Comcast Derails Promising Community Broadband Projects In Washington State

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

The good news: there’s more than $50 billion in broadband subsidies coming down the road courtesy of COVID relief and infrastructure legislation.

The bad news: monopoly ISPs are working overtime using every trick in the lobbying book to ensure this money goes to them, and not to any number of smaller, local competitors. If money is spent, monopolies want it going to their perpetually unfinished efforts to deliver broadband to completely unserved areas. They don’t want this money going toward competitors in their existing footprints.

We’ve already noted how cable giants like Charter Communications have been filing costly, erroneous challenges at the NTIA to try and scuttle smaller providers and municipalities trying to apply for older rounds of government funding. Telecom lobbyists have also taken to convincing some states to write dumb new state laws prohibiting federal broadband funding from going to municipal competitors (despite the fact this is clearly not allowed under NTIA rules).

A lot of these efforts by telecom monopolies involve pointing to flawed FCC data to try and claim such grants should be refused because they already provide service in the area. Several communities in Washington State, for example, have had promising fiber expansion plans derailed due to onerous challenges by Comcast:

Hanny, the core services director of the Grays Harbor Public Utility District, said he felt frustrated and disappointed when the district’s application for a $5 million grant to connect more than 900 homes along the Highway 12 corridor to high-speed internet was denied based on an objection from Comcast, which argued it already served the area.

“Almost all of the areas we target have little to no internet service,” Hanny said of the proposal, which would have brought broadband to the communities of Malone, Porter, Cedarville and Oakville.

Washington State is looking at $400 million in new broadband funding. Comcast, as you might expect, wants the lion’s share of that funding. And monopoly political power being what it is, so far Charter and Comcast have unsurprisingly managed to secure the lion’s share of new subsidies nationwide. Publicly-owned utilities are posing a particularly hot new threat to broadband monopoly power.

There are several problems here. One being that the coverage maps currently being used by Comcast to claim they already serve these regions have long been proven to be an inaccurate mess. That’s supposed to change with the development of slightly better FCC maps, but those maps are still very much a work in progress — and even then involve understaffed, under-funded folks going toe to toe with deep pocket monopolies in a process that routinely gives the monopolies a tactical advantage.

The other problem is that a key barrier to wider broadband adoption is affordability. The primary way to improve affordability is policies that drive greater competition to monopolized markets. That’s currently happening primarily thanks to smaller ISPs, municipalities, cooperatives, and utilities, and if you’re Comcast or Charter or AT&T, that’s certainly not something you want happening.

So once again instead of improving their service, expanding their footprints, or lowering prices, those entrenched incumbents are exploiting ample state level corruption to try and steer an historic round of broadband funding away from competitors, and back toward monopolies, using a bunch of onerous challenges that will be too expensive for many small ISPs or municipalities to handle.

There’s going to be a whole lot of this dirty pool going on in the months to come as infrastructure BEAD grants start rolling, and I’m not quite sure that feckless politicians in either party are going to do much about it, or that the press (endlessly obsessed with Big Tech policy only) will much notice.

Filed Under: BEAD grants, broadband, competition, corruption, digital divide, grays harbor, high speed internet, ntia, subsidies, telecom, washington
Companies: comcast