Phillip Dampier says:

Comcast has never shown an interest in entering any city in upstate New York.

Let me give you a history backgrounder of cable in western NY so you understand this a bit better.

Way back in the 1980s, the cable operator Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), operated a few cable systems mostly in more rural communities in central and southern New York. TCI had gone about buying most of these systems from mom and pop providers, often kept their original names, and just ran them under the corporate umbrella.

TCI would later become AT&T (Cable), and around that time, a company decision was made to shed some of the smaller cable systems that TCI owned that were often woefully outdated (in some rural communities, you can still only receive up to 36 channels or less – it resembles cable TV from 1981.) Many of those systems were bought and later upgraded by Time Warner.

AT&T later exited traditional cable television business and Comcast merged the remaining AT&T systems into Comcast Cable. Comcast actually doesn’t have much activity in New York state. Most of this state is Time Warner controlled.

In the early 1990s, Time Warner embarked on a business plan that would create super clusters of cable systems in order to leverage their products and services over a wider geographical area, which also helped them realize cost savings. The entire cable industry was already doing this with lots of mergers and acquisitions, getting the smaller players out of the industry.

Many cable systems in our community had been merged or taken over by then. The suburban system People’s Cable and city system ATC had already merged into Greater Rochester Cablevision (GRC). You may even recall their old ads, “Wait until you see GRC.” GRC would itself later be owned outright by Time Warner, and the eventual decision to discard local cable system names and stay with a single national brand – Time Warner Cable, was made.

Along the way of building their clusters, Time Warner purchased smaller cable systems and added them to their networks. Warner Cable in western Monroe county, a bunch of Cablevision-owned systems in the Finger Lakes region, and as late as just a couple of years ago, Adelphia all were merged into the Time Warner footprint.

Cable operators since the early 1980s have always maintained an informal agreement with each other not to compete on each others’ turf. I know this personally because back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when we were working to break up the cable monopoly on programming, we produced a ton of evidence that cable companies simply would not “overbuild” into each others’ space. Politicians usually begged to get competing systems into their communities, because an incumbent operator offered abysmal service and increased rates to intolerable levels, but large cable operators with the financing required to embark on this kind of project always said no.

It was this reality that finally helped us win our legislative fight with the passage of S.12 – the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992.

The bill was vetoed by the first President Bush, and was the only veto overridden by Congress during his term of office. It became law in October 1992.

Cable companies have still routinely resisted to build into each others’ areas, and Comcast has never shown an interest, much less faced resistance, from Schumer or anyone else, in coming in here to compete.

What our victory in 1992 did was guarantee equitable access to programming for competitors (this was when cable companies only offered video and, in some areas, alarm systems). That was what helped the satellite dish industry grow, and later led the way for telephone companies to also carry video programming.

Broadband, as a product, came after S.12 became law, and has traditionally been an unregulated product.

So while I agree with you that we need additional competition in this market, please don’t blame Sen. Schumer, who had nothing to do with this, for the lack of competition. Instead, we may need an investigation into why big cable has these informal non-compete agreements in the first place.

A lot of city managers and town supervisors do not want wide open competition if that means there are a half dozen cables now strung on telephone polls, and streets are constantly being torn up to install redundant network lines. That was one of the reasons we have a franchise system for cable providers. It helps make sure that citizens are not unduly burdened by all of the wiring and street work that goes with installing and maintaining it.

One potential concept is to create a handful of redundant wired networks, say one cable company and one telephone company, and then treat them as “common carriers,” meaning anyone can sell and deliver their service down those networks on a competitive basis. Add in the wireless players, and you begin to see more potential competition. But the current network owners need to be compensated for their investment, and then severed from the equation of setting terms and pricing. Otherwise, we end up with the incumbent provider, which owns the network, having the power to discourage competition with excessively high wholesale costs to access it.

I realize there has been a lot of misinformation out there, and a lot of it is directed at politicians out of frustration. I am glad you are here so I can sort of roll back the clock and, over time, chronicle my past experiences in dealing with this industry and share the knowledge I have accumulated while doing so. It will help us win this fight by keeping razor sharp focus on who the real players are.

Some politicians are, in fact a problem. And this is absolutely not a right-left issue. At this point though, there is no reason to point at any one politician on this issue.

S.12 got passed because of hard ground plowing work by Sen. Al Gore, a Democrat, and Sen. John Danforth, a Republican. We were roadblocked on many occasions by members of both parties who were taking big cable lobby checks. Tim “Wirthless” Wirth, a Democrat from Colorado, and Sen. Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, were constant problems for us.