I remember they days with two cable systems in bcs. Four dollar cable bills and outrage when it went to 6 then 8. The community cable system went through multiple owners and I believe it was cook (or crook as people called it) that finally bought Midwest. It was their first order of business to tear down the Midwest distribution infrastructure and move it to the typically newer community system. Prices immediately rose from the lack of competition.
Because of the cost to build this infrastructure it is highly unlikely we will ever see another cable provider here especially in cs and the higher cost driven by being required to be underground. Both cities have franchise agreement with suddenlink but it deals what do and don't about placing infrastructure, what they must provide, things like public access channels, and free cable to city hall and schools. In theory you could go negotiate an agreement with either city but finite resources like space in utility easements and on poles make it very hard. Because of this you typically only see legacy phone companies compete with cable because they have infrastructure in place and technology has moved ahead so old wires can carry data faster and they can leverage it to deliver Internet and via that streaming video. Verizon had no interest in this legacy wire infrastructure theor future was wireless, more profitable and also far lest costly to maintain. Few companies want to be in the phone company business, but frontier is actually one of them. They have been spending money, probably more in the last year here then Verizon spent in the past 15. And have done things like moved all their customer service to us call centers. Their infrastructure will not support gig but you will see uverse level offerings. So plan of sudden link for a long time. Cord cutting is taking some of the arrogance out of providers which may help prices and customer service. But altice, sudden links owner is also one that believes in the cable business, a good thing. Google tried fiber, loosing huge money on what was an experiment. But wall street believes the future is in wireless and none of them are going to say buy this stock they are going to spend hundreds of billions to.put in fiber so people can get faster and cheaper access.
So we deal with people that mostly don't care if your service works well, only that it's enough to keep you mailing them checks. And dial up the price as often as they can get away with and not have mass exodus of customers.
