
Seattle Mayor: I have Comcast, and I would like better service - Libertatea
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/01/seattle-mayor-i-have-comcast-and-i-would-like-better-service/
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donavanm
For the past year the city of Seattle has been hyping "gigabit seattle" as the
solution. The idea is that a private group would get access to city fiber
at/near cost and manage the actual service. The private group in this case is
Gigabit Squared.

As far as I can tell Gigabit Squared is a sham. They have no previous
completed projects. The dates and milestones reported to the press and
recorded in the city meetings, like the CTTAB, are woefully different. Event
the dates in the press are terribly vauge, and keep slipping anyways. First it
was "in 2013", then "late 2013", and now it's "in 2014."

My neighbor has been trying to get implementation details for the past year.
The Seattle mayors office said "contact our partner". Emails and phone calls
to Gigabit Squared went unanswered. She then went to the mayors office,
complaining that the "partner" was unresponsive. The reply? "We cant help you.
You have to talk to gigabit squared for any details."

Last I looked they were missing little things like an ASN, network engineers,
an operations group, facilities, outside plant techs and trucks. Their jobs
page was a generic "ask about exciting opportunities". I find it a bit
incredible that they could feasibly be launching a network of this scope
inside of a year.

I hope it actually works, I'd love to stop giving money to Comcast. But what I
see so far is another Seattle Monorail Project.

~~~
specialist
Thank you for digging into Gigabit Squared. Very interesting. I'll ask McGinn
next chance I get. But I'll wait until after Tuesday, in case its moot.

An acquaintance started a group to promote better broadband.
[http://uptun.org](http://uptun.org)
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/uptun/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/uptun/)
Looks like he hasn't gotten past the angry yelling phase of organizing.

The monorail would have succeeded if the Powers That Be wanted it. But none
did.

I've heard numerous theories for why the monorail died. (eg Weren't provided
an accurate head count, so the projected tax revenue was off, which borked the
credit rating, which led to higher cost of capital, which spiked the project.
Not that I understand these things.) I'm sure there's some truth to most
stories.

The closest I can figure, unlike Sound Transit's light rail and Bezo's fancy
new trolley car, the monorail didn't trigger a rezoning, which would have lead
to higher property taxes, which is local government's back door way to raise
revenue in the face of the anti-tax jihadists. So there was no reason for a
sitting politician to put some muscle behind the effort.

A friend from Chicago has joked that the monorail would have happened if
Seattle was more corrupt. Big capital expense projects, patronage, pork, jobs
for unions, etc.

In that neither the monorail or gigabit have juice behind them, they've very
similar.

~~~
AsymetricCom
The fact that it didn't happen means that the people it would have been
transporting aren't worth the investment from an economic perspective. In the
case of corruption, the city would unwittingly be investing in it's poorest
citizens at a deficit to itself. -(-1) is 1.

------
VLM
You can't intelligently discuss cable monopolies without following the money
and reading the franchise agreement. As near as Google and I can figure out,
you need to read:

[http://www.seattle.gov/cable/comcast_franchise_06.pdf](http://www.seattle.gov/cable/comcast_franchise_06.pdf)

Is this the most recent revision? Who knows. That would take more effort than
I'm willing to expend.

First of all the agreement I linked to at seattle.gov claims to be in effect
until 2016. So until 2016 (or so) you can whine all you want but its just
posturing until them. I donno enough about Seattle politics to know if the
proposed candidate would be in office in 3 years? Also I don't know enough
seattle politics to tell if the mayor really has any input. Some localities
are more autocratic than other more anarchistic localities. So the mayor may
or may not have much impact at all other than pure PR.

Secondly follow the money. Read section 11.1. Basically for CATV in Seattle
there is a 5% sales tax on top of any and all other fees gathered by comcast
and paid to the city. You can call it a fee or bribe or compensation or
whatever but its basically a sales tax. The feds limit this local tax and
there's the usual boilerplate about increasing if legally allowed etc.

You can estimate based on subscriber numbers and bills or the other way around
as total comcast revenue times percentage of comcast subscribers located in
Seattle, well whatever either way its a substantial amount of money. So,
follow the money. Where is the candidate proposing to raise rates, implement
new taxes, or cut services if they kick out Comcast completely?

~~~
backprojection
I'm confused, why wouldn't they just tax whatever replaces Comcast? Maybe your
argument is that the government has an overall interest in maintaining a
monopoly, since monopolies raise prices, and under a fixed tax rate, that
means more revenue for government.

~~~
beambot
I haven't been following this too closely... but a 5% "sales" tax on a free
option is $0.

~~~
SwellJoe
I don't see any mention of a free option in this case.

------
insickness
I just gave a small donation to his campaign fund. You can donate here:
[http://mcginnformayor.com](http://mcginnformayor.com). Wish there was a place
on the donation to tell them why you're donating.

I really hope that more mayors (especially NYC where I live) make this a focus
of their campaign. So sick of the cable company monopolies.

