Why Comcast Needs Competition...Badly

When internet service goes down, who should know about it first? In Seattle, it's not internet provider Comcast. Their customers announce the outages.

This morning, The SunBreak HQ, like many offices around Seattle, was abuzz with complaints about our Business-Class High-Speed Internet from Comcast. Pages were stalling, IM clients weren't loading, everything was slowed down to molasses speed. After performing the usual rites and incantations (unplugging the modem and router, restarting the laptops), nothing had improved.

I had limited connectivity, so I checked on Comcast's status: all green! But it did say, "Please sign in to see local Network Health messages," so I tried that. Still all green. It was time to try online support. 15 people were in the queue ahead of me, so it took 5-10 minutes for my customer service bot to ask me how my day was. Slow internet service? Had I tried unplugging everything? Oh. I had, eh? Well, perhaps I could provide my name and account number. Now if I would just wait a few minutes while they pulled up my account...

While this was happening, I was watching my Twitter stream to see if anyone else was having issues, and TechFlash tweeted "Comcast outage in parts of Seattle." Never mind, I told the bot, the outage is on your end, and signed out. Meanwhile, ComcastWA was tweeting to TechFlash's John Cook that they were "checking to see what's going on." This was about an hour into my experience, and it was the first tweet from ComcastWA on the subject.

By 10:30 a.m. the snafu was resolved, and someone from @comcastcares sent me a tweet to let me know. (Which, you know, thanks, but I can tell when the internet is working.) What's not explained is why Comcast's status maps were all green throughout the outage, or why support staff were telling people to try unplugging their modems and routers first.

You may think to yourself, Hey, come on, it's 90 minutes out of your day. But what I think about is how much time cumulatively was wasted in Seattle this morning, much of it simply because people would not have been sure where the problem was. An early, all-hands-on-deck announcement from Comcast would have been a big help. It seems slightly insane that a company that provides internet service isn't very good at using the internet.

But what can be done? There is no more-agile competitor waiting in the wings, because the Seattle City Council signs ten-year franchise agreements with Comcast. Ten years! It seems like so much could happen in the market in ten years. That's long enough for a provider to go out of business.

So, do we get our money's worth? Do you know what the city lobbied aggressively for when extending the agreement in 2006? A budget increase for the community TV channel SCAN. Four years later, SCAN is being largely defunded. Here an ironic quote from then-Mayor Nickels seems apropos: "This franchise will serve us well for the next 10 years." (Not you, SCAN!)

The city now wants to use the community TV money to fund their email system. That's not...great. Why? Because Comcast can read. And when they learn that you're funding the city's basic IT systems via their franchise fees, it gives them what's called "leverage" at the bargaining table. Plus, attaching themselves limpet-like to a revenue stream that doesn't look like a tax gives the city less incentive than ever to open up cable services to competition. After all, the only losers here are the people of Seattle, and they don't know that's the city's hand in 4.2 percent of their pocket.