[rescue] Boy, am I glad I didn't switch to Cable modem servic e...

[Corda Albert J DLVA]

Cable company greed is legendary... I live in a
somewhat rural part of Virginia (Spotsylvania County)
and have been trying to find a way to get cable
internet service... There is a cable pedestal at
the base of my driveway, but my driveway is
1200 Ft. (not uncommon in a rural county) and
the local cable company (Adelphia) charges
~$4.00 a foot for anything over 100 ft. from the
road.  I've argued with them, and even offered
to trench my own cable, or provide a connection
point close to the road where they can install
a cable box (I was planning to run fiber down
to the box) They have absolutely refused to to
accomodate me or even consider connecting to
anything they haven't trenched themselves.

Maybe I'm a little off base here, but $4.00 a foot
is more than the power company charges to run
a power line to new construction (and they have
to dig a trench 8 ft. deep and install 10 ft. grounding
rods at periodic intervals).

Has anyone else run into this type of price gouging?
Any suggestions as to how to deal with them? (I'd love
to find a (legal :-) way to annoy them until they decide to
act in a more reasonable manner, especially for a cable
company providing rural service)


BTW, DSL is out of the question in this part of the
county, and Satellite would be quite difficult due
to extensive tree coverage...

-al-


> -----Original Message-----
> From: woods at weird.com [mailto:woods at weird.com]
> Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2001 9:56 PM
> To: rescue at sunhelp.org
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Boy, am I glad I didn't switch to Cable modem
> service...
> 
> 
> [ On Saturday, December 1, 2001 at 12:17:39 (-0800), David 
> Passmore wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: [rescue] Boy, am I glad I didn't switch to 
> Cable modem   service...
> >
> > It's pretty sad, really. I can't say @Home is blameless for letting
> > itself get into this position, but this whole thing could 
> end *right now* if
> > the cable companies would stop being greedy and revise the 
> revenue sharing.
> 
> @Home should never ever have even dreamt of trying to provide those
> kinds of services to the cable companies.  That kind of 
> economy of scale
> simply does not ever work.  It simply cannot and the death of @Home is
> the final concrete proof.  The "greed" of the cable companies, while
> very real, has nothing whatsoever to do with why @Home failed.
> 
> Not to mention but that getting into bed with even just one 
> large cable
> company is like sleeping in a pit of angry vipers -- trying to sleep
> with a whole continent's worth of them is, as they say, a "no-win
> situation".
> 
> (Note I'm not just a bystander, or just a cable modem user, 
> as I've done
> contract work for Rogers, helping them back when they were building
> their own infrastructure; and I do network & systems and work for a
> couple of other small cable companies who've done just fine on their
> own.)
> 
> -- 
> 							Greg A. Woods
> 
> +1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>     
> <woods at robohack.ca>
> Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird 
> <woods at weird.com>
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