~~~
btian
Thanks for the link. Yes I really wish that any of the mayoral candidates in
Boston (where I live) would make gigabit Internet a priority rather than just
being "tough on crime".

~~~
spartango
While as a Bostonian I would love gigabit, I do think that fighting crime
remains a substantial priority in this city. It's not totally backwards, but
there's room to improve.

Indeed, I generally think that there are many priorities a mayoral candidate
for this city should have, and alas, super-speed internet access is not at the
top of that list. Gigabit is a problem ranking far under crime, poverty, and
infrastructural issues in Boston.

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bilalq
When I moved to Seattle, I was very fortunate in that CondoInternet served my
apartment building. They offered gigabit internet for $120 a month and 100mbps
for $60. All after taxes, too. Coming from years of dealing with Comcast, this
was a welcome change.

Increased availability for this level of quality would be great to see.

~~~
yoloswag
I pay Time Warner $60 a month for 20mbps....

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jhspaybar
I'm in support of more fiber, I'm actually considering a move to get it at
some of the downtown condos that offer it. However, this feels like the
promise of a down in the polls incumbent hoping to turn this into a 1 issue
race. Why weren't 4 years enough to get it rolling already? (And don't take
this wrong, I likely will vote for McGinn, this just seems opportunistic is
all).

~~~
epistasis
It sounds like it is rolling along, though the details on the "14
neighborhoods" is a bit vague.

~~~
selectiveshift
A quick search of 'gigabit seattle' will make things less vague:
[http://gigabitseattle.com/areas/](http://gigabitseattle.com/areas/)

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jroseattle
McGinn frustrates me. Issues like this are highly popular and resonate with
everyone, but I haven't been a fan of several of his policies.

He raised public parking rates to pay for street maintenance upgrades, safety
at schools, etc. But, a lot of city streets have yet to be repaired, and
safety at our particular local school has slowly been getting worse. He has
had to deal with a police force in transition after a DoJ investigation, which
he's handled rather gracefully, so he's done some things well. I'd say it's
largely been a very mixed bag.

But the biggest frustration for me is that it always seems like he will say
whatever is popular based on who is in the room. It's not that he is acting
like a politician, but rather someone who doesn't really stand for anything.
This issue, while he's raising it now, hasn't been a hallmark of his current
tenure, so it seems more opportunistic than anything else.

If it weren't an election cycle, I'm not sure we'd be hearing so much about
this right now.

~~~
cdcarter
> He raised public parking rates to pay for street maintenance upgrades,
> safety at schools, etc. But, a lot of city streets have yet to be repaired

And of course, Mercer in Lower Queen Anne is getting every single street
corner re-done for...no apparent reason.

~~~
jroseattle
That's happened in Green Lake and Wallingford as well. And it's really
strange, because it doesn't appear to serve any functional purpose. A couple
of them now serve to slow down neighborhood traffic (a good thing), but mostly
they look like replacements for something that didn't need replaced.

------
RexRollman
I wonder if Google going to contribute to the mayor, since Comcast is funding
his opponent.

~~~
skj
Google typically funds all major contenders in big races.

~~~
philwelch
As a corporation, or are you counting their employees?

~~~
kibibyte
In general, corporations do that more or less to hedge their bets. They want
the candidate that they support to win, but if the other candidate wins, they
will be able to settle with at least some influence on that other candidate
through that funding.

~~~
philwelch
Do you have any reliable sources on that? It doesn't make much sense to back
both sides in a zero-sum game and both candidates would know that. It seems
much more likely that the usual sources who report "Google contributed $X to
Candidate A and $Y to Candidate B" are counting employee contributions, either
as an honest mistake or as a propaganda tactic to make their point. In
reality, Google pays thousands of people a generous salary and each of those
people have their own opinions about various issues, and so they're
contributing their money, but not on Google's behalf.

In fact, this explains a lot of things. Back in the day when people got long
distance telephone service from a different company than their local service,
there used to be a pro-life phone company that advertised that all the other
long distance companies like AT&T and MCI donated a ton of money to pro-choice
organizations so you'd better switch to the pro-life phone company. But why
the hell would a phone company care about abortion? They didn't, they just
employed a lot of people and some of them happened to make political donations
to pro-choice causes.

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kyllo
It's not Comcast's service that's the problem anymore--their service has
actually improved a lot over the past few years.

It's their prices and the fact that they have no direct competition to force
them to charge a rate any closer to what the service actually costs to
provide.

It costs hundreds of dollars per user, per month to consume data over cable
only because the cable provider has a monopoly.

------
shmerl
Still waiting for Verizon's FiOS and it takes forever. Does Google plan to
expand Google Fiber to more cities? Their pricing is simply the best when it
comes to $ per bandwidth metirc.

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mmphosis
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Internet_Exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Internet_Exchange)

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sologoub
Take "My Internet is provided by Comcast, and I know my family would like
better service. I will speak for my gamer son as well." and insert any major
cable company and you will get a true statement.

