arguably a better service than cable (it's growing, even as cable use is falling); but satellite providers can't provide bundled Internet. And the one Internet service on the ground than can compete with cable is generally a variant of DSL -- but that has inferior speeds to cable.
The result is what generally happens when private companies have a monopoly and consumers have nowhere else to go: High prices and poor customer service. That's why so many cable customers give their local cablecos low marks. If you want to see how your provider compares in terms of customer service, click here
Back to the issue of municipal cable: When cities do create their own municipal Internet networks, prices from the commercial outfits come down -- as they would when faced with any other competition. The higher speeds and cheaper prices also attract business. One Tennessee businessman found service "eight or ten times cheaper" in Chattanooga after that city created a strong municipal Internet network."
Eight or 10 times cheaper? Here in Greensboro we would feel like we were stealing our cable service after the way Time-Warner, soon to be merged with Comcast, has been gouging us.
But it's not just about lower cost and higher speeds. It's about economic development too. From the New York Times:
"Since the fiber-optic network switched on four years ago, the signs of growth in Chattanooga are unmistakable. Former factory buildings on Main Street and Warehouse Row on Market Street have been converted to loft apartments, open-space offices, restaurants and shops. The city has welcomed a new population of computer programmers, entrepreneurs and investors. Lengthy sideburns and scruffy hipster beards — not the norm in eastern Tennessee — are de rigueur for the under-30 set.
“This is a small city that I had never heard of,” said Toni Gemayel, a Florida native who moved his software start-up, Banyan, from Tampa to Chattanooga because of the Internet speed. “It beat Seattle, New York, San Francisco in building the Gig. People here are thinking big.”
You can thank the Greensboro City Council for helping make Greensboro the center of the second hungriest metropolitan statistical area in the United States with a poverty level of over 21% and the highest unemployment of any comparable city in North Carolina. And for the high cost and slow speeds of your cable and internet.
And remember, even people who don't have cable and internet still pay for this as the City of Greensboro also has to pay for cable and internet.
