Gigem314 said:
Eliminatus said:
Gigem314 said:
Sick of their monopoly.
And shame on our city leaders for letting it continue.
We're not a tiny little college town anymore.
Does anyone actually know why there is only one company here? The consensus I've been hearing for years is that no outside competition will be allowed, and not that any other company is simply not interested. But it's always hearsay.
I've heard the same.
I can't imagine every other cable or high speed internet service out there isn't interested in coming to College Station. It has to be internal politics.
As I understand it, and please take this with a grain of salt, but this is what I understand and it could fully be wrong.
There was at one point an exclusive franchise agreement with both Bryan and College Station cities for the TCA/Cox/Suddenlink/Altice whatever system to operate. That exclusive franchise license ended when the PUC started regulating and issuing their own state-wide franchise agreements for given areas.
https://www.cstx.gov/business___development/franchise_agreementsI can't directly find Bryan's, but did note a reading at City Council on the renewal of a Cable Television franchise renewal in 2003, and and Bryan's code says that without an election, it shouldn't be able to last more than 10 years, 20 with an election.
https://library.municode.com/tx/bryan/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=PTICH_S16UTSTAVALHIPUWOSo, that said, I don't think there's any legal encumbrance restricting our options to Suddenlink, but as I've posted previously, the financial burdens to deploying any new network in the area are so large that our area simply can't sustain it in a solvent manner.
Since the network physical plant and infrastructure are privately owned, there is no legal way to force them to allow a competitor to use the last mile connections. In some municipal networks, the last mile is owned and managed by a public utility type of entity, which leases out, in a vendor-neutral manner, access to the individual customers, and the ISP is an aggregator and manager of traffic. They lease backhaul connecting into the municipal network and resell that bandwidth allocation to their customers.
The most close analogy I can find would be the deregulated areas of electric service versus areas that still have municipal provided power. In deregulated power areas, you can have any one of a multitude of "power companies" but the physical plant is run and managed by a central utility and the "power company" you sign up with is more or less a sales aggregation. They make their money playing on the price of power purchased at a given time and for a given cost versus the power consumed by their customers (which is why they often have "free power at night" deals; the price of power at night is insanely cheap on the bulk market and sometimes they can be paid to actually consume that power). In municipal owned utilities, the utility is end-to-end solution. They own the transmission, distribution and all of the customer service and reliability and regulation costs.This is more analogous to a Suddenlink type of provider, just swap municipal ownership for private ownership.
Oddly enough, some of the most successful local ISP competition to the single-large-player in a modest metro area are in municipal owned ISPs. Chattanooga, TN for example has a municipally owned and operated FTTH ISP that offers residential 1Gbit/sec connections plus TV for $70/month. Comcast was the provider in the area and the town had languished in slow cable modem speeds and higher prices. EPB (the local electric utility) had deployed a very large smart grid system backed by fiber for the VW plant, and once complete, realized they had a very robust and dense coverage area, and started offering services. Somehow that spurred Comcast to do two things; 1) Sue EPB to stop their plans, get rebuffed by the FCC, have the TN State Senate legislate away competition rights against any incumbent provider, have the FCC get a court ruling staying that law temporarily and 2) Led them to "reevaluate" the "inability" to offer better and faster service in the area and started offering 2GBit/Sec FTTH service in Chattanooga
I say all this to say that there isn't a legal restriction on a competitor that I can find, but any potential competitor has either the monumental cost of building up a network from scratch or finding some legal way to bifurcate the billing from service delivery on Suddenlink's lines and both companies resell the service. Neither of those are going to happen in any timeframe soon. The other option, a muni-owned style network also won't happen, more for political reasons though.
So, unless the satellite networks of the future just get awesome, it sucks, but pretty much get used to Suddenlink as the only provider for reasonable speeds in the majority of the B/CS city limits area for a while.