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Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has gone all out for Comcast, headquartered in the city he oversees. Not only has Nutter organized 51 mayors to sign a joint letter supporting Comcast’s $45 billion bid to take control of Time Warner Cable, he is also helping protect the cable company from embarrassing revelations about its performance in the city.
Philadelphia media and public interest groups are now increasing pressure on the mayor’s office to publicly release the results of an important survey the city conducted as part of its franchise renewal process. Almost two years ago, a random sample of 800 area Comcast customers and non-customers were surveyed by the city to get feedback about Comcast’s performance.
Suspiciously, the full results of the taxpayer-funded survey have been withheld from the public, although the city handed a complete copy of their findings to Comcast so the company can prepare to defend itself.
Once every 15 years Comcast must ask city officials for permission to continue providing cable television service. If the majority of residents surveyed excoriate the cable company and beg the city to grant the franchise to someone else, that could prove a serious embarrassment to Mayor Nutter’s campaign to promote Comcast’s merger with Time Warner Cable.
“We cannot be on hold any longer,” said councilman Bobby Henon, a Northeast Philadelphia Democrat. “We’re cutting short the time to publicly talk about the needs” before the franchises expire later this year, reports the Inquirer.
While the mayor’s office has had no trouble sharing everything they can with Comcast, other groups entitled to the information have only gotten scraps of it or denied access altogether.
The Consumerist found, for example, Philadelphia Community Access Media, responsible for public access programming in the city, has only been shown survey responses directly related to its operations.
Other groups, including West Philadelphia’s Media Mobilizing Project, have been shut out completely and refused access to the survey results or the franchise needs assessment.
The mayor’s office has remained elusive explaining why a survey conducted using taxpayer dollars has been kept away from taxpayers.
Verizon should start expanding FiOS to most parts of Philadelphia instead of selling their FiOS to frontier or other companies just because there is too many FiOS customers. Verizon should never complete FiOS expansion by selling the rest to Frontier because it’s not nice for the economy and it’s a form of reducing FiOS coverage. I’m thinking about starting Internet company and have interest in expanding my Fiber to the Home Service in North America and offer low prices for people. Providing high speed broadband service stops people from getting angry with slow AOL standard cable internet. We need real… Read more »
That is the systemic problem. Municipal contracts have killed that one off quickly which is a monopoly but anti-trust litigators keep saying “it isn’t” but when you have only one option and they refuse to expand you are SOL. Small electric co-ops are starting to take up the slack with FTTH one near me is offering the following: 5 megabit ($40/mo 5-6mbit delivered), 100 megabit ($50/mo 70-110mbit delivered) 250 megabit ($60/mo 175-270mbit delivered) and 1 gigabit ($100 mo with 700-1000mbit delivered); but I have a feeling that they will be quashed by the incumbents because of the exclusive contracts.