Broadband Island Exploads In Conflict

from the fight!-fight! dept

Wed, Nov 23rd 2005 1:24am — Mike Masnick

While folks like Broadband Reports have been covering the fact that Long Island has become the main battleground for broadband fights between cable and telco providers for many months, it looks like the Long Island fight is going mainstream in a big way. Both Business Week and the Wall Street Journal have written up nearly identical articles about the battle of the incumbents which has turned quite nasty -- but which hopefully should end up with a lot of happy broadband customers. It's tough to pick someone who you want to root for in a battle between two incumbents, both of whom have shown they won't hesitate to pull all sorts of dirty tricks to stop any kind of competition -- but, in the early rounds, it certainly looks like Cablevision is the company that's sunk the lowest -- personally attacking one mayor who is trying to bring about more competition by allowing Verizon to offer new services in the area. Expect plenty of stories along these lines over the next few years, and both sides are going to come out of it looking bad. About the only thing you can hope for at this point is that the telcos and the cablecos will so bloody each other that it will allow room for some more options to sneak into the competitive arena -- but that seems unlikely right now.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

5 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Erick Erickson, 23 Nov 2005 @ 6:39am

Competition in the Market
I was writing about this the other day here. Across the nation, when Verizon brings FIOS into the market, or an existing company meets lower priced or highed speed competition, prices are dropping and speeds are going up. Consumers are the ones benefiting, which is phenomenal.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Howard, 23 Nov 2005 @ 8:12am

Re: Competition in the Market
Up until Verizon FIOS was available in my neighborhood, Comcast cable was the only broadband (except for wireless with a very high setup cost) service I could get. And it sucked. Every time I had an outage (which was frequent), I had to spend 20 minutes playing the "let's reset the cable modem" game before I could get the CSR with the heavy Indian accent to admit that there was a Comcast network problem in my area. It got on my nerves because I was wiring and maintaining networks when the Indians on the help desk were in diapers. (Hmmm... do they use diapers in India?)
I get my Verizon FIOS next week, so Comcast can kiss my behind (or is the bottom of my foot more appropriate for an Indian insult?). As far as I'm concerned, they are history. They are going to have to do some major backpeddling on their idea of "customer service" to stay in business -- I won't be back; I don't even care if they make a counteroffer with a lower price. Their customer service sucked so bad I will have a bitter memory of them for years. I have had to maintain a separate backup dial-up service to cover for their sporadic outages, because I could not afford to lose access to email for business. Fortunately, I *never* used their email service due to their unreliability, so it will be no problem at all to cut them off. I just hope that Verizon is not as bad! Maybe the fact that they are vigorously competing for the business will help.
The Celtic Fiddler
[ link to this | view in thread ]
pkp646, 5 Apr 2006 @ 11:33am

Competition is Good
I've been looking into this issue lately and Erick is exactly right. Across the board the numbers support thebenefit the consumers receive from having FIOS from Verizon. Not only is it more reliable, but it tends lower costs while increasing connection speed. Anyone with the opportunity should go and check it out, or at least support their entrance into the local market.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
NJSolly, 5 Apr 2006 @ 2:14pm

I think all of us will be glad when FIOS gets to us, but some of us are going to have to wait through a lot of nasty politicking I'm afraid. It's always hardest to make the move from monopoly to duopoly I suppose.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Paulaner01, 5 Apr 2006 @ 8:24pm

I'm new to the FiOS thing but it seems like it's been nothing but good for consumers in the markets that have it. Let's hope it keeps making inroads in places like New Jersey so that sooner or later we can all benefit from a CHOICE.
[ link to this | view in thread ]