Memphis Comcast Price Increase

(This is a letter I just wrote and sent off to City officials and the news media.  Let's see if it does any good.  I will update this post one way or the other.)

(UPDATED to recount how I bought my own cable modem instead of leasing Comcast's.)

I just got an email notice of my bill for January's Comcast Basic Cable and Performance Internet, and I saw a total increase of 6.9% over my bill for December.

They went up 3% on Basic Cable, from $17.95 to $18.50.

They went up 8.342% on Performance Internet, designated as a $2, or 40%, increase in their "Modem Lease" fee; and a $2, or 4.66%, increase for the service itself.

{I had never seen where they offer to let us buy a cable modem and use it instead of leasing theirs, but I had a vague memory that the FCC required them to do so; so I looked that up on their site, and lo and behold they have a page of approved modems that you can buy and place in service in place of the ones they lease.  On that list, I liked the Motorola SB6120 because it is of recent vintage, supports DOCSIS 3.0 for higher speed access, and will likely have a service life of at least several years on Comcast and other cable ISP's. That model has been replaced by the SB6121, that Comcast likes even better, at about the same price, $85.  Do the math: $7/mo. to lease a modem from Comcast x 12 months = $84.  After the first year, I'm going to save $84/yr.+tax!  So I went and bought one and went through the process of substituting it for their older RCA DOCSIS 2.0 job.  All I can say about the performance of the new modem is WOW!}

I never saw any notice of these fee increases from Comcast itself, by our local news media, or by my "Local FCC Franchise Authority, City of Memphis," whose authority permits Comcast to use city rights of way to make their income here.

I am calling on Mayor Wharton and the City Council to call this distantly-owned corporation into their offices to explain why we are getting such large price increases when the economy is in such bad shape.

I am also suggesting that Herman Morris' plan to provide Internet access as a part of our publicly-owned utility company needs to be revisited, but this time without needless rich insider shareholders, so that our city can provide us with guaranteed Net Neutrality, and this time with the power and authority also to provide a la carte TV channels over our City-owned rights of way, in competition with the two monopolistic-minded oligopolists who are the only real providers in Memphis: Comcast and AT&T (not counting the few companies providing some form of Internet access through cell-phone towers).  It can be looked at this way: our governments build and maintain roads; and the Internet is just the electronic road of the future, and one that cannot be subject to the whims and profiteering of a private company. 

For those who never saw the names of the needless insiders who got in on the Networx thing, I tracked them down and published them on my inimitable, if lately neglected, blog:

http://dailydocket.blogspot.com/2007/08/memphis-networx-local-investors.html

I challenge our local news media to look into this large price increase, realizing local TV station employees may in so doing be bucking their own stations, some or all of which may be in the process of negotiating for higher fees from Comcast and AT&T for allowing their signals to be carried on cable, rather than being satisfied with the "must-carry" provisions of federal law and making their traditional revenue through advertisements.  I suspect from considerable study of these matters that broadcast outlets wish to partake of the "monopoly"-style profits enjoyed by cable companies with the complicity of local government entities which share in those profits through fees charged to those companies, which fees are passed through to cable customers.